Posts

So it’s been some time again since I last posted, which I feel like is to be expected at this point. I think I’ve just ended up being busy, or rather not really thinking about writing as much lately, and as such also ended up writing a lot less. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I’d like to rename this blog to, as while I’m not sure how fitting the name currently is I also don’t really have any ideas what I’d like to change it to.

What I have changed, however, is moving the blog back to Hugo. This change was caused by a few things:

1. I wanted to move away from Cloudflare for all my services (this blog was the final thing that still needed moving)
2. I wanted to move away from using Ghost as my backend because they are deprecating MariaDB which I want to continue using over MySQL—I just don’t trust Oracle to be a good actor
3. Since I was changing things up anyway, I took the opportunity to simplify things, and moved back to a pure SSG-setup
4. I chose Hugo over continuing to use Eleventy because I would now be self-hosting these things instead of throwing everything into the cloud, and as such I just prefer having a single binary instead of the mess that is a JS-installation¹

I did do some exploring of other headless CMS but ended up deciding against moving to something else since I just kind of worried that I might end up in the same position I was in already with Ghost where I have to move again or the like due to some dependency changing, and also because it just ended up being one less thing that I need to maintain which is nice. I also don’t really have any problem with writing things in Markdown or other markup languages so the appeal of a more visual editor just isn’t really there for me. Sure, there are some convenience things that are a lot easier that I covered when I was first thinking of moving off Hugo and onto WordPress, but many of those things ended up being not that useful for me. For example, in the last iteration I already didn’t have any comments, because that ended up being annoying to implement with the headless setup I was using anyway; as for things like scheduling posts, I did it for fun several times but I’m just not sure if it adds any real value at the moment.²

I also used this opportunity to fix/re-implement some of the redirects I had going on before, that broke when I migrated over to Eleventy I think? This should mean some links that were broken should be working again now, which is nice. I feel somewhat embarassed about having contributed to link rot because of how frustrated I get at times when I see it on other sites, so hopefully all of that is fixed now. Other than that, as far as reader-facing changes go, there shouldn’t really be any yet.

Well, except for one small thing: the format of the links got somewhat updated again, all of my posts are now under the /post/ subfolder, or section as Hugo calls them. It doesn’t really affect the experience of browsing the site, but the links look a bit different once again.³

What sections mean, however, is that I can more clearly delineate some of the rough draft ideas I’ve had sitting around for a bit: dreams and fiction. It somehow didn’t (or at least doesn’t anymore) feel quite right to post these things simply into the main feed, but I have on occasion been writing my dreams down when I found them particularily interesting as a sort of dream diary, and it feels like sharing them under a different section from the main blog could be interesting. If I do end up doing that (still just thinking about the idea, but the change makes it easier to implement if I end up wanting to), it probably won’t mean that I would publish every dream I have, just the ones that seem interesting enough to do so with for whatever reason; maybe because they deal with a particular topic that might be of interest to someone else than me, or because they are just that strange.

As for fiction, it’s also something I kind of do want to write but never end up sitting down and just doing. I think one of my problesm there is that I like having done things more than doing them, so I get impatient while writing something like that and want to finish it which doesn’t really fit with my goal of also writing something somewhat longer form and as such my interest ends up fizzling out before I have the opportunity to finish actually writing anything. So I guess that means we’ll see if anything ever comes out of my idea to also include some fiction writing on this site, but at least the idea is there.

Beyond that, I’m also considering re-introducing a way to comment or at least somehow communicate back to me. As it stands, I don’t really give out any identifying information or channels to contact me on this blog, which while it has served me well so far I’m not sure if it is the way I want to keep things. Sure, the last time around when I had comments they weren’t really used, but maybe something like an about-page where I at the very least list an email address or some way to contact me might be a good thing to have available (though I have no doubt I would end up getting mostly spam to any such address).

For now though, that ends my ramblings on this topic, and I’ll get back to considering how to proceed from here. I would still kind of like to write more, but about what?

Felt like it was time to freshen up the blog again, even though I haven’t been writing as actively anymore. Just new colors, the layout/functionality has remained basically the same—though I did fix a small bug that occurred when a post didn’t have any tags. Also went back to specifying the font used instead of user preference, since this font just felt right.

It feels like I at some point need to rethink the branding on here, “Rambling Priest” just doesn’t really feel right anymore, not representative of who I am or the content. Probably should go with something that isn’t such a reference to World of Warcraft anymore since the content isn’t necessarily focused around the game anymore and more just about me and who I am. Not sure where to go with that as of yet though, so I suppose I’ll let it lie for now.

I didn’t end up writing about it at the time—which I now kind of regret since I’m no longer quite sure when exactly it was—but I ended up trying Linux again. Looking back at last time, it doesn’t necessarily feel like all that much has changed—though I don’t have the stuttering in World of Warcraft any more—except for perhaps no longer streaming and as such not having the hassle of setting that up, yet I’ve by now used it for several months and just been content.

There have certainly been some minor annoyances still, especially with how badly Battle.net performs, but overall it’s just been rather uneventful.

It feels a bit anticlimactic even, because I guess I was somehow expecting the change to be a bigger deal, which of course was a very misguided expectation but still. One of the really nice things however, is how much better the keyboard layouts are on Linux; specifically how many more things are accessible with Alt Gr or angry Alt.

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I’m honestly just not sure what to say since it all has just been so normal, but somehow it still feels right posting about it since I’ve mentioned trying Linux before. So that’s the update I guess.

It would seem I needed something of a break from blogging—or at the very least I ended up taking one. It wasn’t really a planned thing, it more just ended up happening because I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about and ended up not doing it—which was later on exacerbated by me doing some reconfiguration of my server and consequently needing to reinstall my blogging software before being able to actually continue writing. All of this caused a somewhat extended break.

I’m also not sure if this post actually signifies an actual end to that break or what my plan is going forwards, though I do still really enjoy writing and actually having the blog so I do have that going for me which is nice.

I guess the last few months—or perhaps even this year in general—have been somewhat rougher on me again. Not only did blogging take a back seat, but the habit of a daily walk that I had built up has also been more of a struggle lately with more frequent breaks/missed days than at any other point of me doing it. It’s still definitely more days with walks than without, and I don’t think I’ve actually missed two days in a row at any point, but there has definitely been a general decline. Perhaps I should start tracking this in some way? Though whether such data would be motivating or demotivating I’m not sure…

In more positive news, I think I’m slowly starting to build up confidence in there actually existing a future for me that I want to live in, and while I’m not yet at the point of taking any concrete steps towards it I am starting to feel like it will be possible to do so in a reasonable time frame which helps a lot to making it feel actually doable.

It seems I find myself in a new place: pessimistic about the present but more optimistic about the future. Perhaps this insight will help me in taking those concrete steps to actually get there?

I’m struggling a bit with the blog at the moment. I’m not sure what exactly is the problem, but I just don’t seem to have any real idea what I want to write on the schedule I had set for myself—weekly—which means I have for the past two weeks just ended up not writing, which feels bad.

It feels a bit strange, since it’s not really a case of motivation—I keep thinking about wanting to write and potential things I could write—I just don’t know what I actually do want to write. I have some ideas floating in my drafts folder, but they all feel either too big or too small or simply too unripe.

This has had me thinking if I just end up formally giving up on the idea of regular posts on the blog and going back to posting and writing more sporadically. At the same time, as noted, I do still keep thinking about writing and it is still something I want to do, and there is a certain level of fear of this change then relegating writing to something I barely end up doing because I keep simply forgetting to do so if it isn’t regular enough.

At the moment, I am then faced with a dilemma: keep pushing through and trying to write, or just decide enough is enough and wind down my efforts a bit. I’m not quite sure what I’ll end up doing, but maybe what I have been doing unintentionally is the proper approach to the situation: keep thinking about ideas and writing on the regular schedule as before, but be kind to myself and accepting of not perhaps being able to actually do the writing on a weekly basis. This would both keep it as something I’m actively working on in my memory as well as like right now, afford me opportunities to almost spontaneously decide to write something, while still reducing the pressure and guilt of not doing so.

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Writing the above, once again reminded me of why it is that I want to keep writing so much: it’s just such a great way to process things, because writing something down forces me to actually think about what I am writing.

This is something that has been gnawing on me for the past couple of weeks due to having missed those deadlines, and in writing this I’m forced to actually confront those feelings and to put them into perspective. It’s not a new revelation for me, but sometimes I do need the reminder.

It also feels interesting to note that even prior to having written this, I feel like I was handling the situation better from an emotional perspective than I would have before, in being more forgiving to myself of the mistakes I have made, which means that while it might at times feel like I keep on going in circles with the things I write and think about, there is also learning and improving happening at the same time.

I probably really should reconsider the whole diary thing, shouldn’t I?

Fairly shortly I think after I wrote the second time about keeping a diary, I ended up somehow stopping writing in it. At first, merely only rarely, when something “significant” happened or I felt like I actually had something new to write, but at some point I just stopped completely—probably because I simply forgot to do so after dropping the habit.

The problem for me became—which I also at times have with the blog here—that I just felt like I was repeating basically the same entries most days, which let’s be honest aren’t usually that exciting. Now, of course, the purpose of a diary isn’t to be exciting but to provide an opportunity to both reflect on the happenings of the day and allow you to look back on your past state in order to have a better idea of what you were actually thinking at the time—something which otherwise gets all too easily lost in false memories of one were to try to rely on ones memory alone.

The problem of course, is that when the activity becomes repetitive it kind of loses its shine to me and becomes boring, which means I’m both less likely to do it and more likely to question its purpose—neither of which is very conducive to actually keeping on going with it. This of course prevents me from taking the opportunity to actually reflect on why I keep writing the same things day after day, and if those things are not to my liking how I might go about changing them.

Because of this, I feel like I should give it another try, or at least something like it. I think I could really benefit from some sort of deeper reflection on the state of my life as I feel rather lost in where I’m going and what the meaning of everything is, but at the same time it feels somewhat silly to try the thing that already failed once again instead of something else. Maybe what I need is merely a different approach to the same thing, to be more deliberate of what I want to include and perhaps even just keep it shorter, maybe even just a few sentences, so that it get distilled to the core of the message.

The question, then, becomes what is it that I would want to include? What is important enough for me to want to try to keep track of it on a daily basis? And finally, how do I want to do it—merely pen and paper as before, or do I want to enter the digital realm both with the opportunities that provides but also with the reality of it being something of a less tactile experience? Is being able to leaf through a book of my own writing something that has value to me in some way, or is the easier organization of digital files worth the switch?

I’ll keep pondering these things, but it definitely feels like something worth pondering, as I know I must do something to change the current state of affairs and perhaps a greater awareness of exactly what they are is what I need to influence change in a better direction.

The new raid released this week—though “only” the first eight bosses—and so far we’ve gotten rather decent progress in. To be fair, being the first week, it’s heroic and not mythic, but with the apparent state of the bosses I’m fairly content with how far we have gotten, that being progressing on Anduin.

As for the raid itself, it really is a welcome change from Sanctum of Domination and so far a lot more fun as well. Though part of that is surely the novelty, it still just somehow feels better to me in a nebulous hard to specify way—aside from the rather ridiculous amount of trash, which luckily has been rather possible to skip so far.

What has been personally more interesting to try to pinpoint however, is how I feel at the moment in regards to World of Warcraft in general, since I have been in something of a low point concerning the game for a somewhat long time at this point. What I’m noticing is perhaps not a direct return to form or overabundance of excitement towards the game—which I do also think would be very difficult to build at this point in time—but I am distinctly more interested in playing now than I was, say, at the beginning of the last tier. It just feels like the reduction of more-or-less mandatory content to do along with a raid I am actually somewhat curious to see is creating something of a spurt of motivation towards the game. I do still think I will end up taking it slow, as the situation feels somewhat precarious at the moment, but it does feel encouraging to see at least a slight uptick in interest once more.

Now what remains to be seen is just how the week ends up working out for our progress in general—as I’m writing this we’re only halfway through on our progress days, Sunday and Tuesday still to go—as well as how and if my feelings change next week with the last bosses in the raid that we know very little about so far as they weren’t available for testing.

Another confounding factor is the potential to actually be playing both priest healing specs in the raid again, as I’ve been running holy so far for our progress which usually hasn’t been the case. I’ve, surprisingly, actually kind of enjoyed the opportunity to do so again especially since it has given me the chance to try out a new covenant along with getting to experience their campaign for the first time which was nice. The “new” system of being to change covenants more freely is certainly a welcome change for all of this at it allows me to actually prepare both specs to a decent level for the raid, though it is still somewhat clunkily implemented and it always feels a bit weird to get berated when changing back to Venthyr—though I guess the whole humility and remorse thing fits with their theme.

That was a long and winding path of thoughts, but I hope they made some sense. I think I better stop before it gets even worse.

In recent times, for our D&D game, I’ve been thinking rather a lot more about the world the players inhabit and their role within it. It’s something I somewhat intentionally didn’t do in the beginning, since I firstly wasn’t sure how long we were going to play and secondly I also wanted to give the players and the story an opportunity to form the basis for what the world is—it is a collaborative storytelling game after all.

Along with that, due to us now having better tools for playing the game—we switched to Foundry from Roll20, along with me getting Dungeondraft, the use of which was enabled by the increased storage I have available through a self-hosted option like Foundry—I have also been preparing the maps and places the players might visit more thoroughly than before, and consequently having a better idea of what might happen in the future—staying open to surprises and what the players decide to do still of course.

These two things have meant that while there is still always a certain level of stress associated with the anticipation of the next session for me, it has been markedly reduced since I notice how much better prepared I feel to handle whatever they decide to throw at me and I also feel more able to create a more interesting story for them to explore and influence because I have the opportunity to think about the potential outcomes and twists more.

Despite this, I think I do end up improvising as much as before during the actual session—partially because I often end up forgetting what I had planned beforehand and not remembering to read my notes—but I think, hope, that the increased confidence if nothing else provides for a better experience for my players—that is, assuming they notice anything different at all, since it was mostly a case of pre-game anxiety rather than something that affected me during the game itself.

Another thing, with worldbuilding specifically, that makes it fun for me, is that while the time and opportunities to play the actual game might be limited, and as such the utility of any direct content I create for the game, expanding my knowledge and understanding of the world is somewhat evergreen and as such feels a lot more useful. It ends up being things I can reference again and again during the game, or something I can use to build the content and stories within the game. This makes it a lot easier for me to just create when I feel like doing it and as such it’s easier for me to stay motivated while doing it, as opposed to planning the next session or the future parts of the current story arc the progression of which is limited by the available time to play.

The only problem with this type of creativity and creation, is that the opportunities to share aren’t as obvious and abundant, and I’m not sure if my players are as interested in all of this as I am, which might end up feeling somewhat demotivating—no matter how much one tells oneself one is creating purely for one’s own pleasure and consumption, I think there is always that underlying hope for someone else to see and appreciate what one has created.

Still, creating remains fun, and if the only use of all the worldbuilding I do is for it to be easier for me to think of where the story goes next, I think that’s a worthwhile cause as well—and it does mean the players will inevitably encounter it as well, maybe in a more exciting and interesting format as well.

Back to thinking about the history of the world then…

After my initial infatuation with Crusader Kings 3 there was something of a low period in my interest probably due to simply having almost burned out on the game from playing it so much—along with feeling a bit lost since I didn’t really have any goals anymore. That, however, has changed—at least a bit—once more, with the release of the Royal Court DLC. It adds quite a few more things for me to go after, and a reasonable enough excuse for me to start a new game which of course means new goals to pursue.

This time, I went for the somewhat more boring option of starting in Europe—to be fair, the game kind of feels made for this, but considering I come from here it just feels so boring and plain in a sense—and decided to focus a bit more on culture and religion this time around rather than pure expansion and dynasty. Now, I am still trying to do a decent bit of dynasty expansion as the traits acquired through that are very helpful towards completing whatever else one may be attempting, but it is an activity which doesn’t preclude me from also simultaneously pursuing other things—and I do have to admit it feels kind of good seeing the multi-generation takeover plans of foreign realms bear fruit after having set them in motion early on in the game, where the amount of members and rules in the dynasty just keeps on going upwards.

I also started making a bit more use of the different hostile schemes in the game, having so far mostly gone for the diplomatic or friend building route rather than murders and the like, and I do feel it has its own charm as well. I should probably do even a complete playthrough more focused on the intrigue part of the game, though I guess that is partially coming up since my next heir looks to be—somewhat accidentally as I simply hadn’t had my eye sufficiently far down the succession path—focused on intrigue. It will be interesting to see what he ends up achieving when the time comes.

Oh, now that I mention it, that is indeed another change I ended up doing: this time around I didn’t enable the equal game rule and instead chose to develop it myself by reforming a faith. I’m still running on just plain equal instead of female-preference, so there have been the occasional male ruler along the way, but it has proven not to be quite as annoying as feared. Maybe the knowledge that it is my choice rather than something that has been foisted on me contributes to this increased acceptance of the state of things, I’m not quite sure, but there is also just a certain satisfaction in having gone and actually changed history a bit and enabled a more equal realm rather than merely having flipped a switch and made history a better place that way around.

I’m not yet sure how long this high will last, as I’m already rather more familiar with the game and it’s limitations than I was when starting and as such will probably run into walls or disinterest faster now than before, but I’m still happy to have once more found some joy in the game and new interesting things to explore. Now then, back to the game…

Whew, there has been a whole deluge of World of Warcraft/Blizzard news lately, some of it good, some of it questionable. The probably biggest thing is the announcement that Microsoft is planning to buy the company, which I have somewhat mixed feelings about. On one hand, it might provide an opportunity for them to clean up their act and does probably mean they have access to more funding which would hopefully mean more polished games coming out once again. On the other hand, ever increased consolidation of the gaming industry isn’t something I’m all that happy to see, especially considering Blizzard is one of the few companies that have for a long time made the effort of also releasing their games on Mac, which I would imagine would be at an end were they to go under the Microsoft umbrella.

Still, I think it would probably end up more a good than bad thing, especially considering the announcements which followed that one which are rather suspiciously timed, but we’ll have to see if the deal ends up going through.

For things more directly affecting me, Blizzard decided to ban boosting communities. Now, to be fair, I have been taking something of a break from boosting lately, but was looking at getting back into it before the announcement hit. It probably won’t have that big of an effect on me as a result, especially since boosting with a guild is still allowed and we are making attempts at getting that organized, so the impact should be minimal, even if it does increase uncertainty a bit in the short term.

Finally, they seem to finally be bringing cross-faction PVE support to the game! While it unfortunately won’t be making it in time for the next patch, I’m still really looking forward to it and remain cautiously optimistic that the final implementation ends up being in a form that is also useable for me. The points they made in the announcement were essentially what I had envisioned: cooperation within instanced content, outside of instances normal rules apply. Sadly, there was a major caveat: guilds remain single faction, which essentially makes the system unusable for me at this time, as Hall of Fame is bound to the guild and requires the run to be a guild run, which would mean we would have to limit the amount of players we have on a different faction were we to allow mixed factions at all in the first place. Those players who would be from the minority faction also would not have access to the Hall of Fame title, which is a minor thing but somewhat annoying as well nonetheless.

There is another, more minor caveat, namely that certain instances are unavailable for this since they have faction specific content. It feels a bit silly, since while it isn’t a major thing because all of the content is from old expansions anyway and as such it doesn’t affect current endgame, I feel the solution to the problem is really easy and simple: the group leader’s faction decides which version of the instance the group gets. They did say they were working on a solution for it, so I’m assuming it’s some sort of technical reason they can’t simply implement it at launch, or maybe they are looking at some other solution.

At any rate, I’m hoping these are concerns that they address either before this feature goes live or in a later patch during the expansion, but regardless if they do it is a huge step in the right direction towards addressing the faction imbalance and making Alliance viable as a choice for raiding guilds. This makes me somewhat, dare I say, hopeful about World of Warcraft’s future again.

I’ve been in something of a strange mood lately, after my infatuation with Crusader Kings 3 was over—and probably because of it being over—where time has taken on some rather strange characteristics. On the one hand, it feels like time passes rather slowly, as I’m not really doing anything that manages to captivate me at the moment in any real sense—all the more apparent because I so shortly beforehand was so completely and utterly captivated by something—yet at the same time I end up being surprised every evening at it already being evening and the day having gone and me not really having done anything—not having done anything is of course inaccurate, yet that being the feeling I have.

This underlying feeling of the days passing by quickly yet at the same time hours going slowly somehow is made worse by the simultaneous feeling that there is something I either should be doing or something ominous that the days are ticking towards that I should somehow be doing something about, yet I have no idea what either of these things are. Sure, one of the things I feel like I should be doing is ironically playing more Crusader Kings, since the stop was just somehow so abrupt and in the middle of a game in a sense I feel some sort of strange obligation to go back and re-discover the joy I had playing it before, yet at the same time I just have no motivation or real desire to actually do so—it’s strange to have such a feeling of obligation towards a thing.

What the ominous thing on the horizon might be, I can’t really say. Maybe it is simply the fear of not having the ability to go on such indulgences in the future, where I can wholly dedicate myself to something I am enjoying in the moment because I have other obligations to be taking care of, and am consequently yearning back to the comfort of being completely engrossed by something and as such escaping from the clutches of reality into the recesses of my own mind and obsession.

Actually, that’s probably exactly what it is.

It’s somewhat ironic, that the very fear of this ominous future is what is preventing me from taking the steps to remedy the problem in the present, not allowing myself to free myself from the clutches of what was and concentrate on what can be, ending up in a spiral of guilt leaving me unable to find something else to enjoy or build the framework to allow myself to reach more enjoyment in the future because I am so busy punishing myself for daring to be done with something and not needing or wanting to continue with it; paralyzed by my own internal conflicts.

I am sure this will all pass, as it has many a time before where I have been engrossed by something and consequently had difficulties adjusting back to not being so after either losing interest or finishing the thing in question, yet I have to say, the adjustment period sucks.

Well, the year didn’t begin that well for the blog, with me pretty instantly managing to take something of an impromptu break from writing. It wasn’t really intended, but I quite simply didn’t have the motivation to write anything, even though I had a thought here or there what I might write about. Even now, it’s somewhat difficult for me to do so, since I have been rather captivated by Crusader Kings 3 the last few days, and am somewhat loathe to take time away from playing it.

It’s curious how it happened, since I’ve dabbled in both the first and second game before, but never really for this long a time, mostly just for a few hours, afterwards getting simply too frustrated with the limitations that the game imposes on actually doing things. I’m not quite sure what’s so different this time, perhaps it’s me having begun in an earlier era where there were more opportunities for wars and expansion which gave me the motivation to actually build to empire size, and now that I’ve managed to get there I have a vested interest in keeping the empire going. I also think I might’ve gotten somewhat inspired by quill18 and his playthrough, since it allowed me to take the whole family dynasty approach to my gameplay which means that I can in a sense be more accepting of any potential lost wars or the like since I can just feel content as long as the dynasty is going well—it also makes this early game of forced partitioning of the titles between heirs a bit more bearable, since at least it’s all staying in the family most of the time. It is really annoying the level of control and power each consequent death brings with it though, and the significant slowing of the pace of the game that brings with it as well.

What also really helped—something I think is now an option for the first time but maybe I’ve just overlooked it—is the game setting to just put the gender rules to equal in the game. I know, it’s a lot less historically accurate and whatnot, but just always being essentially forced to play dudes gives me bad vibes for some reason—ironically, I’ll probably end up playing as one soon anyway since both of my heirs ended up being male, but should rectify itself before long at least.

It’s also kind of funny now that I’ve played a bunch looking back and actually thinking about the history of the empire I’ve built, and above that the family dynasty of over 500 living members, and just consider the absurdity of it. What started out as a single village in Africa, has evolved into an African empire lead by a afro-greco muslim empress leading her odd clan-based empire to victory—or more often at this point, merely peace, since with the change from tribal to clan government the cost of wars in gold went up such a huge degree that I can scarcely afford them. Probably doing something wrong there, probably related to how much my vassals like me or such, as that impacts how much they pay me in the clan-type government; probably also just growing pains, having relatively recently changed the government type and all of my vassals not even having done so yet, so there are a lot of upgrades missing I assume.

The one drawback of this recent, I think obsession is appropriate, is that I think it might be affecting my sleep, or rather my ability to go to sleep, since I essentially just end up planning what I’ll do next and essentially playing the game, which seems to keep me awake—or maybe it was just a unlucky coincidence and that’ll rectify itself soon enough. Still, I think the joy I’m currently getting is worth that small downside, just curious to see how long it all lasts, which of course also means enjoying it as long as it does! So back to the game.

While learning Japanese last week, I momentarily hit another small slump in my learning motivation, where I was frustrated at not being faster at learning the language and simply wanting to be done with it and already having learnt the language. While my first instinct might be to just write this off as another patience problem, I think there might be something else underlying why I end up feeling this way: credit.

Credit, in the sense that I don’t give myself enough credit for the things I have already achieved, and the fact I have already learned some things which is an achievement when thinking about how vast a project learning a new language is, and also when considering I have already learned other languages and while those things also took their time and consequently feel rather second nature to me at this point, it’s still kind of awesome and badass to have actually gone through with it and achieved that.

I think that might generally be a problem I have, where I don’t really recognize the effort I have put into learning earlier things, and consequently have a hard time doing new things since I’ve come to expect a certain level of competence of myself and merely write things I can’t do yet as either too hard or not interesting enough to be worth the effort—yet the very fact I try to do them in the first place should be an indicator to me that I’m interested in learning to do that thing.

Now, of course, nobody can learn everything, so there is some limit to the things I am interested in but might not have the time to learn, yet at the same time what seems to be missing for me is not really the time but merely—merely she says, even though learning this will probably be harder than learning any language—is the kindness towards myself to allow myself to actually fail while learning and take the time I need in order to get to the level of comfort that I have with things that I already do know.

It feels like I’ve fallen into the trap of only really learning new things that are already very adjacent to the things I already know, thus facilitating an extremely short learning time, and just giving up on things outside that sphere as “too hard”. A large part of this is probably also that I don’t really have a good methodology of learning new things, especially bigger concepts, I can’t really break things into smaller more manageable chunks so that the subject is easier to learn and just kind of want to know what I need to know in order to achieve whatever it is I want to achieve through knowing the subject—but now it feels like I’m returning to territory that I already covered in my earlier post.

Now I just need to figure out how I start actually internalizing and practicing the things I’ve noticed, but I think some vague awareness of why things are the way they are is a good starting point to doing something about improving my situation. Here’s hoping this year provides good opportunities for me to do so!

One of the fun things about writing this blog regularly is the ability to go back and look at what I was thinking about at specific points in time, and the improved ability for myself to be more aware of my own thoughts and feelings. Now to be fair, I mostly don’t really make use of this opportunity, as I quite often find it difficult to interact with things I have created—or rather written—but there are times where it feels fitting.

It seems, at the end of last year, I was very focused on what I wanted to be doing with this blog, and I think that has shown through to a degree in the types of posts I have made this year, with them being very inwards-looking and analytical of myself or whatever it was that I was interested in at the time. I also think that the things I feel comfortable sharing with whoever stumbles upon this blog have increased, allowing me to more freely write and reflect on myself on here than was the case before—maybe that comes from in general getting more comfortable with myself and who I am as time goes on, even though I fear there is still a lot of work to be done on that front.

Something I’ve also more distinctly noted this year than the latter half of last year—the approximate time my personal challenge to publish something here every week has been going on—is that while it hasn’t necessarily become more difficult to think about something I want to write about, it does feel like I have been less successful in actually getting something published this year than when I started with the challenge. I think that might be the natural progression of things, when starting out it’s easy to remain motivated and keep pushing through any hard patches with the motivation alone, but as time goes by that motivation wanes and the only thing remaining keeping one going is some vague desire to have it done which is considerably easier to overpower—which also keeps getting easier every time one allows oneself to just skip a week, since what’s one more time? Despite that, I remain relatively proud of myself to have even such a good track record with this as I do, where on most weeks I did manage to publish something, and for the most part it was even in my personally agreed upon time-slot of 9:00 Monday.

More thinking than looking back—remember, mostly not comfortable actually looking back at the things I’ve written—it does feel kind of great to be slowly building a collection of written works that I can look back on even if I rarely do. There’s just something comforting in having that ability, and something reassuring in being able to see that and know that it’s something I’m capable of—especially since what I’m capable of or rather all the things I’m not capable of have been somewhat heavily weighing on my mind lately, more or less consciously, but that’s probably something to write about another time if at all.

Overall, it feels like this year has given me a lot to think about, especially as looking back at the end of last year, it felt like things for me personally were heading in a better direction, and while that is true once again as I’m writing this, the past month or two have been a rather hard time mentally and it’s only really now that I’m starting to get perhaps a little better that I’m actually understanding how hard it has been. Despite that difficulty, there has also been some progress on a personal level where I have had a certain feeling of slowly getting forward both with accepting myself and confronting my fears—perhaps it is exactly those things that have caused it to be such a hard time—which with the holidays once more upon us does give a certain amount of hope for the future. Heck, I’ve even noticed myself enjoying things I thought I was past finding enjoyment for, if that’s not a good sign for the future I don’t know what is.

Here’s hoping this upward trajectory continues into the next year!

I’ve recently started having a renewed interest in the ability to create some form of digital art, either through painting/drawing or 3D modeling, and I’m noticing something of a big problem with my approach to the whole thing: patience. I know these are difficult things in which I have no real experience to speak of, and I’m completely unfamiliar with the tools and as such have a difficult time with actually making my thoughts come to reality, yet despite this I notice myself getting very easily frustrated and basically giving up just after starting because the whole way to completion just feels so unfathomably large as to be impossible to overcome. It doesn’t really help that even were I to have the experience and knowledge on how to use the tools, I’m not convinced I have the artistic skill to actually create something I would be satisfied with—though I suppose that might be something of a problem to most artists even, themselves being their biggest critics.

I’m also noticing how it’s sabotaging me a bit at the moment with language learning, which I know is a process that takes a great deal of time due to having gone through it before, yet at the same time due to how slow progress inevitably feels while doing it my motivation is again somewhat waning. To be fair, in this regard at least it is not new, and it tends to wax and wane as time goes on and I notice either how slow progress feels or I notice some situation where I can make use of my newfound skills and thus reinvigorate my motivation.

I know that the right approach to deal with these things is probably to break up the problem into more manageable chunks, and learn those one at a time, always building on the foundation of the things that I have learned before; but when those things aren’t directly enabling me to do something new that I want to do, it is really hard for me to have the patience of learning something I can’t directly make use of or need. Perhaps another way would be to simply do as I have done many times with programming: starting with a clear goal, looking up how to do the pieces as I go along, and then ending up with some sort of amalgamation of different guides and approaches that I can refine once I’m further along and know better what I am doing and how.

Yet even with programming, even for things I already know how to do, I am finding it somewhat difficult to actually do them because while I can envision the end goal and the steps to get there, I am so focused on what I want it to be in the end that I’m not really interested in taking the road to get there. I know it’s the journey and not the destination that matters, and once I manage to get started I do tend to enjoy the journey as well, but starting is just always so difficult. Perhaps, with programming at least, that is actually the problem, that while the journey is the part that I enjoy, because I already know so well the steps I need to take embarking on it doesn’t feel so meaningful making it difficult to do so? If that is so, why then do I also have these difficulties when starting new things where I don’t know all of the steps? Or perhaps I do, I just don’t know how to actually do them even if I know what I want to achieve in theory, and that is what frustrates me.

This matter feels more nuanced than I thought when I started writing, and perhaps “patience” isn’t the right word for all of this, but it did enable me to start this exploration, and maybe one day I will find ways to work around or along the ways my mind work to achieve the things I want to achieve. But for now, I think this is enough.

Last Wednesday Legion timewalking with mythic+ got released for the first time.

Having done the dungeons at the time, to the point of not doing them very much anymore towards the end of Legion—probably more due to general boredom with the state of the game or the game itself than the dungeons themselves—I didn’t have all that high expectations from this event. This was enforced by my general disinterest towards World of Warcraft at the moment, as I’m just really not feeling the game—probably because I’ve been playing it for a long time now without significant breaks.

This, however, turned out not to be the case. To my surprise, doing the dungeons again is actually a great deal of fun, much more so than pretty much any current content. I’m not sure if this is merely because I actually enjoy them more, or if the fact I am once again playing more with friends along with nostalgia are the primary contributing factors to the amount of fun I’m having, but it was definitely a positive surprise.

It feels a bit strange to actually have fun playing World of Warcraft again, and certainly not something I was expecting to happen so soon or suddenly, but it is a nice feeling to have.

What still puzzles me however, is why timewalking in general is an event, and not merely something one can choose to queue for whenever. I get that it might make sense to not make the weekly quest available at any time, but the dungeons themselves feels like would be a sensible choice. Especially considering all the scaling tech now implemented for the new leveling experience, the distinction feels so completely arbitrary.

Now I just need to consider if I have the time and motivation to tacke the mage tower challenges as well, as those are back too. I did give the discipline priest one a few half-hearted tries, but I do think it might be fun to make more of an effort towards it. I’m just noticing a certain feeling of frustration in me towards again the time-limited nature of that as well, which is making it more difficult to actually start ironically due to feeling forced to do it.

Well, time will tell how that develops, I still have Endwalker to play too so it’s not like I’m missing fun things to do—here’s hoping I can get started on actually doing them at some point.

I have recently started what will undoubtedly prove to be a long journey were it to prove successful: learning Japanese. It’s something I have wanted to do for a long time—since my teens, really—because the language just has a certain cool-factor for me, perhaps because it’s so seemingly different? Or potentially because it is a language one stumbles upon often enough through gaming and knowing it seems like it could be useful.

I have been putting it off for a while since I wanted to be in a somewhat comfortable situation with my Russian-learning before I started with another language, but decided to jump in anyway since while my Russian is far from perfect or even usable at this point, I feel like I have hit a wall with the tools and methods I am using currently in that department and until I find another approach to continuing it doesn’t really make sense to keep punishing myself with something I’m rather sure won’t work to get me fluent with the language.

Interestingly, my motivation in learning Japanese has been much higher than it was at any point—even starting out—with Russian, and I’ve repeatedly ended up exceeding what I have previously had as the daily goal while I’m used to just barely meeting that bar. I’m not sure if it’s because the start is so “easy” with me merely having to start learning the alphabet which makes me stay more motivated, or if there is just a greater internal desire to actually learning the language than there was in the case of Russian. I mean, Russian perhaps feels to me more like one of those “would definitely be cool to know it” kind of languages, but I’m just not sure if the motivation is there for actually learning it or if I just like the idea of knowing it. The idea of learning Japanese is definitely a long-lived one, so perhaps it is also merely the satisfaction and impatience that comes with starting something one has had planned for so long?

I do have to admit though, I am noticing a certain level of increased resistance in actually accomplishing the daily goal now that the exercises are getting more difficult and I actually have to have a greater degree of concentration in order to complete them, though at the same time I am more willing to actually try to put in that concentration into the task than I have been in recent times with Russian. Perhaps it was just a bad day or too as well, is certainly also a real possibility since my mood has been rather variable of late.

At any rate, I’m curious to see how this exploration continues, especially as the exercises continue to get harder and harder, and I’ll keep brushing up on my Russian on the side as well so as to not forget the things I have already learned in case I find a good way to keep learning the language more in the future, but for now I’m just excitedly looking forward to knowing a language I have wished to know since childhood.

Maybe that also helped me with starting to learn German, having studied it before and consequently actually having a certain level of base desire to actually knowing the language better. I certainly put a lot more effort learning back then than I do now, though to be fair the need for me to know the language was also greater.

I had two rather strange moments today, where I became somewhat disturbingly aware of my own sentience.

At one point, in the middle of a sentence, I just became very aware of the fact I was talking and explaining things, and started questioning from where I was drawing the things I was saying, how I knew all of it, and how strange it really is to just know and understand things.

Later on, after having watched a TV show and being transported back to reality by the ending of the episode, I just somehow became acutely aware of the strangeness of being and this strange disconnect of me having just been so involved and inside of the happenings of the show and the people within, especially since it is all happening in third person, and then being suddenly jerked back into reality where I am myself and things happen in the first person.

These moments are, luckily, somewhat rare for me, since when they do happen they have a rather profound negative effect on my mental well-being in the moment. I doubt the human psyche is built for such examination of the self.

Yet at the same time, I think this certain distance one takes to the self in such moments might prove useful in exploring the, shall we say, defects of the self—behaviors which lead a person to go against their own wishes or interests. Today I unfortunately did not have the energy for such exploration as the experiences rather took everything out of me, the latter more so than the former, yet I think these are thoughts worth hanging on to for a short while, in case I do find more to be had in exploring this matter further.

It’s getting dark really early.

Now that isn’t all that strange, being something that has been happening for as long as I’ve been alive, what is a bit stranger though is that while it probably isn’t the first time I notice being affected by it, it definitely hasn’t been many years. Until not that long ago I even preferred the dark in a lot of cases, with its more cozy atmosphere, yet now I am definitely noticing how it’s affecting my mood in a not so positive way—making me more lethargic and even more difficult than otherwise to get going on things.

What seems to have helped is increasing my dosage of D³—something I take as a supplement anyway—but I’m not quite sure if that’s just placebo or actually working at this point. I feel better though, here’s hoping that feeling stays.

Another thing that hit me the other day, was how seemingly quickly this fall has gone by, something I felt especially strongly as I was out shopping the other day and there was some sort of Santa-event going on and my first thought being “it’s a bit early for that isn’t it?” yet quickly having to concede that with it being about a month until Christmas it really isn’t that early for something like that—maybe it could still have waited until December though, feels somehow more fitting that way.

I wonder what’s behind that, since I don’t think there has been anything particularly interesting happening that would’ve caused the time to go by so quickly. But then, maybe exactly that is the problem, I haven’t had much going on—partially fueled by my less-than-motivated state caused by the darkness—meaning the days have blended into each other and everything feels quick in retrospect even though the individual days might’ve felt somewhat slow at the time.

With the help of some of that newfound energy I’ll try to stay a bit more active again, we’ll see if that ends up helping as the winter progresses.

I am noticing a trend in my thinking that often leads to me feeling somewhat lost or unsure about the things I have done, or rather how to go forward with them, namely: false expectations.

Most recently, I am noticing this again with Linux, where I once more am feeling the desire to try it out a bit more and have actually done so on my laptop this time around—where I am currently using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed—but the “problem” I have ran into once again is this old feeling of “now what?”. I’ve installed it, am using it and for the most part enjoying it—aside from the small problems I had with the wireless networking and touch pad, both which seem to be solved now—but it’s all just so disappointingly normal that I am to a degree asking why I bothered. Don’t get me wrong, I still like Linux and will probably keep using it on my laptop for the foreseeable future even if desktop is probably out of the question for now due to gaming, but I had just for some reason expected more even though I’m not quite sure what and since that expectation was unreasonable I didn’t end up getting it.

It’s also something I’m running into with Final Fantasy XIV, where while I have been enjoying leveling rather a lot so far, I’m kind of stuck with it at the moment since I’ve ended up wondering what I’m doing it for—fun being the obvious answer, since I’m having fun—because I just stop playing the job basically the moment I hit max level. I did do some more playing with the white mage as I quite enjoyed healing, but even that was rather minor. It doesn’t really help that every time I do end up hitting max level I have on the one hand this feeling of elation of finally reaching the goal I had been working on, but simultaneously this overwhelming feeling of emptiness since I don’t really know what to do without something to work on. All of which ends up leading to this nagging feeling of wanting to play more, yet not knowing what to do once I am playing.

Perhaps there is a solution here in two parts. Part one: learning to set new goals ahead of time, so that even once I finish one I immediately have something new I can start on—or rather, preparing those new goals so that I am ready to start the moment I finish if I so desire.

Part two: learning to let go. By this I mean for example, even though I technically had the next goal ready and waiting once I finished leveling white mage, since I had grown so attached to what I was working on previously I took a long while to start on the next thing. This in and of itself is fine, working for a long while on something confers a certain level of attachment to that thing when it’s good so I’m not saying I should detach myself, but when that attachment is keeping me both from enjoying the old thing since I don’t know what to do with it as well as preventing me from starting something new since I’m clinging to the old the only thing it’s bringing is trouble and that is unnecessary. If you love something let it free and all of that.

Now of course, I’m not sure these things will solve my problem, and talking about it is always easier than actually executing on something—along with the nasty tendency of planning and failing to execute something resulting in a rather big amount of stress and thus negative feelings for me—but maybe writing about it here can be a first step towards a better me. If not, maybe it at least provides some food for thought for you, dear reader.

So last week on Monday evening, I realized that I hadn’t written anything for the blog yet, simply having forgot to do so. I had been meaning to sit down and write something over the weekend, but just never ended up finding the time or remembering to do so.

So, as said, Monday evening rolls around, and I think to myself “well, that’s fine, but I’ll write that I just forgot at some point during the week, maybe even with a few extended thoughts, and it’ll just be a shorter post this time around”. Lo and behold, it is the weekend again, and I still haven’t written anything, so it all now rolls on to the next post. An unfortunate circumstance to be sure, but not the end of the world I don’t think.

To be quite honest, this sort of forgetfulness is something of a theme in my life, and I tend to organize things in such a manner that they are in my way so that they become harder to forget, it just hasn’t been necessary for the blog yet and as such when a time of greater activity came about it got overlooked. It really does help that in general I have such a generous amount of time allotted to myself to write these things, meaning in all likelihood at some point during the week I’ll end up remembering to write a post on here—even if that all too often ends up being on Sunday.

When such discipline isn’t available though, it can be interesting to look in retrospect how long certain things can end up taking, days stretching to weeks stretching to months before I realize that there was that thing I wanted to do, now is just (still) not a convenient time for it. It seems to be especially prominent for me with social interactions, as while I do find that I need them my needs are rather low and anything fixed and scheduled tends to have a really draining and intimidating effect leading up to it, even for things I know I’ll enjoy. This leads to me rather often neglecting to make time for being social and talking to people, yet at the same time missing that kind of interaction.

The silly thing is that I know the solution to this all, which is simply just do it, but as noted once something is fixed and planned the anticipation just ends up really draining me, so planning anything is something of a difficulty. It feels strange, yearning for something so within reach yet the behaviors required for it going so against what I have become comfortable with that executing those becomes all but impossible. I know, I know, getting out of one’s comfort zone usually leads to bigger and better things, but those first steps can be oh so very hard to take, especially as so far they have shown no real sign of getting any easier with time. But I try, I try, and one day I shall get there.

In my post about motivation recently, I speculated about poor self-esteem and how it might be at least part of the reason for some of my difficulties. Thinking about the matter further, especially as it combines with gaming which is something I end up spending rather a lot of time doing, I started wondering why it then is that I am so drawn to games and RPG’s specifically. One reason undoubtedly is that they are part of how I got my start in gaming, and as such there is a certain nostalgia-factor even with newer games, but I think another large contributing factor is achievement.

Now, obviously, games tend to be made to be fun and as such are built to give a certain level of feeling of achievement to the player, either through their story or their competitive nature, but since we are talking about RPG’s the former more aptly applies—disregarding for the moment MMORPG’s and how those add competitive elements.

But what I think is the larger contributing factor in my case, is that in RPG’s I’m not myself but rather someone else, and as such the achievements are externalized allowing me to more readily accept them, and to join other’s celebrating and recognizing those achievements.

That’s probably also a large part, to be fair, having something I do be recognized, or more specifically, being able to myself recognize that something I have done is an achievement is something I struggle with. So when that feeling of achievement is externalized to my character, I am more able to partake in it.

Though the first class I ended up leveling in Final Fantasy XIV was arcanist, I never really ended up playing scholar that much, mostly focusing on summoner—the two jobs the class can specialize in—and consequently it wasn’t until I started leveling as a conjurer/white mage that I ended up actually doing any sort of healing. It has been interesting so far, though rather easy still, as I haven’t gotten overly far to be fair, but the curious thing has been that it has once again reminded me why I like healing, something I had curiously managed to forget. Well, not really forget, but I had been expecting that the slower pace of the game—or more specifically, the longer global cooldown—would mean that healing would be less enjoyable to me, and as such I didn’t really think I would enjoy it as much, yet to my surprise my experience so far has been almost the opposite: I think I enjoy it more than healing in World of Warcraft at the moment.

It’s way too early to make any sort of final judgement on that front though, as the types of content I do in both of the games is so vastly different that the gameplay isn’t really comparable at all.

Speaking of things that I rediscovered recently: tanking. Well, not really rediscovered, but I have been playing as a gunbreaker more recently, leveling through duties and tanking. It has actually been really fun again, especially since I tend to end up doing the same duty several times due to level restrictions, meaning I really get to learn and optimize my play therein, allowing me to actually start thinking about how I pull and where I use my cooldowns. What also really helps strangely is going back to the duty finder from doing trusts—trusts are basically duties (dungeons) that you do with NPCs, duty finder is finding random players to do it with—because even though the interactions are generally rather limited and I do tend to get unreasonably nervous about the prospect of having to interact with new people and afraid of being judged, I think those same fears play into it being that much more rewarding when things go in a reasonable way like they are wont to do. It is curious though, these fears seem much more prominent while playing a tank than a healer for me, probably because of the more visible role in having to lead the group—or perhaps because as a healer I haven’t been queuing alone but with a friend, which probably also helps a lot.

A slight drawback of actually playing with other players is the availability of such, and the increased queue times in trying to find players to run with, which are actually while still not long per se surprisingly long as a tank, generally somewhere between 2-10 minutes. The variance is of course rather high, depending on many factors, but it is still rather interesting to see since I’m somewhat used to tanks being the most in-demand role. Healer queues on the other hand have been surprisingly fast, essentially instantly being put in a party, which is also something of a surprise to me. Perhaps the level range also plays a role, more of the playerbase being available.

At any rate, both of these factors have given me a rather great deal of renewed interest towards the game which I have been happy to see, since it is nice to have something to do once more that I enjoy.

Some while back I wrote about my struggles with motivation, and while I did end up trying the whole novel-writing thing, it unfortunately did not end up quite as hoped—well, “end” is perhaps premature, it is still something I have a desire to do yet have laid to the side for now. But my recent forays into more, shall we say, motivated gaming have caused me to consider once more what it is about that activity that captures me so and how it might best be translated to other parts of life. Now, the simple and somewhat obvious answer is “because it’s fun” but there are other things that are fun that I still end up not doing or not doing as much as I’d like, so that isn’t the whole truth of the matter.

Actually, thinking about it, the problem for me in a lot of cases feels like the age-old problem of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, but with a twist: I’m really bad at intrinsic motivation. There seem to be precious few things that I manage to do out of the enjoyment of doing itself, and must resort to some sort of external motivator to keep me going. As an example, my recent forays into crafting and gathering, even though I was finding a certain degree of enjoyment in the collecting of things, as soon as I had reached my goals there appeared this internal resistance of “why bother?” that made continuing for lesser rewards or merely for the simple fun of it very difficult, leaving me adrift without cause.

This is a strange situation to find oneself in, because I can feel the call to keep playing and doing things, yet at the same time there is this huge internal resistance to actually do anything. One of the things I have going on is to level up another job, and I have been doing that mainly through dungeons since that seems to be the sensible way to do so, yet it for some reason requires rather a lot of mental preparation and focus to click that button to queue up. One might think this has something to do with shyness and other people, yet I had the exact same resistance even when launching on a command mission—as in, doing dungeons with a group of NPCs—so that doesn’t seem to be it.

What might hint at the root cause of this problem however, is what else I have been doing in recent days: programming. Now, that in and of itself isn’t the cause of course, but what I notice is that when I am programming I feel bad for not gaming and when I am gaming I feel bad for not programming, meaning whatever I do I feel bad. Now the problem of not being able to do what I wanted to do before I found new programming projects to work on did exist, yet it was somewhat easier to motivate myself then because I didn’t have anything else I could be doing, or the things I could be doing were small and discrete making it easier to get started by thinking “I’m not doing anything at the moment, so let me just get X out of the way”.

Maybe in the end all of this has little to do with motivation and more with indecisiveness, but the end result seems the same: not being able to do the things I want to do.

Right, now I remember where I was going with that whole motivation thing and why I was so focused on gaming: challenges and obstacles, and how that ties to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I am noticing, while gaming and programming, that once I hit an obstacle or have to think too hard or the like, it gets very hard for me to keep pushing through with intrinsic motivation alone, yet if there is some extrinsic motivation also at play—e.g. more story for completing the dungeon or some other reward like glamour or the like—it is much easier to keep on track and push through. I am not quite sure what this indicates, since the common wisdom is that intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic, but maybe it is a hint that I don’t enjoy the things I do as much as I think? Yet that doesn’t really feel true either, so mayhap there is some other explanation.

The first that comes to mind is poor self-esteem, as in I don’t value myself enough to give sufficient credence to my own motivations and therefore rely on external motivators to keep me going, and deprived of those find myself lost. Perhaps that is also why I take so much comfort in the knowledge that death is an option, and if life gets too much I can simply not. At the same time, I have made the decision not to merely not because there are things I want to do and see and achieve, yet that was very much a conscious and not emotional decision and as such its power to work as a motivator requires a somewhat significant amount of mental energy. I think, however, that the insight gained in writing this might give me more tools to empower that decision.

Having played through the main story in Final Fantasy and consequently feeling a bit lost as what to do next since the story was the driving force keeping me engaged with the game, I decided to take a closer look at leveling the other jobs I was interested in and had already started on earlier, only to not really feel that feeling of purpose that kept me going. I still intend to level those jobs at some point, and have been doing so sporadically, but the thing that ended up really catching my focus in recent days was crafting and gathering, primarily because of some cosmetics I ended up wanting that were gated behind those activities.

I have to admit, despite having heard that the crafting and gathering in Final Fantasy XIV is supposed to be great, I was very skeptical since it isn’t usually something that I find overly interesting in games; it has for the most part just felt like extra steps from having something simply be a drop from a mob or a quest reward, and despite having studied a bit of economics the market aspect of it hasn’t really captured me either. Then again, I notice now, the problem might be that the implementations I had seen before were made either in a way that I find boring (i.e. Assassin’s Creed) or simply poorly (i.e. World of Warcraft), where crafting is naught more than getting the ingredients and pressing a button.

Yet here, crafting and gathering both, are separate classes (or jobs, as the game tends to call classes), with a good 20+ skills. Sure, especially for gathering which I have done more of, there are a lot of skills that end up doing the same thing with different cost and efficacy, but it is still a degree of actual decision-making that I have yet to see from any such system before. In World of Warcraft, the biggest decision is simply where to gather, the rest is more or less running in a circle and hope something interesting happens to be on the way while dodging enemies and hoping not to get dismounted; in Final Fantasy, you have skills that point you to the nearest node and make you permanently stealthed to the local fauna meaning you can focus on the actual gathering of things instead of getting derailed by annoying things like combat with trivial mobs.

Sidenote: I’m one of those probably strange people that actually kind of enjoyed archeology in World of Warcraft—but I was also lucky enough never to be forced to do it to get any relevant power increases, due to not playing during a time when that was possible—with the only thing really annoying me about it was all of the trash mobs one tended to have to deal with while working on the digs. Sure, it was a lesser problem when one went back to do it in older content, but it was really annoying in current content.

The gathering itself is also a lot more engaging and involved, in that while the nodes are common what’s on them might not be, and even if it is especially for the quests one tends to need to gather it in high quality meaning the different skills one has at one’s disposal tend to come in very handy. Then come the decisions of when to use those skills, since while they do not have a cooldown you do have gathering points—mana, essentially—which regenerates somewhat slowly, so you can’t just blast out all of the skills on every node, meaning you have to think how to achieve whatever goal you have in mind in the most efficient way possible. This then also extends to things like collectables, that have their own separate mini-game allowing you to try to make their collectability as high as possible, and while the primary skills there do not require any GP, boosting them does, and maximizing collectability without them is rather unlikely. Gear also helps all of this along, increasing chance for HQ items or GP or merely the chance to gather something in the first place, meaning there is some real actual depth to it all.

Now, I am still a very goal-oriented person and I don’t think I would end up running around gathering things just for the fun of it, but I have to admit the time I have spent gathering has been going by surprisingly quickly and I find myself looking for reasons to keep going.

It really is a strange feeling, realizing that I didn’t dislike some activity, but that I merely disliked it when it was implemented poorly and having only seen such implementations I couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to do it when it was implemented well.

The past month or so has been very, well, not busy but self-indulgent, in that I have chosen to prioritize my time in Eorzea over other concerns, even personal goals such as keeping up with this blog. It has been equal parts freeing and exhausting; on one hand it has been lovely not to have to think too much about other concerns and properly engross myself in a story and another world so completely, on the other hand there is always a toll taken when not tending to one’s obligations or goals: the feeling of failure.

Considering it has to a degree been a conscious choice for me to ignore those other concerns that feeling is somewhat dampened through me having chosen it, yet at the same time I can’t help but look at the things I feel I should have done and feel dejected having not done them. What doesn’t help it that I find it difficult to pinpoint to which degree it was a choice of mine, and to which degree it was my obsessiveness—not quite sure this is the right word, but I’ll come to that—taking over.

You see, it is all fine and good to frame something as a choice, yet when the alternative seemed to be almost a paralyzing unwillingness to act due to a desire to do something else and the sadness resulting from not doing it, how much of a choice was really made? More importantly, what does this say of me and my mind that I have such a overriding need to fulfill my current want that I become all but incapable of taking care of other things? Is this all merely learned behavior from having the opportunity to indulge myself for so long, or is it a symptom of a low degree of mental energy available to override this more instinctual behavior in favor of more long-term thinking? Am I merely unlucky, and need a higher degree of mental energy in order to override these instincts?

Now there are things which I have managed to keep running during this time, with more or less difficulty, and as always keeping them running has been what has provided some measure of accomplishment and relief to the whole situation for me—even though in many cases the whole reason they have been kept running is external supervision or support in those endeavors which means a social cost to not doing them instead of merely a personal one—which makes it feel all the more strange that I should sabotage myself in such a manner.

Overall, it is a strange situation to be in, being aware of what is going wrong to a certain degree yet being unable to stop oneself, thus a feeling of having failed making it yet harder to stop oneself since what is the point, I’ve already failed? Doesn’t help that staying focused and indulging in the obsession is what keeps such thoughts at bay, further reinforcing the desire to keep indulging.

A strange spiral to have been in, one into which I will doubtless fall again in due time, but for now I think I can see the end of this incarnation, and the opportunity to enjoy my adventures in another world in a more productive manner.

Still adventuring in Eorzea, not found the time to really sit down and write. I know, already happened last week without notice or mention, but I simply do not have the energy for it at this time.

There are a lot of things we as humans do, that we do out of convention or habit, because it is the “way things have always been done”. These conventions tend to be rather slow to change, exactly because once they take hold they are somewhat ingrained in the way we do things, and change is always difficult, especially when a larger amount of people are involved. Change means all of them have to agree to some level on the new way of doing things, otherwise you risk any potential gain from the new and hopefully improved way of doing things being diluted by the increased difficulty in connecting with the people who prefer the old way, for one reason or another.

Because changing these conventions is so difficult once they have been established, education plays a huge part in either maintaining them, or when talking about large scale efforts to standardize on something new, changing them. If you are able to educate children in the new way of doing something, the old way will eventually die out as the practitioners of it age and die. Depending on what exactly the convention is, something like legislation may also be enough, if the official way of doing something is changed—like say, currency—people will generally adapt to the new way of doing things because of the other mostly established convention of following the law and societal rules in general.

That was all a long way of prefacing what I have been thinking about, namely currency. Or, to be more specific, the denominations of it, and more generally the way we have structured our numbers with the decimal system.

Pretty much everyone outside of the USA—who cling on to the imperial system for measurement—has become rather accustomed to viewing most things from this base 10 mindset, both when it comes to things like the metric system as well as the separation of currency into the currency itself and cents or something like it—I am sure there are other exceptions to this as always, but I’m looking at this from what I know. This is of course rather convenient, since we can apply the same type of shorthands for many different types of calculations and approximations we do, and don’t have to learn different ways of thinking for something like measuring and paying, but is it really optimal?

I admit, I like it rather much and find the imperial system somewhat annoying to work with—not that I have to work with it much or at all—and find that doing things like multiplication on base 10 is much easier than with most other things, but is that merely because that’s what I’m used to and have learned? Many people don’t seem to have any problem working in the imperial system, and it has survived this long despite the derision it at times receives from the outside, so is there some hidden merit to it?

There was an interesting video I saw a while back about old currency, specifically in England, and one of the things pointed out in it was the to modern sentiments strange thing of being partially based on steps of 240 instead of 100, which on the surface feels a lot less convenient and confusing, yet does come with the advantage of making things like division by 3 a lot easier. Of course, for most applications, merely using a repeating three is accurate enough, so it’s not really a problem necessarily, but it is still something that has caused me to question more the reason behind some of the conventions that we hold, or more so made me more aware of the potential value in having different ways of doing things available and keeping a more open mind. Because I admit, I was very much in the “the imperial system is dumb”-crowd, and now I’m not quite so sure—even if having to convert from imperial to have a better gauge of the size of something in our modern US-centric world does get rather annoying.

I sit here, reveling in the feeling of accomplishment of having once more folded and put away my laundry, and am left pondering on why these most mundane of tasks seem to take so much energy and effort to get going on. It is, once more, something I had been putting off for several days, a personal record in speed really, usually it remains undone until I have finished dirtying the pile of clean laundry again and it goes back into the washing machine—the filling of which, itself, is also a task left to the very last moment.

It is such a strange thing, feeling the overwhelming pressure of effort that is required to start such simple tasks, and then every time rediscovering the feeling of elation and accomplishment at having done the task and not being pressured by needing to complete it anymore. Even before starting, I most of the time know how minute it is and how quickly it goes, yet the feeling of impossibility remains always, preventing me from even starting.

It seems to me, this experience cannot be an universal one, for then almost nothing in this world would get done, yet looking at others it seems still to be rather widespread, which leaves me bewildered as to how the world runs as well as it does, or is it all merely a façade? Perhaps it is, as some say, a sign of some sort of neurological divergence on my part, and the masses have a easier time with it; but how am I to know, I know only my experience, my reality, and can relate to the realities of others only through this lens. Whatever someone describes to me, will be distorted by my own perspective, my own experience.

I take a sip of water, and ponder.

Is the problem perhaps even the opposite? While there is certainly a pressure to accomplish such tasks, the postponing of them also works for a rather significant while—for some definition of works—and with the distractions offered by modern life to take one away from such unpleasant pressure, there are precious few opportunities for the mind to get to the point of actually starting such tasks. Once the postponing has been started, it tends to become a self-perpetuating cycle, since one knows it is something that should already have been taken care of yet remains undone, and a certain level of shame of having put it off for so long makes starting that much more difficult.

Strangely, even now, writing this, I notice some of that very same resistance, some of that effort of forcing myself to do something, and finding it all the harder because I am for once actually writing this well ahead of time. It feels so strange, that even for things which I do enjoy doing—namely, writing—there is so much resistance to actually doing so, and my mind keeps wanting to do something lighter, easier, more distracting. Is it merely because I am struggling to find what I want to say? Another example of my mind wanting to flee adversity, instead of confronting it and dealing with it? Is this why, when wanting to write a book, I ended up stopping so soon, because it felt like this pressure was popping up all too often, and I don’t know how to handle it with such frequency, and it ended up causing me to be stressed out by the whole process of writing creatively?

Perhaps, in the case of the book, I was trying to do too much. Perhaps, I need to train myself to handle such pressure better, and it was coming from too many places at once. There is no real reason for the book to be a completely lost cause, merely because I have not written anything in the last while; the foundation is there, I can pick up and continue when I am ready. Maybe being kinder to myself was the key all along, not creating a standard for myself that I cannot achieve, and accepting myself and what I can achieve as I am, being happy when I go beyond what I thought possible, and kind when I do not; nobody is at their best all of the time.

I go and put the kettle on, tea would do nicely after this excursion into my mind I think.

It feels like there is a certain dichotomy in modern society of the introvert—who hates people and would prefer nothing more than live alone on the moon—and the extrovert—who can’t stop talking and starts crying the moment they are left alone, which of course is a completely false construct, and people mostly fall in somewhere in between with variance through time and space as their feelings allow. I know all of this, yet I am starting to feel I, too, had fallen into the trap of identifying a bit too much with the introvert side of myself, and neglecting or not understanding my need to be social.

During my time in primary and secondary education, I was rather socially active, partially through the mere fact of seeing ones friends daily, and partially because the bonds we forged in school ended up continuing outside it. Thinking about it now, it feels even a bit odd for me to have identified as an introvert considering the reason I used to hate going to our summer place in the summer was not being able to see my friends during that time, and times being what they were availability of things like cheap telephony and Internet in remote places wasn’t what it is today. Perhaps it was even a defense mechanism of sorts, trying to protect myself from the pain of separation through turning inward and creating worlds of my own to be in, occupying my mind with other things. It is a skill that to this day serves me well, and there are definitely still times when I would prefer nothing more than being left alone to do in peace whatever it is I want to do, yet in optimizing so hard for myself to be able to do whatever I want to do, I notice often a certain lack of doing things with others and communicating. Sure, there are people with whom I write a great deal, and share memes or interesting articles or the like, but the times I end up just talking to people feel all too rare.

The exception to this, still being someone who raids, are of course the raids, yet due to their scale of being 20 person challenges there is a certain lack of intimacy going into them, and being someone who now at least does not feel overly confident in large groups, there ends up being a distinct lack of discussion in them—not that there would be much time for it anyway, since the level of challenge does tend to necessitate a certain degree of focus.

Looking back, it feels like a earlier sign that there was a need that wasn’t being fulfilled for me was my desire to participate more actively in social media, thinking back specifically at Mastodon, since the whole point of such media—as the name implies—is to be social. It feels like the experiment to do so has been one great failure, since while my usage has gone up, I remain more of a observer rather than an active participant. Looking at the harm social media can cause, perhaps this is a good thing, but it does mean that this need is still going unfulfilled.

I have had some more successful attempts more recently, and have taken to a bit more actively phoning friends and asking how they are doing—which to be fair, is probably the better idea anyway and more fitting for me—and perhaps the hopefully soon once again beginning rounds of Dungeons & Dragons will provide opportunities to socialize. We have the past few weeks already been playing the new release of Dark Alliance so there has been some of that going on already and it has definitely been helpful, but I am looking forward to the tabletop variant even more.

In the end, this feels like a long way of saying: be careful hiding behind a label or in a box you put yourself in, and try to examine your feelings and listening to your body for what you actually need, not what that label or box tells you is what you are supposed to be like. This, unfortunately, isn’t always as easy as it sounds, because being a human is hard and confusing—heck, it took me something like 10 years to understand this—but identifying what is missing is the first step to finding it.

Earlier this year I found myself looking for a new keyboard, and the difficulties I had at the time finding a keyboard that met my needs lead me to start thinking about language. The problem with finding a keyboard arose from language, since I had some rather particular wants in the new keyboard and those were in general rather hard to find, but even more so when looking at ISO keyboards, since the vast majority of the more custom market seems to focus on ANSI.

This phenomena of American and English being default and standard isn’t exactly new, especially not in computing and programming—basically every programming language uses English as the base language as it were, with some rare exceptions none of which are widespread—but my problems finding a keyboard merely threw it more sharply into focus for me once more.

It frustrates me a rather great deal, because as someone for whom multiple languages have always been rather present and having been raised bilingual with English following at a rather young age, I can see the importance of language to myself rather clearly. Learning and knowing several languages has enriched my life to such an incredible degree, allowing me to express myself in new ways as well as learn to know different people and cultures to a completely different degree. Even writing this very post I find myself resorting to translating my thoughts from other languages to English—not necessarily my mothertongue, mind you—because I can simply find the perfect word for what I want to express in that language even if it might not come to me in English, allowing me that much better to express myself. I could probably achieve a similar thing by perusing a dictionary, but that would end up being so inefficient as for me to give up and not express myself fully instead of taking the time to find the exact right words for what I want to say.

Thus I find myself becoming rather frustrated at this pressure put upon us both culturally from the behemoth that is the American entertainment industry as well as well as technologically from the very machines we use to express ourselves being created in this way that is so very centered on the experience of being American and using English. The most recent frustration I had with this was Nextcloud, which even though I set my settings to use European English for the locale, defaulted to displaying dates the American way which is just yet another one of these small ways that inconvenience everybody else. Another example is the insistence of the Ghost—the software I am using to write this very post—to show the week beginning on Sunday instead of Monday, another from what I can tell American custom, with no obvious way to change that.

At the same time, I can so very well understand the appeal of being to communicate with what feels like the whole world in English, and the self-perpetuating circle this leads to—everyone knows English, so things are made in English first, which means everyone knows or learns English to use those things and so on. Even I, despite these feelings at this point in time, chose to start this blog in English instead of my mothertongue because it does allow me to communicate with so many more people and to be part of the global discussion to a completely different degree—even if what I write here mostly goes unseen by the world at large. English is, despite its silly rules around spelling at times and confusing idioms, such a very convenient language to use for pretty much everything in the digital world that I find it difficult to blame anyone for doing so—I did it myself for a long time, thinking anyone who used one of our local tongues on their machines as either cringe or old—and as my proficiency with German comes to a point where I feel there might be more harm than good done in using it as the system language due to poor or incomplete translations am considering ending my personal one woman crusade against using English everywhere, I can’t help but wonder if the gains in the end outweigh the losses and how cognizant people are of the decision they are making, or if they are merely acting out of convenience.

Every single person probably has their own answer to this question, and while I might decide in the near future to give in to convenience a bit more, I think I would be very sad should the future do away with the beautiful plethora of languages we as a species have developed over time and merely defaulted to a single one out of an overwhelming need for convenience. If that day were to come, I think we would have lost more than we had gained.

Last week I decided to take the plunge and install the Insider Preview version of Windows 11 from the Dev Channel, making it something akin to an alpha version of the operating system. I had been considering doing this for a while, shortly after it was announced I think, but I’m not really sure why. Maybe I just needed the change after so many years of Windows 10.

Nevertheless, before installing Windows 11 I had also considered to once I had done so just do a refresh of the computer, removing all software and files since there is a strong tendency for cruft to accumulate with time as the installations age which usually means a fresh install runs better than an aging one. However, one of the things that ended up with me deciding against this—aside from the annoyance of having to set up all of the things I actually want to keep once more—was how poorly a lot of software is written when it comes to where it stores data and the consequent pollution of user files. When looking into my documents folder, the majority of folders therein do not at all contain any documents of mine but rather different configuration or temporary files for software that I have had installed over the years, much of which I in no way use regularily. This means that if I wanted to do a clean install only keeping documents that are actually important I would have to manually go through all of those folders hunting through my actual documents and discarding all of the random junk software insists on throwing in there, instead of simply copying over my documents as it should be.

All of this is doubly frustrating, since there exists a predefined place for all of this cruft, AppData, since Windows Vista, meaning it has been available for almost 15 years at this point! Why all of this software still to this day contains such an unimaginable amount of legacy cruft that they feel the need to regularily frustrate their users with to this day I do not know, but what makes it triply frustrating is the seeming unability for me as a user to defend myself against this. The software is unsurprisingly running with user rights so it’s going to have write access to the documents folder, and even if there are ways to prevent that it would then mean the broken software ends up not running at all since the odds are if it is broken enough to try to write its files there it’s not going to handle write errors gracefully.

The most egregious example of this that I have encountered in recent memory is the launcher for Final Fantasy XIV, which stores the files for patching the game in the documents folder, which I only know because of another piece of broken software, namely the Nextcloud desktop client, that refuses to respect the ignore lists for syncing that I define. That, of course, is another reason why this behaviour from software is so bad: the cloud. Or more accurately, using things like Dropbox or Google Drive or OneDrive to backup important documents, that of course have quotas on how much can be store there. A sane expectation from any user is to be able to want to back up their documents folder—since it is kind of the obvious place to store their documents in—yet when other broken software chooses to store something like their multi-gigabyte downloads alongside the users documents in that very same folder it can get rather easy to start bumping against those quotas, and then because it is all synchronized between several machines ends up being downloaded to machines that might not even have the software in question installed in the first place or even the possibility of installing it.

It is just such a frustrating state of affairs against which one as a user feels completely helpless, and that makes me angry and sad.

This past Wednesday saw the release of the new raid on heroic and normal, along with some slight progress along the campaign and the availability of flying in the Shadowlands—with the big caveat of it only being available in the four Covenant-Zones, and not in the rest of the world, not even Oribos, making it a somewhat useless thing. It’s still nice to have of course, but still feels like one of those situations where Blizzard begrudgingly allows us to fly for a bit when it is completely irrelevant for the content. It remains, as ever, frustrating.

The campaign itself was rather usual, with possibly the most obvious and clearly telegraphed reveal of all time at the end, but it was still a welcome change of pace from the daily grind content the rest of the patch has been. Though there is of course the frustration of having to repeat it on several characters for those who play several, which is unfortunate.

The raid itself has been something of a wild ride so far, and we actually haven’t managed to clear it on heroic yet though we did have some rather quick progress on the earlier bosses and are working on Sylvanas and had several good tries there. Kel’thuzad probably cost us more time than he should have, but at least it works as practice for mythic so it isn’t wasted time. I think I have actually ended up enjoying most of the bosses in the raid at least to some degree, there are a couple in there where the tuning is a bit strange and several where the mechanics are buggy but I think my enjoyment of the raid is a lot higher than it was in Nathria. Of course, early times and not mythic yet, but bodes well for the future.

Speaking of buggy, Sylvanas. On the last platform there is a rather infuriating bug which makes targeting AoE ground effect abilities impossible—the cursor just permanently stays grayed out—and it just makes the whole fight so much more annyoing to play because the only workaround we have found so far is creating macros casting the spell on oneself, which of course means running in to melee so that it actually hits a sensible amount of people. It also seems to pop up rather randomly, making it more annoying. Hopefully that is one of the things that ends up being fixed before we are progressing the boss on mythic, otherwise I’m not sure what I’ll do there. To be fair, it won’t be as bad since by then I will have specced away from holy and back to discipline, so I’ll be less reliant on such spells.

That has actually been another interesting thing, playing holy again. The spec feels fine to me still, if somehow very weak. I’m not sure why, but it just feels like all of my spells do almost no healing—well, with the exception Holy Word: Salvation which has a hefty cooldown. Still, the change of pace is welcome, especially since it is a much easier spec to handle in heroic with new and to me unkown mechanics and timings, but there is still a certain sadness to it all, remembering how it was and seeing what it has become. To be fair, I am also putting a rather heavy focus on damage since that was pretty much always my speciality, so maybe that is coloring my impression, but it still feels odd.

Anyway, new content is fun, look forward to progressing the raid!

This past week saw the release of World of Warcraft patch 9.1, and with it—I think, because I can’t see the future and know what’s coming—the culmination of my frustration with the game.

For those who follow the game a bit more this will be old news, but with the patch came some rather drastic balancing changes to discipline priests, the class and spec I primarily play, which all but forced me to change covenant as well. This means farming renown once more, which while a great deal easier since the patch, is still a very luck-based activity and the amount of content one needs to do to get back to where one started varies greatly.

Early on in the week, I was unfortunately not so blessed by Lady Luck, and staring down the prospect of potentially having to farm a rather extensive amount of renown through less than reliable sources doing content that I don’t find overly enjoyable. This, unsurprisingly for someone who was already rather on the fence as to my motivation to keep playing, was a rather crushing feeling. This was exacerbated by flying being locked behind renown and becoming available next week, which regardless of how useless it is looking to be this expansion is something I’ve always looked forward to unlocking and having as soon as possible since I really don’t agree with Blizzard’s design direction in this regard, and thus there was a creeping fear of being “cheated” out of the opportunity to unlock it quickly. A rather irrational feeling when evaluating the utility of actually unlocking it, but a strong feeling nonetheless.

Fortunately for me, the guildies I have are rather excellent, and with the help and motivation of a friend (💜) and without almost completely participating in said unmotivating content I already on Saturday ended up being able to fill up my renown once more.

This puts me in a somewhat unexpected position, since I find myself at the moment actually enjoying World of Warcraft—even the more menial things—a lot again, and am rather motivated to keep playing. I am curious to see how long this will last, since it may well be that I am merely still riding on the high of a new patch being released and the content being somewhat fresh, but I am happy for the change.

Another benefit of the current situation is that having been forced to change covenants actually ended up as a positive for me, since now at least as far as theme and looks go I ended up with the covenant I wanted the most when they were unveiled, even if the abilities associated with the covenant aren’t necessarily the ones I would choose.

The biggest takeaway from this experience for me has really been the reminder of the value of friends and a good guild in a game like this, since at the end of the day they are the true reason I keep playing, with the game merely serving as the backdrop for those connections.

Last week I talked about my feelings regarding World of Warcraft, and specifically how I was unsure if I wanted to continue playing since it seemed the stress was outweighing the joy. In the week since, we’ve had our first retail raid after having taken a break, as well as a boost raid, and while it wasn’t all positive all the time my outlook on the situation is definitely a lot more positive than it was before that—it really served as a reminder of what the game can be at its best.

What I also briefly mentioned but didn’t go deeper in on was that it felt like being someone who plays and is somewhat decent at World of Warcraft seems to be a somewhat large part of my identity which made even considering stopping somewhat agonizing. Now, it wouldn’t have been the first time I stopped playing but it would be the first time I think where the decision to do so would be such a conscious one as opposed to merely logging in less and over time stopping since I didn’t feel like I had anything to do in game. That then is what I would like to write about: identity.

The question of who I am seems like such a huge topic, a vast sea of uncertainty that I have so far in my life rather successfully avoided sailing. Now, sure, there are aspects of my identity that I have spent a lot of time examining and questioning and consequently have a fairly good understanding of what they are at the moment and what they mean for me like gender and womanhood—especially as someone who won’t experience motherhood, as those things seem to be so deeply linked on the societal level—but simultaneously there are also huge gaping holes in my knowledge like what do I want to do and be and what do I like doing.

One of the confounding factors I often encounter when trying to do this sort of exploration, is the disconnect I often have between desired and actual desires. There are so many things of which I think “that would be cool!” only to discover that what I liked about it wasn’t necessarily the activity itself but the idea of it or the image of being a person who likes the thing. This, of course, is part of the process of discovery and in and of itself not necessarily a bad thing.

The problem is by the point I often actually end up trying things I am already either so emotionally invested in wanting it to happen or socially invested through involving other people in the activity that it becomes difficult for me to admit that is the case and I end up continuing through a feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment; this then leads to a certain degree of resentment of new things since the process of discovery becomes tainted by negative feelings and the whole thing ends up reinforcing itself.

Last week it feels like was actually a perfect example of this manifesting, since it to such a great degree felt like my fear of stopping was primarily driven not by a want to continue but by a fear of the unknown and doing things which I wasn’t used to; stepping out of my comfort zone. It feels like there are so many things in which I continue to engage through either habit or a feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment. I am aware there are going to be high and low points to anything one does in life, and like the past week shows there it is often worth it to hold tight through the bad times to experience the good times once more, but it just feels like that stubbornness can at times also sabotage my attempts at finding my way to better times and greater knowledge of who I am.

So who am I? Am I my actions? Or are they merely a manifestation of my desires made real by my fears, a distorted reflection of the real self? That, unfortunately, I do not know, though writing this is a step on that path, hopefully one day leading to enlightenment.

The somewhat recent release of Burning Crusade Classic has thrown all kinds of new flavors into the mix of feelings I am feeling towards World of Warcraft at the moment, some good, some bad.

For the good part, it has oddly really reminded me why I like the game and why I kind of still want to keep playing it, despite all of its flaws. Being somewhat more casual in classic than I am in retail, has meant that there is a greater feeling of freedom to doing things since the only real motivation is what I personally want to achieve and not what is required for some external reason, and also a lot less pressure to actually do things I might not want to do but feel in one way or another required to do the things I do want to do. Classic still has a lot of flaws, especially when it comes to things like consumables, but the fact that I am playing it in a way that doesn’t necessitate those things to the same degree as retail makes it much easier for me to ignore those flaws if I want to.

Further, having the goals be that much more personal and also usually concrete things makes working towards them a lot more engaging, since it’s a lot easier to feel the progress as it comes along.

For the bad part, it feels like the biggest ill that has come from it isn’t even necessarily something bad in and of itself, but it feels like I am questioning a lot more why I am continuing to play retail at this point. It at this point feels like the game might be giving me more stress than it is bringing in joy and that seems like a obviously lopsided equation for what it is supposed to be, and while I would very much like to experience the new raid once more and progress it, I am simultaneously dreading all of the things that might be required to be done around that progress, not the progress itself

These aren’t exactly new thoughts, but merely things that having a point of comparison has once again brought to the fore, and I unforunately can’t really see any easy answers. There are reasons I’ve continued playing retail for as long as I have, and those are my guildies, and it feels very wrong to leave them high and dry so shortly before progress so quitting at the very least at this time is not an option, but it feels like continuing as is might be taking an unkown toll on me. At the same time, I fear that not continuing might be the even worse option, since it would provide me with an opportunity to retreat more completely into myself since there would be a certain lack of routine keeping me together, and while that routine can at times feeling frustrating in its limiting of what I have the freedom to do, it also helps ground me and keeps me doing the things I enjoy.

Another thing I fear, is that it feels like playing might have become a too big part of my identity, or at least how I self-identify, and changing who one is is a scary thing indeed.

For a rather long while now, I’ve been running with a virtual machine as a router, first for a decent while running pfSense and then at some point switching to a simple Debian installation due to some irritation with how poorly pfSense handled IPv6. It all ran rather well, and setting up a router using systemd was actually a rather decent experience since there is actually a decent amount of flexibility built into it assuming one is using a recent enough version.

However, having recently started tinkering with other virtual machines on the same host more, and specifically things like PCIe passthrough, it became apparent that there was a decent amount of value in having the router actually be a separate physical box. Since I had been curious about trying VyOS anyway, the EdgeRouter X seemed like a good fit for the task, while still being a rather small, cheap and silent device.

Configuration of the device has been rather easy for the most part, though I have had to do a lot of it through the CLI—which to be fair is my preferred method anyway—since the WebUI has a woefully terrible support for IPv6; it’s strange that manufacturers think that’s acceptable in this day and age, but I guess I paid for the device too so maybe they’re correct? I have also ended up simplifying my network somewhat from the time I was using pfSense which is fortunate, since looking at how the router seems to set up things like router advertisements seems to be handled the same way in VyOS which means I would be encountering the same problems as I had with pfSense again.

Another change I ended up making from my previous setup due to besser hardware support was changing my VPN tunnels from OpenVPN to IPsec, since the EdgeRouter only has hardware offloading for IPsec meaning the performance of those tunnels is going to be better. This was a nice opportunity for me, since I had actually been curious about playing around with IPsec anyway but due to the increased complexity in comparison to OpenVPN had never really had the motivation to actually properly get started with it, which was compounded by the previous other endpoint of the tunnel being on an OpenVZ VPS, which introduced some additional difficulties in configuring IPsec since it’s a kernel module and OpenVZ is paravirtualization. The changeover was probably unecessary since I believe the true bottleneck will end up being our Internet upink anyway, but it did prove to be a fun learning experience—even the extra effort of switching from PSK to public key authentication for the tunnel, even if I was rather frustrated at times at the somewhat unclear documentation when one wanted public key without a certificate authority. Another thing that required some figuring out was allowing IPv6 traffic over the IPsec tunnel as well, since while the EdgeRouter does support configuring an IPsec tunnel with a DHCP interface instead of a fixed address which is necessary for my setup, this option is unexplicably disabled when using IPv6 addresses which means there was no straightforward way to configure it. What I ended up doing was running a GRE tunnel over the IPsec tunnel and using that to pass the IPv6 traffic, meaning a bit of extra overhead but it is at least a functional solution and the overhead should be negligible for my use-case anyway.

The final piece of the changeover puzzle was figuring out DNS-level adblocking, to protect devices that don’t allow installing an adblocker on the device or software itself. This was luckily enough solved easily by a package by britannic that even ended up having the usual filter list that I use included meaning it was zero configuration needed for me, I only needed to actually install the package itself. I has worked nicely so far, and I’m happy to see such simple solutions be available and tailored for these devices, especially since any custom hacks that I might build myself while certainly functional would mean an increased maintenance burden.

Overall, I’ve been happy with the switch so far, and everything seems to be functioning rather nicely, and getting to finally properly use VyOS was a nice bonus on top. It does feel a bit unfortunate to lose the “magic box” cool factor of having the router run in a virtual machine, but the separation of concerns makes up for that. Also, it’s still a tiny highly configurable “magic box” that makes the Internet work, so there is still a certain cool factor in that as well.

As a astute reader may note, it is Wednesday and not Monday on the day this post comes out, and that is for a somewhat good reason: I’ve been too busy playing Burning Crusade Classic to make time for writing a proper post. Well, to be more accurate, I was too tired after finally getting to 70 Sunday evening/Monday morning to actually sit down and write a post—I still have the habit of leaving it to the last minute most of the time.

The journey of leveling itself, along with our first run of Karazhan on Monday, has been a fun one so far, even if towards the end of the leveling I was getting rather frustrated partially with my own unfounded fears of abandonment along with worries that I wouldn’t be able to level up in time to complete the attunement to participate in the Karazhan run.

I ended up mostly, or rather exclusively, leveling in a group, for the most part through dungeons, which suited me rather nicely since I once more picked up my priest and played her as a healer, so solo content wouldn’t exactly have been the most enjoyable to do. It actually felt rather nice being back on my priest in Classic after having recently spent a rather significant amount of time levelig a hunter there—which while enjoyable just doesn’t feel like home quite like playing a priest does.

Leveling in a group it turns out, is also a rather efficient way of leveling due to giving a rather decent chunk of reputation with the different factions in Outland, meaning I could simply buy at least two of the keys needed to enter heroic dungeons—I say at least, because I’m actually not sure where my reputation ended up on with Lower City, so I’m not sure if I could simply buy the key there, but I shouldn’t be missing much at the very least.

The heroics themselves, though I have only had time to complete two so far, have also proven fun, at least with the right people and mentality. It is definitely slower going when comparing it to current high-end content, but it feels somewhat difficult actually classifying it as distinctly hard content, more perhaps simply unforgiving. To be fair, I’ve been in there with relatively experienced players who know the dungeons fairly well, so there haven’t been too many surprises along the way, which is probably contributing a lot to that feeling. Still, so far I’ve actually rather enjoyed the difficulty level of the content, making use of my familiarity with it to actually enjoy it more than I think back in the day where the insecurities due to my lack of knowledge would’ve prevented me from actually enjoying what I’m doing even if my youthful arrogance at the time may have masked it.

Entering Karazhan again was something of a swell of nostalgia, and I think once again I ended up enjoying the raid more than I ever did at the time due to the knowledge I’ve acquired in the years between, especially of the layout of the tower itself. Not being afraid of going the wrong way and actually to a degree knowing my way around the place really helped me both with figuring out where in the raid we were and what was coming up next, but also in actually soaking up the atmosphere since I wasn’t as focused on not making some sort of mistake that while in the grand scheme of things minute would have probably ruined at the very least my evening back in the day.

Overall, in both gameplay and nostalgia, Burning Crusade definitely scores higher for me than Classic itself, and it has been really fun to go back and see the old things with more experienced eyes even if the whole experience of playing is rather different due to the way the landscape has shifted in the intervening years as well as how I’ve changed with time. Still, the game does to me stand the test of time of still being enjoyable, and I’m happy to share the experience once more with a group of friends.

Something rather strange happened last week, or I found it amusing at least: I completely forgot to write the blogpost. Well, not completely, but Monday evening in bed I had the sudden realisation I hadn’t written it yet, and did so, and only after submitting the post did I realize that it was indeed already Monday evening and not Sunday evening as I had thought, and that I had missed my self-imposed deadline. The strange part was, I didn’t end up being mad or frustrated with myself, as I might have come to expect, but simply amused at being so completely, oblivious I suppose to the passing of time or the weekday.

I could probably try to attribute this to some sort of growth that has been going on lately with me trying to deal with things like failure and making mistakes better, and in this instance I think it was the only appropriate reaction since there was nothing I could do to change what had happened and the corrective action as it were—writing the post—was already done so the only thing remaining was being amused at my mistake.

Being bored is something I feel like happens relatively rarely in modern times, at least being properly bored. It’s so very easy to find a distraction that being bored is rather rare. I’ve noticed this in myself at least, where the moment there is even the slightest hint of not having something occupying my mind, I turn to some easily digestable task like scrolling through memes or watching videos.

Both of these activities aren’t bad in and of themselves, and sometimes that distraction is exactly what one needs, and the videos I watch tend to even be mostly educational in nature, at least slightly. Despite this, I’ve noticed a certain need in myself for allowing myself to actually get bored and not fall into the trap of these easy distractions; both because I need to actually take time to process what I am doing or feeling or wanting to do, and because being actually bored and not doing anything seems to be the best motivation to actually do the things I want to do instead of filling my time with the distractions from my boredom.

So that’s been what I have tried to do as well as I can lately, and I have to say, while the switch has been partially quite fruitful in getting me to do more things and appreciating those things more as well, other things it certainly doesn’t make any easier to achieve and it is quite hard to pull of in one fell swoop. It almost seems like in order to still avoid being bored, I’ve merely changed the category of tasks I do to distract myself, but still don’t necessarily the things I actually want to get done. The reflection part is also still missing for me, where I merely give myself time to think, though to be fair that’s usually at least partially covered by me thinking during my daily walks, this isn’t the always the case and I do often end up escaping into fantasy worlds during those in order to avoid confronting the things bothering me or to avoid boredom. Consequently I also haven’t been as succesful as I’d like in exploring more and simply taking in my surroundings better, since I tend to just walk the same route and be lost in thought while doing so.

Still, the steps I’ve taken so far feel like a good start, and I think I’m expecting a bit too much from myself by expecting me to be able to make such a drastic change at the drop of a hat, this is something I’ll need to work on for the forseeable future I think. But it feels like I’m working on the right thing at least, trying to make myself more capable of achieveing the things I want to achieve and doing the things I want to do, so that feels like a positive. I’m not sure what the next step after this will be, but I think I need to take this one first before I start worrying about that.

As feels like is becoming a yearly tradition at this point, I changed the design of the blog again. I’m currently resisting rather well also changing the software running it as well, since even though that seems like it would be an interesting project it feels like the alternatives would all land me in a worse place than I am in at the moment—to be fair, that hasn’t stopped me before, but still.

Contrary to my considerations at the end of the year, I decided against also changing the name, since I’m really not sure what the new name would be, and silly and out of place it might be at the moment, I think it serves its purpose well—for now, at least. This might all change once more in the future as I learn to know myself better and what I want and expect from this here experiment in doing just that changes with time, but some stability in these turbulent times might be rather welcome.

As for the design itself, it’s gone back to being a bit more understated, clean and modern I guess one could call it, though with some light inspiration from synthwave I guess one could say, though that’s mostly just the background gradient talking. It feels a bit strange going back to something so understated after having the previous design which was something of a nostalgia trip, but I think the problem with that design was that it wasn’t actually all that good in many ways. The post pages themselves were a strange mix of a more modern style with old trappings, the contrast between the text and the background was somewhat poor making reading harder than necessary, and while the name remains inspired by World of Warcraft and my journies there to a great extent—that’s the only capacity in which I am anything resembling a priest—the heavy callout to that in the design didn’t really reflect the current reality of the content all that well. How much those two things need to be related is debatable I suppose, but I still felt there was a certain level of disconnect there.

Another thing the old design didn’t really leave room for implementing properly was “hero images” for the posts, something that I’ve considered doing on and off for a longer time but just didn’t really have a place in the design. The necessity of such images might be debatable, and it is completely validly arguable that the content should speak for itself and not be carried by the work of others in the form of images, but I think the addition of an image to a certain degree set the tone of the post might be a valuable tool. To many of the more recent posts I have already been selecting these images, they have merely had no place to be shown, but for most of the backlog they will be missing and even for future posts I might choose not to make use of them, but still they are now there for your enjoyment; well, assuming you go to the page for a single post at least, felt a bit too much like breaking the flow to display them on the index pages, and I also still have the habit of trying to optimize for connection speeds that are unlikely to be seen these days, so I didn’t want to include a bunch of not-strictly-necessary images on those pages.

The final thing to note then, and a change from earlier times of carefully curating a list of standard fonts applicable to the major operating systems or making use of web fonts, is that the new design intentionally merely states that a sans-serif font is preferred, and the users preference should be respected. Now, I’m sure most users aren’t even aware that they do in fact have the option of specifying such a preference in their browser, much as they might not be aware that they may specify a preference for language and the like, so it might end up meaning that most users will end up seeing some of the rather less pleasing default fonts rather than something nice looking when reading here, but I still felt like respecting that choice was more important for this design than trying to force something else on people even if they are unaware that they are making that choice. To be fair, the default font selection has probably also become quite a lot better since the olden times, so even the defaults might not be that bad, though I wouldn’t know since I’ve intentionally chosen Fira Sans for myself. I suppose that means if you want to see the pages as the author sees them, that would also be an appropriate choice for you, but if not then choose whatever you feel makes for the best reading experience.

The last time I wrote about reading, I was worried I might not be able to engross myself in a book the same way I have before. Dear reader, to my delight, that worry was unfounded—as I also speculated at the time. On Saturday I finished the Red Queen tetralogy (yes, I had to look up that word too, four books), a journey I had only began two weeks prior. Now that I think about it, I think all of the four books actually took pretty exactly two weeks, I think I began reading on a Saturday evening as well.

I ended up enjoying the books quite thoroughly, even if it felt that they were part of a rather familiar pattern at this point and I still have mixed feelings about the decision to include several perspectives in the later books. Yes, there is undoubtedly merit to it, and there were certainly characters it gave me a greater appreciation for, but it still felt like a diversion a lot of the time. As for the familiar pattern, the book felt very reminiscent of others like Hunger Games or Divergent (basing that somewhat on the movies, haven’t actually ended up reading those books, but still). This isn’t a bad thing, just something to be aware of if you end up considering reading these books. They also felt very young adult, which I think is exactly what I need at the moment, but also something to be aware of.

The only problem I have now, which I ended up feeling after finishing Pillars of Eternity II as well, is that odd void that appears after having spent such a long time in another world I can no longer enter. It of course opens the way for new and interesting experiences in the future, especially since I know again that this is something I can still do if I find the right book for it, but there is still a certain sadness to every end that makes it somewhat difficult to begin something new in order to avoid that feeling.

Thinking back, that might have been the reason I have had such difficulty reading before this, simply the fear I suppose of loss that comes when leaving these worlds that end up feeling almost more like home than the real one for a short while. It probably also doesn’t help that I still have several books that I started reading but never finished, partially because they are a part of unfinished series that I decided to wait for to be finished so that I could devour them more efficiently at my own pace instead of waiting for the author, but also partially because for whatever reason those books didn’t end up resonating with me on a sufficient level for me to just read through them, simultaneously making every new book I began a betrayal to the unfinished ones, making it ever more difficult to enjoy new books. I will probably have to take another look at my backlog of started books and reconsider if I truly do want to read them, and if not actually mentally check them of my todo list so that they don’t end up haunting me in the future, learning to let go as it were.

It feels like, I might have made one of those classic blunders of spring: underestimating how cold it still is. The last probably week or more, I have felt more or less a bit down as far as energy goes, and a bit of a stuffy or runny nose. Now I know what one might suspect, that it might be the great spectre of our times, COVID-19, but I think the likelyhood for that is extremely low, considering the measures I take to be safe. Even if it were the case, it would seem I am one of the lucky ones, considering how long I have been in this state and no worse symptoms appearing so far.

It does have the unfortunate side-effect of making it a bit more difficult for me to actually enjoy spring, since I’m less likely than before to go out and enjoy the rather good weather we have been having here for the most part, but to be fair that is something I’m generally not all that likely to do—even if I do still want to get into the habit of doing some more exploring.

There is another somewhat strange thing accompanying all of this, namely I have been noticing lately a certain difficulty in falling asleep lately, and wasn’t initially quite sure what to attribute it to: mental health state, stress, or what? But it is slowly dawning on me, that the most obvious change has been a increase in evening mental activity on my part, in this case in the form of reading more again, a couple of hours before going to sleep. Now it has been very nice to be reading this much again and I have certainly missed it just like I had missed playing a good RPG, but I think I need to come to terms with the fact that it is actually a highly stimulating activity for me when it is as interesting as it is at the moment, which means I need to take some time to recover afterwards before going to sleep. It’s funny in a sense, having reading which seems so passive be something I need to recover from, but I guess adventures in other worlds are anything but relaxing.

There is another rather fortuitous link between these two things, namely taking a day and just hanging out in bed reading seems like a rather splendid idea in order to try to recover from whatever ailment I might be suffering from at the moment, maybe even several days. I shall try this, then, and hopefully by this time next week I am feeling somewhat better, hopefully once more in more of a mood to do other things than just reading. It is the most excellent of distractions though, whisking me away from life as it is to the troubles of someone else, the worries of my own fading away for a moment, replaced by the adventures of others, comforting in their distance.

I’m recently noticing, that I seem to have something of a problem. Namely, I’m often not quite sure what I enjoy anymore. I don’t think I’m completely incapable of having fun, even if I do have difficulty putting my finger on exactly when it is happening—though I suppose that is often so, not something one thinks of in the moment—but it does feel like there are a lot of things I do either out of habit or because I like the idea of being a person who does that thing or liking something, instead of doing it because I actually enjoy it.

At the same time, it feels like my fear of failure might at times go deeper than I had even realized before, to a point of actually contributing to the problem. I noticed this most distinctly recently, when loaning a book. Firstly, finding a book that seemed intersting enough to try wasn’t actually all that difficult, loaning it however took some thinking because I just kind of kept wondering: “what if I can’t finish this book either?”, probably because I actually do have a number of unfinished books I could be reading but am not.

Even once I got past that first hurdle, actually reading the book was also difficult because even though I think I was enjoying it and making decent pace, I kept second-guessing both my enjoyment and my capability to actually finish the book, along with a certain level of guilt of not having finished the other books I have started and why am I reading something new instead of those.

I worry, that this mentality of unfinished things, even things I might not want to finish, are bothering me to a degree of actually then being unable to enjoy the things I usually enjoy, and the guilt making it hard to actually do those things I want to do.

I also worry, that I not only need but also want to actually make rather drastic changes to how I am living life, since as noted above it feels like I am letting habit and familiarity determine the things I do regardless of enjoyment instead of actually changing things and doing things I enjoy. Why is this worrying? Because big change isn’t easy, and that means it will take a good while to actually get done, which means the status quo which I seem to not be overly enjoying at the moment is likely to continue for some time going forward.

On the other hand, having identified the possibility of this being the case, does allow me to make smaller changes that I think are where I want to be, and thus test the waters as it were and see if those changes are ones I would actually enjoy making.

Thinking through what I have written, once more having been one of those journies we take together dear reader, it seems to me the problem is that unfinished tasks or desires have a cost associated with them, and unfortunately that cost also makes it more difficult to actually finish them. I suppose, along with testing out different things I actually do want to do, I should look into ways of enabling myself to actually do the things I want to do instead of just thinking about doing them. That’s the hard part though, I suppose, taking that risk of actually doing, potentially failing or just simply not enjoying it. That’s another thing, then, allowing myself to say: this wasn’t for me, I’ll do something else instead; without it becoming some sort of mark of shame.

This was already unusually rambly, so I think best end it there, though I think I discovered more new questions than answered old ones.

On Saturday, I ended up going on a second walk due to the good weather during which while looking for something to do and see I went on something of a very local exploration. Basically right outside our house there are old ruins of fortifications that I remember playing in as a kid, that I haven’t really looked at since. Which is something of a shame since it’s a part of local history and not necessarily something everyone has the opportunity to do.

Of course, in practice they are pieces and paths made out of concrete and not necessarily overly interesting in and of themselves, at least not for someone like me that doesn’t know much about the history associated with them, though there was a cave or tunnel that I also re-discovered that I’m still somewhat curious about, mostly because I like caves for some reason and also because I haven’t been in there yet. I decided however, to try to find out a bit more about the area before I did that, since I wasn’t sure how safe it exactly is which can be a concern when going into an old tunnel.

This luckily proved rather easy, since the museum authority (I guess? not quite sure how to properly translate that part) is kind enough to provide rather detailed information about historical sites and a map to look them up on online. So it seems it was a World War I era fortification which fell into disuse since, and the tunnel seems to be somewhat large considering how small the opening is at 110m², though there was no mention of how safe it all is to enter and the inspection seems to have been done in the late 1990’s with no real updates since so if I do end up going in myself I should still remain careful, and I’m not as of yet quite sure if I will end up doing that though I do still kind of want to.

In general, this feels like something I should do more often, go for walks in a random direction and just look around me and try to see the things in front of me, simply soaking in my surroundings. I did touch on this already in my last post about relaxation, though I guess exploring is the opposite of that in a sense, but with time I’m becoming more and more aware of how poorly I actually known the area I live in since even the times I do end up going out I tend to either stick to the same routes or am lost in my own mind not really heeding what is going on around me. Consequently, it feels like intentionally going out and looking at new things or things I might not have noticed before would satisfy both itches: being stimulated by new things yet at the same time actually learning about my surroundings. Looking at the map as well, though it doesn’t have to be old ruins that I go looking at, if I do choose to do so there seems to be an abundance of choice near me of things to look at so I shouldn’t run out of content in a while.

Maybe that’s the plan for this spring and summer then, exploring, when weather allows.

I had some shoulder pain again recently, and in order to let them recover a bit I decided to just lie in bed as ergonomically as I could, opting to just take the time and think a bit. It’s something I don’t really do all that often, letting my mind just wander without any distractions, except for perhaps the walks I take daily. There is something different about it though when there is no activity or pressure attached to it though, just relaxing I suppose one could say.

That it was as well, rather unsurprisingly, rather relaxing, and much nicer than when I am actually intending to go to sleep, since then there is always the pressure of actually trying to fall asleep and wanting to get a good night’s sleep at the back of my mind. It feels like it’s something I should try to take the time to do more often, since it essentially something I almost never do. At the same time, there is somewhat of a reason for that, it very easily becoming rather boring especially as I am someone who is not particularily good at just focusing on a single thing for extended periods of time unless it really grips me, so trying to stay focused on nothing is a challenge to say the least.

It does however, feel like part of a trend going on with me in general, trying to change small habits that I have developed along the way that may not always be so helpful. Another small thing I have been doing during my walks recently, is merely looking up and around me more. As noted above, they kind of used to be me being completely immersed in my own thoughts—to the point of being rather oblivious to my surroundings with the exception of the little detail I needed to actually find my way, mostly looking at the ground before my feet—and passing the time that way, but now I’m more trying to once again soak in my surroundings and actually to a degree simply let my mind rest instead of working it all the time. It’s strange, but in a way actually being alert and looking at my surroundings is less mentally taxing than thinking all the time, since there isn’t much I need to act upon in my observations.

The one drawback to this one might say, is that my surroundings while I am walking become that tad more important since I am actually looking at them instead of merely passing them by, but I guess that is an opportunity to go exploring and seeing new things as well.

Writing these posts is strange sometimes, since it takes me on a journey into myself, making me realize things about my own behaviour and feelings that I hadn’t thought about beforehand, and I end up just writing down those observations as I go along, on a shared journey of discovery of sorts. Starting out, I hadn’t even realized the similarity of these two experiences, and the thing connecting them: letting my mind freely wander, not thinking about anything specific or trying to entertain myself, just letting it roam. It seems that is something I’ve missed, not quite realizing it. To be fair, it can get boring rather easily, and it’s not something I could or would spend the whole day doing, but I think taking more opportunities to just be is something I will be keeping my eye open for.

I used to have this thing, when playing Cities Skilines or games like it, where I remembered it existed, get really excited because I do like city-builders, social games and the like, play it rather obsessively that day usually forgetting to go to sleep, and then not touching the game again for a year or more.

I am now, however slowly, weaning myself off of this, dipping into the game for an hour or two when I think of something to do or get inspired, doing what I can think of and then just closing the game again when I get bored. There is something strange about this to me, since I somehow get the feeling I don’t like the game if I can’t obsess about it which isn’t true, so being able to do this is in a way a learning experience.

It feels like, this tendency to want to have something to do that consumes every fiber of my being for the time I am doing it and anything less is not even worth considering to do makes actually enjoying smaller things more difficult to me, to the point of when I can’t dedicate a significant chunk of time to doing something I tend to kind of aimlessly sit at the computer, bored, but unable to start anything since I feel like I don’t have the time. Now, there are probably other contributing factors as well to this feeling, and wanting something one enjoys very much to do isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the point where it is with me where I have difficulties doing things I enjoy because it doesn’t feel worth it getting started on doing them, well that feels like a bad thing.

So far, I have been moderately succesful in this endeavor, in that I am still at times dipping into Cities Skylines specifically when I find the time and motivation and that of course varies but is still somewhat constant, and generally ends up being at least a couple of times a month. However, it hasn’t been necessarily an easy task doing so and I feel there is a rather big amount of additional work and time invested that goes into it on my part, especially since I rather often end up watching videos on other people doing builds which then inspire me to actually start playing again—it isn’t really something I all that often find the motivation to do on my own. Even then, that also isn’t always succesful in inspiring me and I do definitely watch the videos more often than I end up actually playing the game, which does mean I am in a sense keeping invested in the game even though I might not be playing it myself at the time, which perhaps through a cruel twist of fate actually makes me less likely to play it since I already get my fix as it were through other people’s experiences.

So it is a question of inspiration or am I actually sabotaging my own motivation? I honestly don’t know at this time, all I know is I want to do things more often but actually doing things is so much effort that it never ends up happening, so maybe living through others during those times is good so that I don’t just end up staring at the ceiling—or maybe the opposite is true, and I need that boredom without other stimulus in order to motivate me to change things? Not sure, and this has gone enough off the rails already as it is, so I’m going to end it here, but I guess there was even more to this topic than I thought and I might have to have a long think about some things.

Yesterday was the first day of summer time, an annoying archaic system that for some unexplicable reason is still being observed here.

If memory serves, I already wrote about this last year, hoping for it to be the last time we needed to subject ourselves to such unnecessities, though alas the wheels of bureocracy turn slowly and we are here yet again, suffering.

It remains, as always, an unfit solution for a problem that need not exist were it not for the unflexibility of the systems and procedures that came before, trying to fit nature into a box, working against her instead of with her.

I find myself in the fortunate yet unfortunate position of mayhaps not needing to care a great deal about the comings and goings of the ticking of clocks and their rendering of time, the cruel master we all serve in one way or another, yet even then I find myself incetivized to a degree to follow those monstrous things so as to allow myself to participate better in society at the times it is necessary or pleasant. The company of other people remains, despite my assurances at times to the contrary, important to me.

In the end, this too shall pass, and given time I shall once again adapt to the new reality presented before me, and life with all her ups and downs will go on, this being but yet another bump on the road.

A bumpy road it may be, life, and one I am often enough not too keen to travel on, yet it is the road before me and the road I shall remain on so long I am able, savoring every smile and tear along the way.

There was some hubbub recently around Tusky, a app for Mastodon, getting removed from the Google Play Store. It has fortunately since then been reinstated, but it did remind me to take another look at Mastodon and consequently the fediverse as a whole.

Mastodon, in case you aren’t aware, is a federated alternative to Twitter—federated meaning it’s not a central service run by one organisation or company but several different persons or organisations each running their own instance yet capable of talking to each other, a bit like email. The fediverse on the other hand refers to all of the different services talking this same protocol, allowing all of them to interoperate to a degree. There are other services that function as alternatives to things like Instagram or YouTube as well, though there I don’t really have any experience.

It has been a somewhat interesting experience so far, trying to start to use something that is very clearly built as a social and sharing platform, when both of those are things that don’t come particularily naturally to me. It’s very clearly more of an active effort to actually think of things I want to say there, as well as sometimes overthinking what is acceptable for me to say. Simultaneously, I am rather fascinated by the whole idea for some reason, both from a techical as well as a social aspect, so there is a certain drive there for me to continue to do it, I just have a hard time figuring out what to do with it.

I feel like that’s a trap I fall into somewhat easily, liking an idea but having no idea what to do with that idea or lacking the motivation to see it through.

There remains, of course, the option of using it in a similar manner to which I use Twitter currently, namely as an observer and reader. This time around I have been rather more succesful in finding things to read that I also want to read—so the option is definitely more appealing now than it was before, and I don’t think I will end up completely stopping using Mastodon at the very least—but for some reason remaining an observer feels like the wrong move. Sharing things publicly is definitely an activity that is outside my comfort zone—I think this blog works because I know basically nobody reads it—but I think exactly that is what makes it potentially so valuable.

Why you ask? Because it is both something I feel like I want to do yet uncomfortable, which means it is an opportunity to widen the horizon of things I am comfortable doing and in doing so not only allow me to learn new skills but improve my self-confidence as well. Widening my horizon is in general something that I am quite interested in at the moment, since I have this sneaking suspicion that I’ve arrived in a local maxima of sorts. I’ve grown comfortable with where I am and terrified of going anywhere since it feels like all paths lead downwards; yet I’m sure I have not found the peak.

I’m in a strange place when it comes to typing at the moment. I am currently in the process of learning to do ten-finger typing, and it has gone rather well so far, however there is a small thing that is bothering me a bit about it. There was a small remark in the program when starting it, noting that one shouldn’t revert to the old way of typing, even if one needs to type fast for something temporarily, and the problem is I seem to have taken this into heart a bit too much. It’s gotten to the point where I think I’m avoiding typing to a certain degree, because I’m worried about making mistakes, and instead resorting to using the mouse for things where I’d previously typed a search.

Now this fear is obviously hampering both my ability to learn and my ability to do things since it takes me longer, yet I persevere, for some to me unknown reason. I still, even while writing this post, am doing my best to keep up with the skills I’ve learned, taking my time, and thinking the actions through I need to take in order to get my thoughts on paper as it were. It feels really strange, typing in this way, especially since it gives me a heightened awarenes of any mistakes I make, which again isn’t exactly motivating.

Despite all of that negativity I’ve just written, there is also a sense of accomplishment to the whole thing, having taken something new and learned it in a relatively short time, a week or so. I am still far from perfect at it, and make what feels like a ton of mistakes especially when I try to go faster for once, but all of that is part of learning something new, I have to remind myself.

It feels a bit strange, but the biggest change really seems to be the lack of confidence I have in my skills now, that is holding me back from performing better. This lack of confidence however, is a good thing to a certain degree, since by going slowly I am better able to notice when I try to take shortcuts an accidentally revert to my old way of doing things. I then at the same time tend to notice why I shouldn’t be doing things the old way, since I spot inefficiencies and conflicts in the way my fingers are moving. I try to correct myself when I notice that, erasing what I’ve written and writing it again correctly, and that again feels good and like learning is taking place—even if it is a bit annoying since it does hamper my speed even further.

I’m also noticing my strange dependance on glancing at the keyboard, which again makes me slower since it makes me all the more aware of what I’m doing. At the same time, I don’t really have problem with writing with my eyes closed and that to a certain degree seems to actually even be easier since I can concentrate on what I’m doing better. Maybe that really is the way for me to learn the best, writing with my eyes closed, though there is only so much I have to say at one time and it tends to get kind of repetitive. So back to practising for me then.

Earlier this year, I stopped my habit of writing something in my diary daily. I’m not quite sure why, it just happened, one day I didn’t write anything and the next day just kind of followed from there. It might partially have been just that, missing out on one day leading to a demotivational spiral, where it didn’t feel like something I could do or perhaps needed to do. On reflection, I am also noticing a certain trend in the writing I did, where I had kind of hit a pattern of seemingly writing the same thing with different words and not really taking the time to actually reflect and write what was meaningful about that day.

Now, certainly, days that don’t necessarily have anything meanginful to them—at least on a personal level—do exist, but the lack of actually having the habit and taking the time to reflect on the day also definitely lead to me not writing about the days that did have something important in them and consequently not reflecting and perhaps remembering that.

I think the more important part might be, rather than forcing myself to write something, anything, to take the time and think if there is anything I would like to write that day if I haven’t done so already, or perhaps catching up the following day if anything comes to mind while lying about to sleep. The self-empathy of not punishing myself for missing out on recording something when there isn’t anything to record is important, as is I think recording it when it was meaningful to me that day. What’s meaningful might change with space and time, but that doesn’t lessen its importance in the moment, so thinking about it and actually processing it instead of supressing it is a good start.

So the last week or so—could be longer, could be shorter, it’s hard to keep track of time for me—I have actually been writing pretty much on the daily again. There were some difficulties and perhaps more boring entries during the start, though even then I did have thing to record from the previous weeks that I had neglected before so I actually ended up surprising myself with the amount of writing I had to do. It’s a strange feeling sometimes, of only actually realizing what I have been thinking about and feeling when I need to put it into words and write it down, since before that time it has merely been an unacknowledged ambigious feeling, the process of writing it down makes it all more concrete. It doesn’t always yield all of the answers, but it is a helpful tool on the way there.

I am not quite where I would like to be with the process yet, since it is perhaps too frequent occurrence that I don’t yet take the time to do this reflection and end up doing it in bed before sleeping instead, making both falling asleep as well as actually recording it accurately more difficult than it needs to be—I tend to do it the following day so as to not make falling asleep even more difficult—but this is a learning experience for me, and making mistakes and not being perfect from the start are allowed.

It’s a curious thing really, since this blog has become sort of another diary for me, chronicling my thoughts and feelings, but due to the different audiences and levels of privacy, the content is quite different. At the same time, despite those differences, both mediums help me process my thoughts and feelings and are a valuable tools in doing so.

I think I’m slowly starting to come to terms with the fact, that I don’t especially like failure. Now, you might think that that’s true for everyone, and sure to a certain degree that is probably true, but I’m very much noticing that I’m avoiding situations and activities where failure is a possibility, or at least enjoying such things a whole lot less. It just tends to, frustrate me I guess? Instead of becoming a learning opportunity and something I take as a lesson, I just end up all too easily giving up and doing something else.

This has been coming up in several different contexts in recent times, and also partially because I do quite a bit more self-reflection at the moment in general. Most recently I noticed this with Rise to Ruins, a kind of roguelike city-builder I suppose, where while I was enjoying the gameplay just fine and learning how it all works, my villagers started dying of starvation even though there was some food available—not much to be fair, I hadn’t prepared for the season properly, but there was a little food available and they didn’t really need to starve it felt like, and more was being prepared the whole time—and I just kind of ended up stopping playing at that point.

Now, the game bills itself as being hard and having a learning curve and saying that you won’t succeed the first time around, so this experience is something I should’ve expected going into it, but it’s still something that left me feeling like not wanting to play the game anymore and that feeling remains even though several weeks have passed since. My thoughts do wander to the game occasionally to be fair, so maybe I end up trying it again at some point, but we’ll see.

Another example that comes to mind, last summer as I was playing through RPGs I mostly ended up playing them on something like easy, which is a bit out of the ordinary for me since I most often tend to play things on normal or the equivalent. This was partially motivated by me not being such a huge friend of the resource management in the spells system that tends to be present in the type of D&D-inspired RPGs I was playing, but even though that wasn’t really the case in Pillars of Eternity II I still played the game on easy, so I’m not quite sure that was the whole reason. Now, to be fair, for me the more interesting part is the story and the social interactions anyway and the combat I don’t find overly interesting, and it quite simply just felt more relaxing doing it this way around and I’m not advocating that everyone needs to always do things the hardest way possible or that something has to be difficult for it to be enjoyable but these are merely observations of a pattern in recent times.

I stated before, that I don’t really believe failure is something that provides a great deal of joy to most people, even if they do then end up learning from it, and that it is then later the application of that learning and seeing the improvement that provides the joy. But it feels, therein lies the rub for me at the moment, I feel uncomfortable putting myself in situations where I don’t feel safe being able to succeed instantly, and when that doesn’t happen I feel all the more bad about my failure since it was something where I was expecting to succeed and am not able to gleam as much learning as might be possible from it. My problem, as it were, is not with failing itself but the reaction and mindset surrounding it that I have at the moment, and that is something I feel I need to work on.

I worry I might be paralysing myself with fear to a degree, where I find it more difficult to start with things since I fear I might not succeed—or perhaps my difficulties with starting things are mostly unrelated and at some point worth a post of their own.

BlizzCon, or BlizzConline as it was called this year, felt rather different. It wasn’t really the lack of a public for me—since that’s something I’ve always had in a sense since I never went on location, so that was a bonus if anything—but rather the way the panels were structured. To be fair, I haven’t watched all or even many of them yet, mostly just a couple of the ones that came after the main event, but still there was a distinct different style to them, much more personal something akin to a bunch of friends talking. Now it was at times rather obvious that they had a list of talking points that they needed to get through, but I still liked the vibe from what I’ve seen. To be fair, that probably partially came from it being the first time in a good while that they actually had the opportunity to catch up in real life as opposed to online, so perhaps that was to be expected even if it came as something of a positive surprise for me.

Another thing that really stood out for me this time around, probably owing to Blizzard not really having anything truly new to announce this year, was the heavy focus on nostalgia. That is naturally part of the whole thing when you’ve already released something like World of Warcaft Classic, and of course plays into the 30 anniversary, but still it felt somewhat interesting to see, especially when considering how much remastered stuff they actually ended up announcing.

This whole nostalgia thing did end up spurring some deeper thinking on my part, since it feels at times I can get rather stuck living in the past to a certain degree—looking at the current design of the blog—and while that isn’t in and of itself necessarily a bad thing it can definitely be a indicator of something left unresolved. I think one of the biggest points on this for me in recent times, was when I ended up changing my main’s name which felt like a much bigger thing than it probably is. Now sure, to a certain degree a name is actually a big thing, even if it is one in a game, but in retrospect I think there was quite a lot of unresolved emotions that I was clinging on to through the name, mostly unaware, and changing it helped me deal with those feelings better.

That doesn’t mean that I think that something being old or having me be nostalgic about something translate to it in someway being bad or negative in and of itself, but it has encouraged me to more critically look and analyze the feelings I think I have and actually have about certain things, especially when there is some outside influence nudging me in a certain direction.

With all of that said, much of the nostalgia Blizzard was selling us on wasn’t really something that applied to me, I didn’t actually play that much Diablo II or any of the things from the collection, so that does afford me the opportunity to go in with fresh eyes if I wanted to, but I don’t think I could handle the mechanics of old games at this point—even Diablo II, was never really a fan of the whole dropping items on death thing, just let me load the game.

The panels were really nice though.

We ended up completing Twisting Corridors in Torghast last Monday, all eight layers, and I have to admit it was surprisingly fun. Well, perhaps not surprisingly, I had kind of expected it to be more fune than normal Torghast since one actually properly has the opportunity to do something sensible even with some of the common anima powers, but still.

The runs themselves went rather well, we ended up having one failed run but that one was probably more down to late-night shenanigans than anything else, but all in all it felt more like a question of the content being time-consuming than difficult. To be fair, it’s a hard balance to strike, and with the runs being so long it would probably also be rather frustrating if it was more punishing since it would mean more time was “wasted” on failed runs, so the current balancing is probably correct.

One slightly unfortunate thing with it all, is that now there isn’t really any reason for me to revisit the Twisting Corridors outside of doing it for my own enjoyment, and the normal runs will probably feel even more boring than they were before since I’m more aware of the cool things that are possible with longer runs yet are so unlikely as to not be worth aiming for during a normal run. It really is a pity, and one nice change that could be made on that front is having Twisting Corridors as an option instead of the normal runs for the weekly ash, though implementing that might be somewhat difficult even if it would make farming it on alts that much more enjoyable.

The biggest gain from the whole ordeal, of course, was the mount awarded at the end, which is one of the few mounts currently available that is actually useable in the Maw, making that zone not utterly terrible to be in. It was really the primary motivator for me to get started with the whole thing, since I had been ignoring the Maw best I could but this strategy is probably not viable in the long term if I want to continue raiding at a reasonable level, so making doing the Maw not utterly terrible as it was unmounted was something of a priority for me, actually having some fun achieving that was just a bonus. It still baffles me at times, how Blizzard can make so many steps in the right direction to make the game more enjoyable with less mandatory grinding, and then just kind of give up at the last moment and introduce something like the Maw. Still, should have enough time now with the mount and weekly quests to get a sufficient amount of reputation for the gems before the next major content patch hits, so I guess that annoyance has kind of been dealt with for now; having to re-farm the Maw on alts however, I’m not looking forward to, hopefully that gets fixed at some point.

All in all, a successful week, especially since we ended up killing Sire Denathrius the next day, completing progress for now. Quite a nice feeling, being able to take it a bit more relaxed with the game again.

I guess it had to happen at some point, but it would seem I have missed my weekly deadline. It happened oddly quietly in a way, I thought about writing something a couple of times during the week, but never could really think of what I wanted to write, and when Sunday evening/night rolled around, there where simply sufficient other things going on to distract me from remembering to still write something that I just kind of didn’t.

Were this some sort of corporate setting and more serious a subject, there might be some sort of post-mortem of what process allowed this to happen and what steps will be taken to prevent it in the future, but at the end of the day, this is a personal project and something I’m doing for my own benefit, so the whole thing getting delayed by a few hours doesn’t really change all that much, if anything at all. Now, sure, it might to a certain degree contribute to a personal feeling of failure, and that can definitely be harmful in the long term but I’m also learning how to deal with such things better so I’d say it’s not really harmful at this point.

So what does this mean in the end? Nothing more than I get the opportunity to write two posts this week instead of one, and maybe having a break from time to time isn’t all that bad, I could of course prepare posts ahead of time if I feel the need to take a break but if that’s forced it doesn’t really feel worth increasing stress in order to reduce it. Anyway, bit of a diversion this time around, hopefully something more interesting next week.

So sometime at the end of last year, I ended up renaming my main character. Now, it’s probably not something big for most people, but having played mostly this character with (almost) the same name for the last 15 years or so, there was quite a bit of emotion and memory attached to that name for me. This, of course, begs the question, why did I end up renaming if there was so much attached to the name? Well, quite frankly, that attachment was partially beginning to feel more like baggage and a hindrance than something positive, and the new name is something quite a bit more light and fun which also helped quite a bit.

It’s strange sometimes, how much emotion can be associated with something like a name, and how stepping back from all of that can help one gain some perspective both on the path one has been on and where one is going. It’s not even that the emotions are necessarily negative, on the contrary, that name and the character and the game have definitely helped me get through some hard times, and for that I am grateful. However, it does also mean that those old feelings and patterns of behaviour are attached to that name, and that can be rather constraining at times when one wants to evolve and grow and better oneself. That does mean that renaming has been oddly freeing, which I think was not the thing I was expecting from that.

The most interesting part of it all however, has probably been the reactions from other people with regards to the new name. It seemed to be a rather common sentiment in the beginning to ask if I had lost a bet or the like, since the name seems to have been so far away from what they knew from me, and the other seems to be joy or pleasure in regards to the new name since it is rather fun. Amusingly, it has also given a few opportunities to have some fun in Details with the custom names there, since it’s close enough when spoken out loud to one of the abilities in the game that I can put variations of the calls made during the fight as my name there, which has been an unexpected but very welcome bonus.

It might not be that in the grand scheme of things renaming one’s character in a game is all the meaningful of an act, but there is quite a bit of symbolic significance to it all for me, letting go of the past in a sense. There’s a lot of that I need to be doing, and I think this was one small step in the right direction, but it’s a long journey. Still, even the longest journey happens one step at a time.

I recently wanted to do a bit of experimenting with an old tablet I have, a Galaxy Tab 10.1 (yes, one of the original ones), and happened to notice that installing Linux—more specifically PostmarketOS—was possible and in fact somewhat simple.

Now, it is still very much an unfinished product, and it did take a couple of tries before I got something that actually worked, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to use the tablet for now, but it was quite a fun time experimenting around with it. To be fair, I wasn’t using the tablet before anyway, it is kind of stuck on Android 4, anything newer runs rather terribly, and even the old Android just works rather slow on it.

I have been considering making it into some sort of dashboard or info display, and that should now be rather easily achievable with simply some sort of browser running in kiosk-mode, after I create the website with the info I want displayed of course. There comes the next problem however, since I’m not quite sure what I would want displayed, I simply want to make the thing. Something like weather and possibly messages seems like the obvious thing, but does that actually even make any sense? Do I need that? Weather I guess could be rather nice for my parents, since my father at least does have a tendency to check it rather often, so maybe there is some use-case for the thing.

Of course, me just wanting to make it is enough of a reason to do so, but it is always a bit unfortunate to have projects that then end up just lying around somewhere unused.

The installation I ended up with after some experimenting of what actually works and what doesn’t, is basically Alpine Linux with XFCE, and it is all surprisingly useable, even though me not having a keyboard connected does make it all a bit more difficult, especially as the standard installation didn’t include an on-screen keyboard. Luckily that was rather easily solved, and now it’s actually possible to do things with the device again. It, oddly enough, actually also feels a good bit more responsive now than it did before with Android, even if the user interface is a lot more clunky to drive since it really is built for a mouse and the touchscreen just controls the mouse which isn’t the best experience at all times.

Another problem I’ve encountered is that Firefox doesn’t seem to launch, I’m not quite sure why yet and I’ll have to look into that, but luckily for now Midori is a decent enough alternative especially since I’m probably not going to be using the device for all that much for now. Hm, that does get me thinking though, with simply a keyboard it would actually make for a decent Linux portable for me, and a Bluetooth keyboard shouldn’t be that expensive to get, maybe I’ll have to research that next… Though maybe it would need to be a keyboard+mouse combo, it will get tiring at some point to poke at the screen especially since the interface isn’t designed for it as noted.

So I guess I have a couple of ideas there of what to do with the device now, I’ll update in the future if any one of them ends up actually panning out.

I have always had something of a fascination with “old-school” methods of communication, from relatively recent things like e-mail to the original long-distance communication method: letters. I’m not really sure where this fascination comes from, since I am on the other hand also someone who likes modernity and technology a great deal, but maybe it is exactly the eccentricity or the effort involved that makes it have more of a personal feel that draws me to them.

Now, this does not mean that I have spent a great deal of time in the past writing letters or sending postcards, I think I sent a letter in elementary school once and since then nothing else really, but having my mother read some old letters that her mother and other older relatives had sent in their youth along with a general desire to explore this communication method made me start sending letters. I haven’t as of yet sent many, well two to be exact and only one has arrived so far, but the reception so far has been very positive, they noted it was very sweet and personal to receive something like that. I think it was a combination of choosing to send a handwritten letter instead of printed that contributed to that feeling, along with it being such a rare occurance in today’s society that it simply stands out.

One of the reasons that I have sent so few letters as of yet and and a problem I am discovering is, that for many people who would be the most suitable for this kind of communication on account of me not actually talking or chatting with them that much otherwise at the moment, I actually don’t have the address for. These are people whom I know rather well and have a decent amount to do with in the past and might even know where they live, just simply not what to write on an envelope so that it reaches them. I could, of course, simply ask them, but that would kind of spoil the surprise.

So, at the moment, it does at times feel a bit silly writing letters to someone I already at the very least chat with pretty much daily, though it does provide the opportunity to communicate in a different way about different things when writing something a bit more long form, and it is quite simply nice to have someone to write letters to since I do enjoy it, and perhaps it only being one person does make it a bit more special for the two of us.

Even then, I think this is something I want to expand upon in the future, probably start writing my parents in the summer since we don’t see each other quite as often then, and possibly other people once I find a fitting excuse or way to get their address without raising too much suspicion.

I seem to have, once again, come to something of a slump when it comes to my writing, or rather my motivation to do it. I’m not even sure that it’s a case of motivation, though it does definitely play a part in it all since I’m having difficulty actually sitting down and starting to produce something, anything, but also a matter of not being quite certain what I want to write about and what I should write about the matter I don’t know I want to write about.

Now, I have been smart enough in the past to save some ideas in my drafts that I can simply take and start writing about which is exactly what I ended up doing last week. But the problem with that arrangement is that when I simply force myself to do it out of a feeling of obligation the fun does disappear to a degree and, for me at least, what I produce takes a hit since I can’t truly motivate myself to actually think about what I’m writing. So having access to a sampling of ideas of what to write about is great, but I do then also have to feel like actually writing about one of those things in order for the whole ordeal to actually go anywhere moderately sensible.

I did also mention a feeling of obligation, which is somewhat silly, since the obligation is to myself alone since it was my decision to try and keep up this pace of one article a week and last week for some reason just ended up being particularily bad where I at no point really had the motivation to truly write anything. It wasn’t the first time I’ve written the post the night before, but it was the first time I can remember where I truly had no idea what I wanted to say and just put out something, anything, in order to fulfill this constraint I set upon myself.

The question then naturally follows, what am I doing about this? Can I even do anything? Unfortunately it is one I cannot answer, however luckily it seems that it was for now at least a one time thing, a natural consequence of the varying levels of motivation that I tend to have. I suppose, also, I am in fact working on answering that question, since I am going to therapy, but I suppose also, that finding the answer to something like that is going to take a rather long time indeed.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to try to overcome these phases as they occur however I can, and in the cases such as last week where I finally did accomplish actually producing something not being overly harsh on myself for not being perfect every time—especially since a big part of this whole process of doing it regularily is actually trying to improve and become better and when doing that one is going to have difficulties and less than perfect output, but that is merely a part of learning to be better at something, and even the best of us fail at times.

Something of a early-expansion phenomenon seems to be that holy (meaning priests, paladins are usually rather useful) are actually rather decent at times and sometimes even preferred over discipline, meaning I actually get the opportunity to use the spec at times again which has been somewhat fun.

The spec itself, actually does play rather decently again since Shadowlands prepatch, far away from the boring slog it was in Battle for Azeroth but still a lot slower than Legion unfortunately. Salvation is still something of an annoying spell to have, since while it is very powerful actually getting to use it at reasonable intervals means a somewhat decandent playstyle which isn’t all that fun to execute on. Luckily, no fight so far has called for that so it’s mostly just been used as a once-or-twice per fight kind of thing, where it slots in perfectly—probably even more the design-intent behind the spell.

Beyond Salvation though, holy’s niche is in this strange place where its strength really lies in making the other healers shine, which while it does luckily work excellently in fights like Sun King’s Salvation, doesn’t really make a lot of sense in most other encounters especially when the alternative is to just bring a discipline priest since it’s the same class. Oh, also, bigger raids do favor holy over discipline to a certain degree, since discipline is rather limited in the amount of targets it can heal and that is another area where I have found use for the spec, specifically in our boostraids since we tend to go over the 20 player mark.

What I’m really enjoying about the situation though, is the versatility in gameplay it brings having the opportunity to actually play both specs on a regular basis and have it make sense, since no matter how fun either spec is getting to switch it up with both of them actually being enjoyable is much better. I’m also curious to see what some of the later bosses bring to the table in this regard, I’ve heard some rumblings that there is something later on that can be cheesed a bit with the Redemption-legendary that became available this week, and I’m looking forward to seeing what exactly that ends up entailing. Getting there might take a bit though, we’re slowly starting to get to the difficult bosses in the raid so progress is slowing down somewhat, hopefully we’re not too many weeks away from me getting to actually test it all out.

This blog, in its various incarnations and designs, is a bit over five years old with a hundred-and-odd posts. When I started writing, I’m not really sure what I envisioned for it, I think I merely found the idea of being someone with a blog cool and decided to go with it, consequently probably not being prepared for the effort of actually keeping up with the writing especially as my interest in the main topic of the blog at the time—World of Warcraft—waned.

Still, years later, I somehow thought of this whole project again and kept writing sporadically, primarily still focused on the realm of the one game and the blogs of yore that had inspired me in the first place. I dabbled in things like writing thoughts and guides of a sort on the bosses we killed—probably a terrible idea, it didn’t bring me much joy and I consequently didn’t do a great job of the whole thing—along with I guess the occasional mini-“review” of some of the other games I had ended up playing, with it all culminating really in the last half year or so where I have been trying to produce something for the blog every week.

At this point in time, I’ve come to the realisation that I should stop trying to, well, produce something and just create and write what really strikes my fancy, since this has really just evolved into an outlet for me to do some writing without too much meaning or consequence which does increase my enjoyment of the whole thing by quite a bit. I think, to a certain degree, were someone to ever stumble upon this thing and actually start reading, that enjoyment of the process would also show through in the actual end content and thus hopefully be a more enjoyable read as well.

All of this growth and discovery does make it somewhat difficult for me personally to go back and look at some of the older things I have written, since there is a certain tinge of regret not only in the things I thought I should be focusing on but also—especially given, as said, the last year of so of somewhat high activity—how little I have written at times. To be sure, this is a leasure activity for me and to a certain degree making it even so regimented as I have now done with any schedule at all does at times mean that one’s heart isn’t into the creating a hundred percent, yet at the same time it does make it more of a priority to find time to do something I enjoy as well as allowing me to become that much better since I force myself to actually practice instead of putting things off indefinitely.

From looking back to looking forward, what then are my plans for the future for this small space on the internet that I call my own? As of yet, I am not sure. I think, as far as content goes, it will be as was outlined above, whatever I feel like I want to write about that I also feel comfortable sharing with the public. As for the site itself, I have considered changing the design—yet again—and potentially even the name, to free myself from the shackles of the past as it were. While the current design is something I do quite enjoy, it also makes a very clear statement as to the content of the site which might not be quite honest anymore. The name, similarily, is also a reference to World of Warcraft and my main there with the added bit of rambling because I wanted to give myself some freedom as to what I wrote about within the context of the game even if I don’t think I’m overly prone to actually rambling at least in so far as the length of my posts go. That was, admittedly, a really rambly sentence though.

What these changes would look like, however, I have no idea as of yet. A small retrospective simply felt right with this being the last post of the year—at least for those of us on the Gregorian calendar. With that, let us hope the coming year provides us all with more opportunities to happiness than the past one.

I recently found a little time to do some reading again, partially inspired by my mother who had done it as well, and I have to say there is something really calming about it even if the material I was reading this time around wasn’t such a light read for me. I really don’t know what it is about it, but it just seemed to have a very relaxing effect for me—or perhaps I managed to read because I felt relaxed in the moment?

This, of course, makes me somewhat sad that to a great degree I seem to have lost the ability I had in my youth of simply engrossing myself completely in a book and doing nothing else days on end than reading, but perhaps this is also a matter of not having found the right book for that in a long time. To be fair, I have also done a lot less looking for that book now than in earlier times, and at least as far as gaming goes I think Pillars of Eternity II proved to me that the capability to engross myself in something so completely is still there if I find the right story to focus me.

Perhaps a part of this is as well, that the kind of books I have been reading recently have mostly been with some sort of learning in mind, either directly through the content of the book or indirectly through the books language, which while fun in its own right is still draining to a degree which makes it that much more difficult to simply engross oneself in the content. At the same time, the last book I’ve read, Because Internet, was also purely research and factual yet I did enjoy that read greatly and felt more limited by the time I had available than the content of the book in my reading speed.

So perhaps that is merely the problem, me not having prioritised reading to a sufficient degree to actually go and search books I want to read sufficiently badly in order to actually keep on spending whole days doing that, along with not necessarily having those full days to spend on such an activity—or at least not setting aside a whole day for something like that, I did do it with gaming and Pillars as well as more recently World of Warcraft during the new expansion launch.

It is often said that identifying the problem is half of the solution, so now that I have done that do I think anything is likely to change for me? At the end of the day, probably not. I still enjoy reading and there is definitely a desire in me to find more of those moments where I can sneak away a page or twenty, but those day-long marathons are not likely to feature prominently at least in my imminent future due to other priorities at the moment, gaming and otherwise. Still, knowing that the potential is still probably there is also something of a comfort, and maybe one day in the not-too-distant future I will once again make use of it.

The last week or two, I’ve been feeling rather stressed and overwhelmed. I’m starting to think all the things I wanted to do with the release of the new expansion, along with holiday preparations going on at home, might’ve been biting of a bit more than I can chew. Now sure, it’s not that I wouldn’t have the time for all of it, but rather I’m just so very exhausted at the moment and would really need a break from everything that doesn’t seem to be forthcoming anytime soon—probably not this year at least.

It feels a bit strange, complaining about doing the things I actually want to do, but it’s still the way of things at the moment. The problem with all of that, of course, is that because I end up feeling overwhelmed by it all I kind of end up retreating into myself and not actually doing all the things. Some, sure, but not everything.

What probably isn’t helping is the somewhat precarious mental state I was in even before all of this got started, but I guess that all just means I’ve somthing to work through.

It’s, well, not really strange since I’ve known it for a while, but interesting to once again notice how much I seem to enjoy writing. There are definitively phases to it, and the desire to do so comes and goes, which was one of the reasons I decided to do it regularily so that I can hopefully keep the momentum and enjoyment going, but it is still interesting every time I re-discover it about myself.

The latest iteration of this process of discovery has been to finally start keeping a diary, so that I may for myself chronicle my moods and goings and through that hopefully better process things as well as give myself an opportunity to think things through. The process of putting something to paper is one that helps me actually take a deep dive into the matter instead of avoiding it.

Now this is already something I have at times done through this blog, but the nature of everything I post here being public necessarily both restricts what I want to say as well as forcing myself to speak about matters more circumspectly than when I am merely writing for myself and my own reference. Now, yes, the writing I do here is also mainly for my own benefit but it is still all public and consequently does need to have some consideration attached to what I end up saying, especially since humans are social animals and consequently what I think or feel about others might have an effect on them.

Another aspect of this iteration is, that it is for once a real life paper and pencil record for myself, and I have in recent times simply renewed my interest in somewhat old-school methods of communication and writing. There’s something about the idea of just having a handwritten book that just appeals to me, even if it is a lot less convenient and insecure—in the sense that it is probably a lot easier for someone close to me to get their hands on it and read it—than the digital alternative would be. But sitting down at my desk and taking a pen and writing down what I am thinking just feels more right for some reason, perhaps exactly because I already use the digital form of expression for other things or perhaps because I want to give those close to me the opportunity to see what was going on with me were something to go wrong—a consequence of watching to many crime dramas perhaps.

It’s somewhat amusing, I had been considering also taking up letter writing, since it seems to be somewhat of a lost art, and my mother recently found and went through some old letters left behind by her mother, and even though it was all somewhat mundane there was definitely a certain charm to seeing what someone was up to so long ago and retaining that little piece of history. So while I am definitely a child of the digital age and love technology and computers, sometimes it just feels more right to use older methods of communication so that there is a greater opportunity for it all to be studied and appreciated by posterity.

So here we are, almost a week after release, and so far the experience has been while somewhat stressful at times—mostly due to my own doing and ambition—something of a relief.

I’ve written before, of some of the anxiety I had going into it all, and so far my fears have been mostly unfounded though the real trial will of course be with the release of the raid—still in the honeymoon-phase. Yet the significantly reduced expectations following on from Battle for Azeroth have been a real blessing, and while this does lead to me perhaps logging in less than I did in the early days of that expansion, the time that I am spending playing is more meaningful to me and consequently more enjoyable.

Now, I admit, part of this enjoyment is probably also me having almost completely dodged the Maw so far, and the little I’ve done in there I still did not like, but the experience has still overall been very positive—if at times still somewhat frustrating due to the low amount of haste everyone has but it’s early days of the expansion and that always happens.

This does also mean I am looking forward to my future in this expansion that much more, since it has such a much more promising beginning than the last one meaning I can more easily see myself enjoying it all in the long run as well.

Now to get back to some leveling and dungeoning…

Last week, a couple of days ago to be more precise, we had our first snow of the year here. Now it wasn’t a lot, and is quickly melting since the temperature is still above 0°, but what a difference it makes, how much lighter the whole worlds seems in these dark times of the year with simply some white snow on the ground.

It’s one of those strange things, that you know and expect yet kind of have to marvell at every time, the difference it makes.

The less fun part—for me at least—is that this means that we are slowly transitioning from autumn to winter, which means that my daily walks will get a bit colder, especially noticeable since the past autumn has actually been rather warm. Now, predicting the weather for long stretches of time is always hard and I haven’t even looked at the short-term forecasts, so maybe this was just a blip and it gets warmer again, but still, it’s a reminder that winter is (probably) around the corner.

I do hope for warm-ish winter, still under 0° so that we get to keep the snow, but not by much so I don’t have to freeze too much when going outside.

Having spent some time with my mother in the recent days, along with my usual gaming in the evenings, has given me renewed insight into my own, I suppose introversion is the right word.

Now, it’s something I have been aware of about myself for a long time already, never being one that is at home at parties or larger gatherings, but what it has put into the spotlight is merely a rather significant need to have time that is simply mine, that I don’t necessarily spend with anyone else or if I do it’s more a case of being “alone together” where we are each doing our own thing.

This has recently, even though I am doing things I enjoy with people I enjoy, manifested itself as a form of stress and tiredness, to which the answer of course is simple: spend some time alone doing things for yourself, like writing. What then complicates matters, is not only the hours available in a day—I have been doing the things I have been doing since I want to spend time with people that are important to me—but also to a certain degree a feeling of guilt or perhaps even duty to spend the time with those people.

Taking a guess, this feeling stems from wanting to please others and making sure they are having a good time, and putting those needs before my own. Now, there have certainly been times and situations where I have managed my own needs better than I am at the moment, but that tinge of guilt of not participating has still always been there, the feeling of not belonging or not being wanted.

Reconciling these two extremes, on one hand needing time alone doing my own thing and on the other feeling guilty or left out when I am doing exactly that and others are doing their thing is something it seems I still have to work on, but for the moment the need for alone time is winning out.

So a while back, we got the (new) release date for Shadowlands, 24.11.2020.

My feelings toward this are rather mixed, one the one hand, it means we get to play new content and hopefully properly explore the new zones, something I’ve put off doing on the beta for the release. On the other hand, though I’m hopeful that Blizzard will figure everything out in time for release, it all feels somewhat unfinished in the state it is in during my last testing.

Beyond that, the release date along with the two week delay until the raid opens and one week delay until mythic becomes available, means we will once more have progress over the holidays which is never really a nice thing. I mean, there’ll probably be less going on anyway what with the pandemic going on, but still, having that sort of split attention is never all that nice—much prefer simply being able to take a break from raiding during that time rather than having it lurking in the background.

At this very moment though, I think my elation is winning over my pessimism, since I am actually rather looking forward to playing more World of Warcraft, especially with how good the opportunities to play several characters look in the expansion. Now, sure, I can do that during the prepatch, but there just isn’t a lot of content to pursue that feels in any way shape or form meaningful at the moment—the raid is on farm since months at this point, gear is about to become completely obsolete, and the whole transmog and mount farming thing wasn’t really my, well, thing to any great extent. Sure, getting some specific transmogs can be nice at times, but I rarely feel any particular need to simply catch them all as it were.

To be fair, we are even doing that to a degree, with a somewhat long-running at this point weekly Molten Core run, trying to get Thunderfury. But it’s not exactly the kind of content that provides a lot of engagement with a character nor does it take a significant amount of time, so it’s not really the experience I’m looking for in the game most of the time.

At any rate, there is that old saying of learning to accept the things one cannot change, and my actions at this point in time have rather little influence on the outcome of the release so all I can do is wait and see, making any sort of premature worrying and overthinking of the whole thing rather pointless. I’ll just have to end up showing up for the launch—which I’m hoping goes smoothly once more—level a bit, have some fun with friends, and take my time enjoying the start of the expansion, since it’s looking like that too is an option this time around. In the meantime, my energy is better spent making sure the time up until that point is spent enjoyably in good company.

So, lately, I’ve noticed a certain trend in myself of being rather anxious, or perhaps stressed. I worry about the things I need to do, I feel like I get almost nothing done, and I feel like I have this recurring problem with my scalp getting itchy where I’m not quite sure if it actually gets itchy or I’m so anxious about it happening that I focus on it and start noticing the itchiness and then it all snowballs from there.

Now that last one, to be fair, is probably combination of factors and my scalp actually being really dry and itchy is definitely also a contributing factor, but it feels like the anxiety might also be contributing to how they are manifesting and making themselves noticed.

As for the worrying, well, it feels like it’s partially down to trying to create some new healthy routines—and routine in general—and the stress associated with making sure not only that I do those things but also the perceived time they take, along with the effort of actually going through with it.

These routines still feel like a gain in the long run but it seems that building them up is taking something of a bigger toll than I had anticipated at the start, especially since they are daily things and as such I never really get respite and a chance to recouperate from trying to adapt and adopt these new changes. Luckily it isn’t something I’m undertaking alone which makes it all doable, but we both have our own challenges in actually achieving this goal.

Now, I guess, comes the hard part, after having identified the problem and its potential causes, trying to figure out a way to solve it and actually move past this all. That part I am unfortunately still working on, might be that merely time will solve it for me once the new routines actually become routine and not something I have to really think about, or maybe there are greater unknowns still somewhere lurking that I need to solve in order for this to be over.

Still, I suppose this chronichling of those challenges is a step in the right direction, helping me in my thought process by making it all a bit easier to analyse and take in. I do hope I find a solution soon, this itchiness is really starting to get annyoing, worst part is it was away for a bit and then came back again…

I did something a bit interesting recently, namely replace my pfSense virtual machine with just a plain Debian install which I configured myself. There were a few reasons I decided to do this replacement and build something myself instead of going with some sort of ready-made package, chief among them the feeling that almost all router distributions (at least the free ones that I have access to) had really subpar IPv6 support which is a problem since I want to look into potentially moving the home network into a single-stack IPv6 world if possible—spoiler alert: not possible.

Now this changeover didn’t go quite as painlessly as I had probably hoped, mainly because even in bespoke world there was quite a lot of additional scripting I needed to do in order to support some of the configurations I wanted, and even then there are some outliers like the “smart”-TV that seem to not like being in an IPv6-only world even though all the services the TV accesses are IPv6 enabled.

The first hurdle came fairly early on, after I had gotten the automatic address assignment working primarily through DHCPv6 when I wanted those addresses to get registered in DNS since an IPv6-address is obviously something of a pain to type in and relearn every time they go around changing due to the automatic assignment. Now, while this is something of a supported thing in the ISC DHCP and DNS servers, unfortunately the most important clients for this feature—the servers, mostly running Debian—didn’t include the necessary configuration in their DHCP clients out of the box to enable this to happen meaning they all needed to be reconfigured. Not a big deal—and something that makes me want to take another look at configuration management tools even if most of the configuration of most of my servers is still in the “pet” category since they tend to be one-offs serving only one purpose—but still rather annoying and required some debugging to find out why they were behaving that way since my Windows workstation had no problem registering itself.

The second problem in this saga came from reverse DNS entries. Since my address prefix is dynamic and assigned through DHCPv6 from my ISP, even if it rarely changes, I couldn’t go the easy route of simply configuring it in the DNS and DHCP server and letting the updates happen that way automatically but rather ended up having to add a hook on the router for the DHCP client to modify the configuration files of the two other services and then reload them as needed. Now this works and is the implementation that I’m currently using, but there were some growing pains since at one point the DNS server decided that these reloads meant it could also drop all of the dynamically assigned addresses from the DHCP server which meant ever time the router got a new DHCP assignemnt it also forgot where all the server were—or rather, their names—which is a less than ideal situation to be in. I found a workaround for this that is less than ideal—simply not updating the serial number of the DNS zone—and somewhat hacky but hey, at least it all works for now.

Having had all of this running now for a while has been something of a mixed bag. Sure, everything basically works and having been able to mostly switch over to IPv6 for internal traffic like was my goal from the start has been really nice, but it is all still a bit janky which I noticed most recently when the server froze due to a CPU bug and needed rebooting, which unfortunately did not lead to the router rebooting itself gracefully and it was instead stuck on bringing up network interfaces for something like 5 minutes before giving up and just booting up without doing that. So even a month or so later, it all still has some rough edges but to be fair I think that was to be expected what with there actually being so big a market for ready-made solutions. It just means I need to start taking the long view on this project instead of assuming it’s something I’m simply done with, which is fine.

So the prepatch is here, has been for a few days even, and it has started in usual fashion, with things being very broken. There’s the usual thing, of most addons being broken with the changes that came, I think the biggest problem for them has been the change to require some extra code for frames that need a backdrop since apparently time was being spent figuring out to render non-existent backdrops before so Blizzard changed how they handle all of that.

A bit more annoyingly, what was also rather broken the first couple of days were the servers, which considering how well Blizzard has handled the expansion launches recently was something of a surprise. Patch-day itself was pretty much unplayable, we wanted to do some leveling and couldn’t really get started at all before late into the evening when things mostly stabilized somewhat. At this point, the servers are mostly stable again from what I can tell so things seem to have settled, which is nice.

A lot more annoyingly, the patch seems to have brought a couple of bugs along with it, the worst of which is some sort of desynchronisation between the clients and the server, where a player ends up just showing in the completely wrong location. Have had it happen both in dungeons and in the raid, and is rather annoying when it does especially as a healer since the player in question will only be shown in range on the desynchronised position not their actual position, making healing them in dungeons essentially impossible. Raid fights, well depends on the fight and how far one has to move, though luckily we only had this bug come up once and some strategical relogging seemed to fix it so.

Another more minor bug but rather annoying one non the less is the inability as Alliance to start questing and leveling in Battle for Azeroth at the start unless one does Exile’s Reach as starting zone. Which would be fine, except the whole reason we are leveling Alliance characters at the moment is in order to unlock the heritage armor which means playing allied races which means we can’t play Exile’s Reach since we start at level 10. This is a minor bug for me since there are other avenues to level and we mostly wanted to do Battle for Azeroth to see how the scaling on the neck was at early levels and it seems that gets unlocked later anyway, but still it was rather annoying to find it since we spent a good while trying to figure out how to start questing there—including leveling other characters through Exile’s Reach to see how that works and seeing if maybe party sync could allow us to finagle our way in there—but unfortunately it all seems very buggy at the moment.

Beyond that, we had our first prepatch raid yesterday—moved from Wednesday due to the aforementioned server/addon issues—and it was all a surprisingly fun time, since we got to do content that was rather familiar while at the same time having to relearn how to play it to a degree due to the class changes and consequent damage output changes following that. Especially prominent in this was no longer having the burst from fire mages which meant we had to adapt some of our strategies somewhat to reach some key damage checks, but overall it seemed that our relative damage had actually increased since we seemed to kill N’Zoth at a earlier point than before. The lack of haste hasn’t hit me too badly _yet—_though the worst part of course comes when we start leveling in Shadowlands—but it was definitely noticeable when doing my ramps on my priest since it means I have to time things differently and potentially not cover as many people. I’ll get used to it with time but still a bit sad to have it all gone.

Overall the prepatch has been a fun time so far despite the hiccups, so should be able to tide me over well until the expansion itself launches.

So the expansion got delayed, the pre-patch is hitting soon, I’ve played some more beta and barely play any live. All of these factors are condensing into quite a lot of feelings towards the game, so I thought it prudent to write those down to process them better.

Delay

Shadowlands getting delayed is old news at this point, and I haven’t really mentioned it so far because all I can really say about it is echo what I think the general sentiment seems to be: great news, a bit unfortunate that we have to wait longer since I was really looking forward to having new things to test out—not just in beta form—but the expansion really needed this and I’m hoping it gives Blizzard what they need to make it great. It’s giving me more hope that the expansion will be good on launch which is a positive thing, even if it does mean some boredom in the short term.

Pre-patch

With the announcement of the delay we also got the date for the pre-patch, which mostly felt like a concession so that people would have something new to grab on to during the extended wait for the expansion. It is cool, since it will give more people the opportunity to play around with the class changes that were restricted to people with beta access before, and it will mean that we get to do some more allied race leveling we had been postponing so that’s a nice bonus.

On the other hand, pre-patch is generally the worst time of the games lifecycle, since it’s the time when the old stuff gets disabled or weaker—looking at you, corruption disappearing and secondary stats getting a lot weaker—and the new stuff isn’t quite there yet to replace it so it tends to play rather poorly. Still, my time playing it will probably be quite restricted—at least on max level characters where the negatives are most noticeable—so it shouldn’t be that noticeable to me and as said brings with it the opportunity to level some allied races so on the whole it’s probably more positive than negative.

Beta

Having played more of the beta however, oof. It makes really clear to me why they delayed the expansion and why I was hoping for it, but even though there have been some changes for the positive so far, it still feels like there is quite a lot of work to go before the expansion is in any state that could be classified as fun or good.

The covenants and soulbinds still feel like a mess, more limiting of player choice than actually enabling it. The class changes I’m rather unsure about, sure there is some good stuff in there but the tuning is a bit all over the place which makes it hard to predict if the fun things are the things that will actually stick. The Maw is an unfun mess that I would prefer to completely avoid at this point yet they stuck the gem vendor in there making it essentially mandatory content where you seemingly in its current iteration can spend quite a lot of time there daily.

Barely playing any live

Among all of this, it feels like there’s barely any reason to log into the live game, excepting maybe doing the weekly keys and arena on my latest alt.

All of this is putting me into the somewhat strange place of having alternating phases of hype and dread towards the new expansion. On one hand, I’m really read for something new, on the other, the thing we’re getting really doesn’t look all that good at the moment and even though Blizzard took more time in order to be able to fix that, I’m really worried that it just won’t be enough.

At the moment, I’m in more of a down phase which I’m sure shines through in what I’ve written, and I’m really hoping Blizzard proves me wrong because I would really like another good expansion right about now.

It feels somewhat ironc writing this at the moment, since we have had a two week break from the game due to real life getting in the way, but recently I have been really hyped up to get to playing Dungeons & Dragons again which is a refreshing change. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed the sessions we have had, but now I am once more excitedly planning and looking forward to the next time we play as well as seeing how they tackle the challenges I set before them.

I am, however, at the moment somewhat unsure what exactly that challenge will be but I have some ideas that I can refine and more importantly I feel like the time has come to start giving the players some more interesting magic items to play around with as well as encounter in their fights. It’s actually been really fun so far seeing them interract with the magical things in the world that they have already encountered since they are first-time players and as such have no real expectation of what’s in front of them making the reactions they have really unexpected. The best example of this so far was their encounter with an alchemical jug, where one of the players (or their character) assumed it was filled with some sort of invisible liquid instead of being merely magical in nature and consequently (unfortunately for them) ended up destroying the item during their experimentation.

This feeling of not knowing what will happen is what makes me really excited to have them encounter something like that in a combat situation, since they will have to think even more on their feet and prepare a response to such a strange circumstance in a hurry, and the coolest part of course is that once combat is over—should they prevail—they will have the opportunity to confuse their own enemies with such magical items in the future.

The other thing that I find myself really looking forward to again is the whole collaborative storytelling aspect of the game, especially since the players’ actions can sometimes throw rather big curveballs to me as a DM which makes the whole thing that much more interesting along with giving me ideas on how to implement things in the future. I think the best recent-ish example of this was a player simply deciding that they picked up a glowing stone while they were out adventuring, and gave it to the dwarf in the party since they are experts on stones and stonework. This all lead to a somewhat interesting dream-like adventure at a later date that I don’t think the players expected, but that interaction between the two players was the catalyst for it all which I find really cool. That does remind me, I need to try and encourage such creativity from the players more somehow, since as mentioned they are first-timers and I quite often get the feeling that they are somewhat unsure of what exactly they actually can do and it all feels a tad bit safe, though the two above examples are definite counterpoints to that feeling. Still, giving the players even more opportunities for those interactions is definitely something I want to enable, so need to keep that in mind more in the future, maybe a note or the like somewhere?

Having written this, now I just hope all the more that we actually do get the opportunity to play in the not too distant future and that we have the chance to put real life aside for a bit, and I think next time is actually looking rather likely so fingers crossed!

It doesn’t feel like that long ago since I last completely changed the design of this blog, yet recently I have for some reason started thinking about changing it up a bit again, strangely enough because the current design feels a bit dated even though that is exactly the point.

I don’t as of yet have any concrete ideas of where to go with a potential new design, so it’s all mostly just thoughts in my head that I decided to put down for my own amusement, but here we are.

I still in a sense want to keep the current general feel of the blog, though perhaps with a few more modern touches like enabling me to if I so choose to pick some of those nice featured images for a post, and perhaps in general being a bit more friendly towards media in my posts. At the same time, using more images and media is something I’ve wanted to do before as well, yet it is something that almost always just ends up being something I want to do instead of something I go through with since I find it somewhat hard to find fitting places for images and don’t necessarily partiularily enjoy the process of finding the fitting imagery for a specific post or point.

This all isn’t really helped along by the theme of the blog currently being very heavily World of Warcraft inspired, yet a lot of the content not necessarily having that much to do with the theme so it feels like there is a certain conflict between the presentation and the content itself which would only be made stronger were I to use things like featured images which exist to give a bit more, shall we say, punch to an article yet might look completely out of place with the theme. I suppose this is why the trend is towards quite a bit more “generic” looking sites with simple and sleek designs, and while those can look really nice I do still enjoy the somewhat oldschool feel that the current theme has.

Another problem becomes that were I to choose to also go that route, it would in a sense become that much more difficult to make the site memorable to potential visitors since it feels like it would then look just like every other blog currently in existence making it all that much more forgettable. Sure, one can argue that just means that the content is more important in those cases, but presentation matters just as much as content.

In the end though, all of these problems and pros and cons are somewhat irrelevant though, since this all is about me expressing myself and not truly writing for any specific audience and consequently the only presentation that matters is the one I myself am comfortable with and the impression it leaves on anyone else is secondary—especially since, let’s be honest, nobody is reading all of this.

All of that is a really long way of saying, I’m thinking about changing things up a bit, and somewhat excited by the idea, but it will probably all end up going nowhere (at least on any reasonable timescale).

In the process of gearing and playing my new rogue, we ended up doing some arena as well mainly for the essence since I never ended up getting rank three of it on my priest. This was a rather interesting experience since arena was something I hadn’t particularily enjoyed up until this point, I’d participated in it at times when friends asked me and didn’t really mind playing it per se since I was playing with people I enjoyed playing with, but it also certainly wasn’t my favourite part of the game.

This didn’t exactly change while playing the rogue—as in it’s still not my favourite part of the game—but it did feel a lot less frustrating than when playing as a priest and more specifically healer, and I think I can even say I enjoyed it, which came as something of a surprise; not a complete one mind, since I did actually have a period during Warlords of Draenor where I did a somewhat significant amount of PVP, mostly battlegrounds, also with a rogue, meaning the precedent was definitely there for me enjoying rogue PVP.

It feels like this somewhat re-iterates the value in playing multiple characters and specs, since it allows one to find new places to enjoy the game that perhaps didn’t feel that fun before. It has also increased my desire to keep several characters relatively well maintained in Shadowlands, especially as mentioned before that is looking a lot more doable than it was in Battle for Azeroth. Being able to hop on the rogue and shank some faces in arena will be a really nice change of pace from progressing the latest mythic boss as a healer on the priest which I think will go a long way to helping the new expansion keep fresh.

Speaking of the new expansion, I am slowly starting to get somewhat hyped for it, what with all the changes coming to shadow along with the removal of things like corruptions that while really fun on a well maintained character are really frustrating while playing a new character since it feels like one is just perpetually behind and never really able to catch up. It’s a bit of a strange feeling, since I’m not generally one to get really hyped for new expansions, I think the last one for wich that was the case was Cataclysm, and tend to actually have a bit of a case of, well, mourning the passing of the previous expansion in advance. This even happened with Warlords of Draenor, since even though it wasn’t really my favourite expansion while playing it there were some really positive changes to the environment in which I was playing which made me have fond memories of the end of it along with a dread of what was to come with Legion. These fears ended up being rather unfounded of course with Legion ending up my favourite expansion, but still they were there. Going into Battle for Azeroth, the fear ended up being whether or not the expansion could live up to its predecessor (spoiler: no, it could not) along with once again shifting guilds which always comes with some uncertainty even if that ended up being a really good thing in the end and I am really enjoying where I raid at the moment.

Yet now, I’m just looking forward to putting this expansion behind me and “getting” to play more characters on a competetive level without the somewhat silly amount of effort that required in Battle for Azeroth along with getting to see the new content. Sure, there are as always the worries around balancing and raid spots that accompany every new piece of content, but it feels like even were it the case that those worries come to pass I would have a better time of it than I would have had during Battle for Azeroth and that I’m more prepared for that outcome. Still really wary of how the Covenant-situation will end up, but nothing I can really do about that so nothing to be done but wait and see and enjoy the ride.

Lately, I have had a renewed motivation to play World of Warcraft, yet with the next expansion knocking around the corner the primary forms of content I tend to participate in are in a somewhat of a cooldown period and consequently I’ve ended up doing some leveling and gearing of new characters, most recently a rogue.

It’s actually been kind of amazing to see how quickly it is possible to level at the moment, even barring aside all of the “cheesy” things one can do and just going for the pretty straightforward path toward max level, though to be fair we did do some trickery with party sync since we had a couple of people that were a bit behind so that enabled us to douple-dip into the bonus objectives in Warlords of Draenor that remain one of the more ridiculously quick means of leveling in that range and allowed us to basically completely skip leveling in Legion.

As for gearing, well that’s a bit more interesting, since we took something of an “expansion launch” approach to the whole thing where we ended up just gearing through dungeons as opposed to the usual fare of having some guildies help us out with mythic+ keys, and while the progress has naturally consequently been quite a lot slower, it’s been quite fun dragging it all out a bit and having a longer span of time where I have a reason and motivation to play a new character. It does also present more of an opportunity to get to know the class and spec in a more appropriate environment, which hopefully means that once Shadowlands launches—or more accurately, the pre-patch hits—I’ll be a lot more prepared for the class changes that come with it.

Speaking of Shadowlands, one of the reasons I decided to do some leveling was rather unsurprisingly preparation for the new expansion, since I am hoping this time around will be somewhat more conducive to actually playing several characters on a reasonable enough level without too much of the grindy things that has bogged down creating several characters in the past couple of expansions, and from what I can gather from other sources, this is indeed the case.

One of the other considerations for a new character was simply the opportunity to explore playing damage dealers a bit more again, since I usually tend to mostly stick with healers and even more so mostly tend to just stick with my priest for most types of content, so getting to explore more parts of the game once again was a welcome change in these times where there doesn’t really seem to be all that much to do in-game. It really also helped that rogue is a class (like hunter) that I’ve been interested in playing more for a long time and actually did dabble in back in Warlords of Draenor, and having the time once again to get to know the class better in anticipation of new content has been a treat, sneaking around is a lot of fun.

That reminds me, so far I’ve mostly been playing Outlaw since it seemed to be the most sensible spec for leveling as much of it was done in dungeons and the spec seems to have the most AoE available to it, but truly go for that sneaky feeling it does not so maybe I need to take another look at the other two specs, Subtlety in particular since it feels like that might be the spec that fits my idea of a rogue the best. To be fair, going all pirate especially after having rewatched all of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies recently has also had a rather nice feel to it, so I truly haven’t minded playing the spec, especially since I’ve mostly been ignoring its biggest drawback: the randomness with the rolls. Trying to get better at the spec though, does mean I need to start considering those rolls more so maybe my enjoyment of it will change in the near future.

I’m noticing a certain pattern in my desires lately—writing, playing D&D, small forays into creating some digital art, more programming—and they all end up being outlets for me to in some form be creative and well, actually create something. This realisation doesn’t come as a complete surprise since these are all things I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time yet kind of always felt I wasn’t good enough to do, a common dilemma it feels for aspiring artists, but it still feels a bit interesting and somewhat scary to potentially start thinking of myself as a “creative type”—whatever that means in the end.

It’s also putting me face to face with my difficulties with, well difficulties and the failure that will inevitably rise from those and that one has to push past. I’m noticing a certain trend in myself of getting really excited about the concept of something, spending a small amount of time getting a very rough familiarity with that concept and then the surface level knowledge within an area—recent example being digital art—and after it gets difficult and I need to start actually practicing and refining my skill I kind of give up. I get the sense that anything for which I don’t notice something of a natural talent for, I subconciously categorize as too difficult and give up on it without giving myself the time to actually learn the subject at hand. Maybe it’s the age old thing of “everyone wants to know a foreign language/how to play an instrument/paint but nobody wants to learn how to do those things” at work, but at the same time in the realm of actual language learning I am doing somewhat well so obviously with the right conditions the capability and persistence from my part exists I just need to figure out how to channel it into other things.

In addition to this, also touching on the subject of motivation which I’ve discussed in other posts, I’m finding it a bit difficult at times to actually refine the concepts and ideas when it comes to things like D&D that I am already working on and are ongoing. Now I’ve mentioned it before that I have often felt that I was somewhat underprepared when going into our sessions and that had caused some level of anxiety for me going into those games, and though that anxiety has definitely lessened and I’m much more eager to get back to playing I still have the problem of having some very loose ideas where it is all going to go forward yet not really taking the time and doing the research necessary to actually feed those ideas until they are more solid as well as being able to present them properly.

Now in this instance there are of course a couple of caveats, namely that overpreparing can actually be somewhat harmful since in the medium in question telling the story is a group activity and if I try to prepare and solidify and predict too many things I might end up railroading the players to an unecessary degree which I don’t think is fun—I want to have the opportunity to be very surprised during our sessions too—and secondly, from the presentation standpoint, I’m actually doing well and don’t need the extra pressure and anxiety I’m causing myself, even if a desire to improve isn’t a bad thing either.

This all also becomes painfully obvious to me with my dream to write a novel, where I got really excited about the start, the initial concept, the rough sketch, yet I haven’t even managed to actually put a paragraph on (virtual) paper yet and actually started writing. I haven’t even started fleshing out those concepts, coming up with the world, the story or the goals, all I have so far is the start of a story. Now, to be fair, that is the general approach I take to e.g. these blogposts, where I have some very rough idea of what I want to write about and then flesh it all out as I go along and don’t look back, but I don’t think this is a sensible approach for the more longer form writing that a novel would be, possibly still appropriate for a short story or the like. Though, perhaps, why actually not? Why can’t I just start writing and discover the story myself as I go along, exploring the world I am creating while I am creating it? Editing is something very doable, if at a later date something doesn’t fit it can be removed or adapted, and then if nothing else it served as inspiration for what was to come. Why am I expecting myself to basically write the whole story out before actually, well, writing it? I don’t really need all of those tools that generally are there to make the writing process more efficient since I’m doing it really for nobody’s benefit but my own, so the pace of it all doesn’t matter in the least. I mean, I do hope to actually be done with it at some point, but that still a lot longer than even the slowest writing process I could conjure up would take for the task I have in mind.

So, I guess, even in this case, the thing keeping me from even getting started is the fear of not finishing it or it not being what I hope or dream it would be, either to me or others. Yet at the same time, if I keep so vehemently refusing to take those risks and actually working on things I want to see get done, none of those things will with certainty become what I want them to become, I’m not even giving my ideas the chance to flourish if I don’t execute on them. Maybe writing all of this down, once more, is a step towards actually starting to realize more of my ideas?

I stumbled upon a new Youtuber recently, Sara Dietschy and while watching one of her videos where she was going over one productivity tool or another she mentioned how the tool being more fun than the one she had previously used had positively affected her efficiacy in actually using that tool which ended up resonating with me quite well since I could look back at me switching over to Ghost from WordPress and notice myself actually being much more motivated to sit down and write something in the past few weeks than I have been in a long time.

Now, to be fair, this could just be coincidence and I seem to remember there being a similar effect when I originally switched over to WordPress but it’s still something that makes a lot of sense to me especially as I’m rather curious about different tools and their application in the first place which is why I tend to do these experiments like testing different browsers or operating systems.

It has also gotten me thinking about how I could use this to overcome some of those motivation problems I’ve discussed previously especially since it feels like at the moment I actually do have several projects I’d like to get started on but during the rare times I actually sit down to work on them my interest in actually progressing fades really quickly at the slightest hurdle. I mean, looking at the kinds of problems I’m facing this kind of “hack” feels unlikely to actually have any long lasting effects but the mere act of actually getting started on and finishing several projects might be what ends up leading to the kind of self-improvement that will result in more lasting change so it feels like a worthwile avenue to at least explore a little bit—especially, as noted, in the light of the small success I’ve had with it in the moment in the realm of blogging.

The problem, then becomes, actually figuring out what my pain points when starting these different projects are and how I would go about solving those or making the tools I use to create these project more fun to use, yet looking at some of the problems I’m facing the tools really aren’t a problem since I do already enjoy using them to a degree, it’s more the challenges I’m facing or the projects I’m embarking on that are focused on bringing perhaps a more long term sort of gratification which I’m unused to working with.

A good example of this, is I have a website for watching movies together with friends that I’ve built and I want to do something of a refactoring in the code and add a few features—namely short clips as previews of the movie as well as customizing the video player a bit from the standard controls provided by browsers. Yet when I got started on doing this today and yesterday I could barely get started with the whole thing before I ended up frustrated I suppose at the seeming lack of progress along with the list of tasks still ahead of me even though I had a pretty clear vision of what to do. Maybe exactly that is the problem, that once I have the vision of what to do and how to do it, the project stops being exciting and just becomes a matter of actually implementing what I’ve already thought out and that just feels boring and not something I want to engage with, yet I know from experience that things are rarely as straightforward as they seem and there is almost always something lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce and actually present and interesting challenge to solve.

But maybe that’s the other problem, I just want the thing to work and not actually have to do the work of getting there, especially if there are hidden roadblocks on the way, and maybe the solution to both of these problems is learning to internalize and remember the joy I have felt previously when finally solving those problems so that they go from being demotivators to being motivators in the long run.

What I am also noticing, writing all of this and thinking back at it, is another factor and that is time, namely the times that I have actually set aside a block of time in order to accomplish something are the times where I have been more successful in getting those things done as opposed to the times where I somewhat spontaneously get motivated to start doing something. So it might be that all I need is to actually unplug a bit so I don’t have the fear of distraction running in the back of my mind and set aside times where I decide that this is the time I try to solve this problem.

I spent a bunch of time getting WordPress into a state where I could run it headless and then just a short while after I decide to switch over to Ghost anyway because it just ended up feeling like the slicker solution I guess. There were some things that annoyed me with the WordPress setup to be fair, chief among them the fact that all the images hosted there were getting copied over on each deploy which felt very wasteful even if it wasn’t time I spent actively waiting for the task to complete since it was done automatically in the background and Ghost seemed to have the more straightforward integrations to get the images hosted on some other platform so that they didn’t need to be part of the deploy process.

Beyond that, the writing process is largely similar, if perhaps a bit cleaner of a default editing view in Ghost than WordPress though that is easily enough configurable for it to not really be that big of a difference. The separation of the admin/publishing side and the published website itself is also more clear in Ghost, which means setting up the whole thing for headless operation was considerably smoother than it was with WordPress which somehow makes me trust the whole thing a bit more even if I personally didn’t run into any problems with WordPress or the setup really. To be fair, I am now slightly less reliant on any sort of plugins which is a boon in itself, since while they are one of the greatest strengths of WordPress they are also the source of many of its problems which makes me a tad more confident that the current setup will be easier to maintain than the previous one if only marginally.

This change of backend however, has also had me thinking about potentially changing the frontend as well, since one of the primary reasons I went with Eleventy originally was the fact that I could copy over the images from the backend during the deploy but as that is no longer necessary with them hosted off-site I might end up using one of the other static site generators I looked into but discarded due to them lacking this functionality. I’m especially curious about this since during my experimentation Gridsome and to a lesser degree Nuxt really caught my eye since I have had some previous experience building sites with Vue and being able to bring that familiarity in to this as well would be a nice bonus, along with their rendering fanciness really contributing to making the site actually feel a bit snappier which to me is one of the main points of using a headless instead of traditional CMS in the first place.

That project is still ongoing however, so I’ll have to update the state of it at a later date if I actually do end up switching, since to be fair for the most part Eleventy is doing its job in a nice and quick manner and there is no real need to switch—though I am ever the tinkerer, never quite satisified with every detail and always curious to test new things so that probably ends up being the primary reason I decide to test something different in the future.

I’m recently noticing that now that I am no longer spending my days playing RPGs since I finished Pillars of Eternity and stopped playing Pathfinder, my general mood is somewhat more down that it was in the weeks prior. It feels like it’s related to my, shall we say, revelation at the end of playing those games, namely that I am still somewhat in the search of purpose to my life and now that I’m done with playing those games those feelings of aimlessness are surfacing again.

All of this then unfortunately affects other things poorly, things that I want to get done but may not necessarily feel are core to myself. Examples of this being, my recent difficulties preparing “properly” for our D&D sessions, and while that all ended up going well I still constantly have the feeling that I should be doing more. It is to be fair probably only extra pressure that I am putting on myself completely unecessarily, but it is still something that I end up thinking about.

Another thing it affects at the moment is initiating or accepting invitations to participate in activites that I do enjoy, at the moment the example being mythic+ where I at the moment would have the opportunity to participate somewhat more often but find myself having to convice myself to accept the invitation even though I know that I enjoy the activity which is a somewhat frustrating feeling. I also ended up not participating in the raid tests on 6th and 7th, though to be fair on the 6th it was more down to the servers not being available at the start but on the 7th I just needed a break from people and consequently ended up participating in neither the raidtest nor the achievement run that were planned for the day.

In the middle of all of this, I’m also considering starting my own personal NaNoWriMo, since I’m not sure I want to wait that long nor am I sure that I actually want to do it quite as intensely as the real deal, so more of a personal writing sprint or goal than actually anything to do with that event but anyway. Yet two things are somewhat hindering this, primarily as noted the feeling of lack of motivation to actually get started, which I think is then amplified through a fear that I won’t make it, especially if I were to try and follow the goals of the actual event which then ends up demoralizing me before I even get started, which to be fair probably is a bigger part of the whole lacking motivation thing, fear of failure. Maybe it’s all even intertwined, in that my fear of failure leads to being fearful of caring about things which leads to not having many things which are important to me which leads to me not having a force driving me forwards? If that all is the case, what are my next steps towards working to rectify this problem and how do I intend to solve it? That I do not yet know, but I think coming closer to identifying it is the first step in being able to actually solve it.

So it slowly seems we are creating a tradition of playing D&D, though with another group than mentioned in the previous post. It’s a bit different since we are running this game online over VOIP and without cameras, so there is a certain amount of communication lost through that, but still it has been quite fun so far. We have even managed to recruit a new player who decided not to join us on the initial session but coming in for the second on and staying for the third, so new convert, yay!

Preparation is still an aspect that I find highly challenging, since it’s hard to know in which direction the players want to go so I don’t really want to overprepare things that are unlikely to end up happening yet simultaneously I often notice how unsatisified I myself am with things I end up improvising on the fly—not that any of the players seem to have minded at any point so far but still! Also the whole “keeping the world consistent” thing is much easier when I actually have some idea of what’s going on beforehand, though maybe that’s an aspect that I personally focus on more than the players themselves do.

Simultaneously, that all can just be solved by taking good notes while we are playing of the things that I’m coming up with on the spot, and our last session actually ended up being mostly improvisation on my part since while I had accounted for a bit what was going to happen if the players ended up going in the direction they finally headed, it wasn’t the “primary” story path—more akin to a sidequest or the like—and consequently the world that they encountered on the way there wasn’t overly fleshed out yet from what I can tell the players seemed engaged and interested in the characters they encountered while doing a bit of investigation on a missing person in the village and their suspicions even gave me new ideas for potential further stories if they decide to go that way even if I had previously had nothing planned for these characters. Though maybe I also need to be careful of confirming any suspicions players may have to often since if jumping at every shadow yields something dark the world might feel a bit more bleaker than it is.

This last experience though has significantly calmed my nerves when it comes to actually running the game, since it was an opportunity to see that I can actually manage the situation coming up pretty well of having to think on my feet and just kind of blurt out things that are forming in the moment which while I knew was important going into the whole dungeon mastering thing, was something I felt really shaky about especially hearing the amount of preparation some dungeon masters choose to do before their sessions that I haven’t really commited to myself—I mean, I try to prepare as good as I can but it just feels very difficult since I don’t know here the next session will go. Still, this does mean I’m not as stressed for our upcoming session and am actually rather looking forward to it, well, moreso than I was before.

This past week I ended up participating in some more raidtesting along with a quick run of a Mythic+ dungeon as well as some quick addon development. I finally ended up getting frustrated enough with the healing experience on the beta, and ended up seeking out and fixing the couple of errors I was encountering with Clique in order to be able to actually play the beta with sensible keybindings. The fix was actually rather minor which I’m happy about since I’m not overly familiar with the Clique codebase and since it means I get to test the new expansion properly, though it does mean I’m sligthly frustrated to have waited so long to give it a shot since all these problems could’ve been over ages ago. To be fair, during the fixing I was relying on reports from other people regarding what changes Blizzard has made to the API which might not have been available as easily at a earlier point in time, so maybe it was so easy because I ended up waiting so long to fix it.

Mythic+

The dungeon we did was Halls of Atonement and it ended up rather surprising me with its ease especially since I was still figuring out the keybindings at the time. To be fair, we did not end up managing to complete the dungeon in time and seemingly the only affix that was active was Fortified even though it stated it was a +10 dungeon so maybe all of the scaling was completely broken but still. If it was indicative of what a +2 will feel like come release with some heroic blues it all seemed to be in line with expectation.

Raid testing

The past week I also participated in all of the raid tests, rather than just the one I had participated in the week previous, and well, the new raid is looking rather nice. Sure, there are tuning problems and bugs but that’s what we’re there for.

The most fun boss of the bunch so far to me seemed the Council of Blood, I liked the flair of the intermission where you have to participate in the dance since from the little story I’ve played so far it felt like it fit the theme of the place perfectly. Beside that though, the fight did feel rather hectic and I’m really curious to see how it ends up on mythic since it already had so many things going on—maybe this is one of those cases where we only get the numbers tuned up and no real additional mechanics. I might be biased though, since it’s the only boss in testing these raids so far that we have actually killed.

My definite least favourite boss of the bunch was Shriekwing, which seems to be the first boss of the raid—gets a bit confusing at times since there is actually another bossfight that takes place in the same room and you just get ported to the correct boss anyway. There was an annoying tendency on this boss for people not to be in line of sight of me which is understandable since it plays such a huge role in the fight and dodging out of the boss’ line of sight at the correct time is crucial, but it does make for a very annoying experience as a healer. Luckily, this is the first boss of the raid so it will probably be trivial anyway but those reclears could get a bit annyoing. The second phase also seemed like it could be interesting, the boss basically went into a rage which you needed to wait out where it took almost no damage and periodically did a sonar pinpointing people which you had to hide from.

The other two bosses, Huntsman Altimor along with the Stone Legion Generals, somehow felt a bit more bland though still fun even if the Huntsman once again introduced the twist of there occasionally being an add that needed healing instead of just being able to focus on the raid. This is probably also partially due to the bugginess and tuning of these two encounters, so final judgement is as always reserved until mythic.

Holy

For this week I also took the opportunity to test out holy a bit more again and I have to admit it does feel rather good to be playing the spec again even if I at the same time feel it is probably not the most sensible choice. It all does still feel rather weak and I don’t have nearly as much time to dish out damage as was available in Legion but there is still a familiar comfort to it all. To be fair, it’s probably also the better choice for new content where the damage patterns are still rather unknown.

All the returning abilities have made it a bit more interesting to figure out what is the optimal play in different situations as well, so that is a welcome change.

Last week I ended up getting access to the Shadowlands beta and while I haven’t done much testing so far what little I have done has been interesting. The first thing I noticed has been the reintroduction of several spells, known beforehand of course but still interesting especially since I now get to consider where in my toolkit those spells fit in and more importantly where I get to bind them—for this it will actually be rather nice to have the beta so I have all of that figure out before I have to stumble around with it on live.

With this introduction of several new spells looking for keybinds, I ended up rather sorely missing Clique since it meant that several keybindings I was used to being able to access were no longer accessible to me leading to something of a dearth of available binds; drawbacks of beta-testing I suppose.

Finally, actually getting into the content and playing it, once more the lack of haste hit me though for some reason not quite as badly as in the transition between Legion and Battle for Azeroth (except when I played Shadow for a short while, there it felt really painful to have almost no haste).

What I have done on the beta so far is the second evening of raid-testing the past week as well as a couple of introductory quest runs into Torghast, and so far it all seems rather promising if a bit disorienting with the aforementoned lack of certain keybindings leading to rather more relearning than usual. Of course, the content is all new and I haven’t really had to bother with the daily grind aspects of it so I guess there is a certain tendency towards optimism in it all, but it does somehow seem surprisingly nice even if I am still not quite sold on having to give up on transmogs I could be interested in, in order to enable me to actually get the abilities that I feel benefit me the most which is a situation having to choose a covenant still puts me in.

Also, there is a smaller irritation I have with the covenants, namely the flight between their base of operations and what seems to be the central hub of the expansions, I’m not sure the extra travel between these two places which will both be visited rather frequently by players is completely justified.

Beyond that, it’s a bit too early for me to give any more concrete feelings on the new expansion and it is all still a work in progress I endeavor to help make better where I can find the time so I’ll reserve final judgement for the release version but I do have a hint of more optimism in me towards the new expansion than I had previously, we will see how long that lasts.

Inspired by my playing a lot of RPGs lately, I ended up organising my first actual round of Dungeons & Dragons in a long while, five years or so. As often happens with these things when one self is the initiatior, I had the role of Dungeon Master and wow, I was so stressed going into this even though these are people I know well, but once we got rolling it all ended up quite good as these things tend to. Though to be quite honest, we had a longer break at one point and I think we should have just ended the session there, it went on a bit too long and the concentration was severly lacking after the break.

Despite the not quite as successful latter half everyone seemed to enjoy the session overall and we are planning to do it again some point this year hopefully, though for that I think I really need to be a bit more prepared and have more of the world thought out so I’m more ready to respond to the whims of the players since I encountered a place or two where in hindsight I’m not happy with how I played the situation out.

Having played both of the Pillars of Eternity games, I rediscovered my liking for RPG games and went looking for other recent examples I could get into playing and after a bit of experimentation ended up with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It hasn’t yet drawn me in quite as well as the Pillars games but it has still been quite enjoyable so far though it does certainly feel like a much less polished experience—this game was unfortunately quite known for the amount of bugs it had at launch, and even now some of them still seem to plague the game. The one I most recently ran into that is now making me consider how to proceed is that one of my companions’ pet now simply spawns in the middle of whatever map I happen to be on and is uncontrollable, essentially completely removing the pet from the game and consequently making that companion quite a bit less useful, which is especially unfortunate for me since that was one of the companions I had been quite regularly running with up until now.

Beyond that, the writing also feels quite a bit more cliché, with the game focusing a bit too much on the beauty and prioritising that for both the female companions as well as some of the other NPCs one runs into in the game, especially in some of the dialogue choices the game puts on you.

Still, the kingdom management aspect is actually a nice feature of the game I find, and at times I even find myself getting somewhat annoyed having to go back to questing due to some timed event or another pressuring me away from that part of the game and I think the balance between the two is rather nicely achieved where there are multiple things to keep tabs on and you have to prioritise what is more important at any given time.

The less nice thing is that some of the tools the game gives you for keeping tabs on things are rather poor, namely the way the game indicates quests and where in the world you are actually going leaves something to be desired I find. I’m not saying there needs to be an arrow pointing to every single thing in the world, but when I get a prompt in the dialogue that an NPC pointed out a location on the map to me and I then go to look on the map and see no indication what this “new” location is since I’d already discovered it on the way there, it does get a bit annoying to try to puzzle out what the game wants me to be doing. Most of the time the game does have some indication when hovering over a location of the map that a quest takes place there, but not always, and once enough of the map is discovered and the game suddenly decides to send you off into some far-flung corner of it having some option to just click in the journal to have the map display the relevant part of the map would be a rather nice feature to have. Not having this included might be an intentional decision though, where the game tries to emulate some of the older style of RPG where there were fewer UI elements helping you along but those games also tended to have a bit more thorough descriptions in the text where you could ask where something was supposed to be located, and intentional or not it’s not really a design I agree with.

Despite these flaws, it is a game I definitely want to go back to at some point, when I either figure out how I want to deal with the bug I encountered or when it ends up getting fixed. Despite the clichés, I do want to see where the story ends up going even if the general direction of it seems somewhat obvious.

Having recently played Pillars of Eternity 2 and following that the first part as well, the story in those games has gotten me thinking a bit since it ended up speaking to me surprisingly strongly—probably partially because I was so engrossed in the games.

Now, I’ve been somewhat nihilistic for a long time, not really believing there is some great meaning to the universe and our place within it though that doesn’t mean there aren’t causes or values I hold important or even that I don’t feel that the world would be a better place if some of those values were universal (if maybe a bit boring).

But at the same time, it has left me without any sort of driving force in my own life, without a reason to do and achieve things which has meant I’ve been left just kind of floating around without purpose which does mean it is somewhat hard to motivate myself to participate in society as well as actually having dreams and goals. This, along with recent events in the world, has left me with a lot of thinking to do along with a search for that meaning to call my own. I expect this introspection will take some time, and I’m not sure I can say I’m looking forward to it though I think it will prove quite interesting and valuable to me going forward.

So it’s been about a year since I started using WordPress instead of Hugo to publish this blog, and it’s been quite a nice experience so far. I like the editing workflow, that I’m actually reminded to certain things like specifying tags and publish date when I do press the publish button, and that I can schedule posts so I can write when I feel like writing and still end up with a somewhat regular cadence of when the posts actually end up getting shown on the site.

The sligthly less rosy part of the whole thing has unfortunately been the performance, specifically the performance for anyone else than myself since the site gets hosted locally to me. Now there are some things I’ve already done to alleviate this, like using caching in WordPress so that the pages get rendered faster and using Cloudflare in front of the site as a CDN and cache to hopefully deliver the content from a location closer to the reader but it’s still quite slow because in the end speed of light is a thing and the caches don’t last forever. Also, only the assets and not the pages themselves ended up being cacheable with the free Cloudflare plan, so the main content of the site ended up being served rather slowly anyway.

Then, at some point, I remembered looking into Ghost, which is another publishing platform which remains more focused on just the publishing part than WordPress and while looking into it again I discovered a keyword which lead me on something of an adventure: headless CMS. What this specifically means is, that the CMS part is just there for managing the content and then provides an API which a frontend of your choosing can then use in order to render out the actual site—so a greater separation of duties in a sense. Classically in publishing systems, the CMS is responsible for both the whole content management part and the presentation part but this separation of the two means one can take a static site generator like Eleventy or Gridsome, query the API of the CMS for the actual content and still generate the site statically which allows it to be deployed more easily.

Since this site is mostly just me writing for the fun of it and the more interactive parts like comments haven’t really proved that used implementing this approach for the site was something I set about exploring, and what an exploration that was. It all ended up being somewhat more complicated than I expected, partially because the WordPress REST API isn’t necessarily set up for all the functions required for this sort of thing—ended up needing to install another plugin for authentication against the API so that things like site settings could be retrieved through it, normally only the session cookie based authentication is implemented—and another problem ended up being content management since I want to then also deploy the media I might embed in posts so that they don’t end up still being queried from the WordPress server and that use-case was surprisingly unsupported in many of the static site generators I looked at, not even through plugins. Now, of course, most of them support some form of filters or mapping or the like with which I could create this functionality myself without too much trouble, but I wanted something where someone else had (hopefully) figured out the edge-cases for me so that I didn’t have to go around thinking about file I/O and the like.

This lead me to settle on Eleventy which allowed me to reach my goals with the least amount of fuss—which is kind of what it bills itself with as well, “Eleventy is a simpler static site generator”.

Once that decision was made it was a relatively simple task of configuring Eleventy to query the WordPress API in order to fetch the posts and then display them in a near identical manner to the current site, with the biggest differences being the lack of comments because the site is now static as well as removal of some of the shall we say bloat that WordPress as well as JetPack include. It’s all well-intentioned and I could remove it if I liked so this isn’t a criticism of WordPress by any means—and in the case of JetPack I even chose to include that—but it’s still nice to see the site in a somewhat leaner form than it was before.

Getting the category-pages working however, was a bit more of a struggle—mostly because I’m somewhat stubborn however (and also not that familiar with Eleventy)—because I didn’t want to end up retrieving the pages from the API twice so I needed to figure out some way of providing two different collections while only retrieving that data asynchronously once. In the end however, I just ended up retrieving the data twice since that seemed to be the way Eleventy preferred handling this usecase, and in the end it’s just text so it shouldn’t lead to all that big of a transfer anyway.

After that, I simply needed to find a plugin for WordPress that triggers a webhook when a new post gets published so that the hosting for the static site knows to rebuild, and the process is essentially complete. For this I settled on Notification since it seemed on the surface the cleanest and simplest implementation and it looked like it would likely remain supported in the future as well—always a concern when adding a new plugin.

All in all, the process wasn’t perhaps quite as straightforward as I would’ve wanted but still easy enough to get everything going after I stopped being stubborn and just used the systems that actually provided the features I wanted (Eleventy, specifically referring to the local image support) instead of considering developing plugins of my own. From what I can tell the site also feels quite a bit snappier even for me so that’s a big plus as well, hopefully it ends up serving any potential readers better as well! Regardless, it was a fun journey.

So the past week or so my time has been pretty much consumed by Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and it has been a pretty amazing time.

It’s the first time in a long while for me where I’ve actually been able to get my mind inside the world I’m playing in or reading about which does mean that it does bring me some sadness to have to leave that world but the journey was great.

It might be a bit late for a New Year’s promise, but having read a post recently of someone missing blogs and well me writing one, I’m considering trying a somewhat more regular writing cadence on here. I’m not still quite sure what that cadence might be, weekly sounds somewhat realistic, and I’m also not sure what that might do to my motivation to do so but it feels like an interesting proposition. Perhaps getting started with it could even prove to be its own motivator, seeing how good it feels when I get a decent amount of things written on here.

I also believe forming the habit of simply writing might prove useful, essentially improving my skill at committing to something since that is something I can at times have trouble with. It will also prove interesting having to more actively seek out topics to write about since that has generally been my biggest problem, which will require me to practice my creativity somewhat—that also being a skill I have not trained as much as I would perhaps like, at least in this context.

Making writing more deliberate also has another side-effect, namely training me to do it over a longer period of time and actually editing what I’ve written rather than as a “one-shot” as most of the previous posts here; me just sitting down and writing because I remember to and pressing publish at the and. The long pauses between posts lead to a mentality of “just get something out there”, which can of course happen again with a schedule if I haven’t prepared anything and that’s fine, but should be less likely to happen assuming I stick with it and actually prepare the posts in advance as is my intention at least. This more drawn-out method of writing will also allow me to think about and state my viewpoints more thoroughly on a subject since I don’t have such a stress to press the publish-button, which will hopefully lead to some longer-form content (or perhaps simply more edited content).

I am not making longer form content a hard requirement for myself though, since this remains an activity mostly driven by my desires rather than anything done for some external purpose. In that same vein, I am also hoping this more deliberate approach to the whole thing will allow me to satisfy that need on a more ongoing basis rather than merely sporadically when I remember to.

As is starting to become spring-tradition I feel, I gave switching to Linux as my primary operating system on my desktop another shot, and the results were slightly better than last time though still not quite enough to make the switch permanent. Honestly, the overall experience was rather impressive, the biggest problem is me still needing to shoehorn some Windows-things (games) into Linux, and aside from those I think I would’ve already made the switch.

As a change from last time, I tried the Liquorix kernel, which is the Linux kernel tuned to fit the interactive desktop use-case better and the difference was quite noticeable. This probably made the biggest difference in how everything felt this time around and it’s definitely something I could get used to. There was some funkiness however, as I had installed the Nvidia drivers first but once I installed the kernel I needed to install newer drivers and getting rid of those cleanly and the newer ones installed was a bit of a short pain which does also lead me to worry somewhat of the longterm stability of the system since I have had a bad experience with Arch and Nvidia drivers in the past where the kernel got updated to be newer than the drivers supported. The dangers of binary-blob drivers on Linux I suppose, which I was intending to counteract by using a more stable distro (Debian) but of course the Liquorix kernel releases follow the current kernel releases much more closely so that didn’t really end up being an advantage.

Gaming

As mentioned above, the biggest pain-point for me is still gaming, namely the Blizzard games. World of Warcraft is still my main jam at the moment, and while it isn’t impossible to get running on Linux and actually has a rather decent rating on Lutris, Battle.net was something of a pain for me to get running and then because it’s not just a game launcher but also a chat service, one that I quite heavily use, I want to have it constantly running which doesn’t always work that well and the integration into the desktop is lacking because Wine. Specifically, Battle.net has a tray icon that then gets shown to Linux as some sort of “legacy” format which isn’t supported by the newer versions of the major desktop environments (GNOME and KDE) which would mean I might need to use something more niche which I’m not that into at the moment though it might be interesting at some later point. The customisability of the interface is after all one of the strengths of Linux.

Another new pain-point was actually Epic Games Store, something I hadn’t used the last time I made this experiment but was now using primarily due to the free games they have been offering, which can contain some rather nice deals at times. This feels especially silly, since some of the games they offer—For the King as an example—do actually have a Linux version yet because I own the Epic Games Store version I can’t actually play it easily on Linux. From what I gather, Epic Games doesn’t have the best of reputations when it comes to Linux support in general, which also makes me somewhat wary of trying to run the store through Wine in case they decide to treat it as cheating or the like. The dangers of free stuff I suppose.

Streaming

Also, I never got started on streaming and getting that to work, multiple audio devices as a problem from last time.

Another more minor niggle is streaming. It really is rather minor, since I kind of know exactly how I want it all set up and what I need to do to get there, just the way there is somewhat annoying.

Basically, the big problem is that my audio setup in Windows is actually rather complicated, with four different (virtual) audio devices so that I can cleanly separate game, music, voice and desktop sounds and then only pipe some of those through to the stream. The different audio devices also more easily allow me to adjust the different audio levels for me and the stream, for example my game and music audio is rather quiet because I want to hear what’s going on in voice but as that isn’t piped to the stream most of the time I can actually turn those up a bit for them so that it isn’t all so quiet and they can enjoy the music. The game sounds are also more important to me than to the stream, so being able to adjust those separately is quite nice.

Now, all of this is rather trivially possible with Pulseaudio, which does support creating virtual audio sinks without any extra software installation as is required on Windows (though I guess what’s core and what’s not is somewhat more loosely defined on Linux than Windows, since it’s dependant on the distribution), however I want all of this to automatically be the case from the moment I log in so that I don’t have to keep readjusting my software to use the correct sinks and did unfortunately not find a good way to do this. Some sort of login script would be the obvious example but I didn’t really want to take the time to program something like that.

Then there is the case of the bots. Namely, chatbots. While a lot of the popular ones are cloud-based these days, which one would think would mean that running on Linux wouldn’t be a problem, the song request part often requires a Windows application in order to provide the currently playing song to the streaming software in the form of a simple text file. Since these seem to be mostly Electron-applications, I don’t really see the reasoning behind this other than the developers not considering Linux a big enough market in order to make the effort which does make it all a bit more of a pain for me. There are also more “pure” cloud variants like StreamElements which do have a mechanism of providing the song title through a web browser interface but unfortunately the last time I used it the song request functionality was somewhat flawed, skipping some songs completely and not doing a particularly good job of shuffling the songs.

Now I have been wanting to write my own bot for the song requests because all of them feel a bit janky in one way or the other anyway which would alleviate these concerns and allow me to use the others just for moderation, however as I haven’t done that yet it’s something of a blocker at the moment.

Finally, one major problem from last time that I didn’t end up running into this time but could rear its head again, some versions of OBS oddly enough did not include hardware acceleration (on Nvidia cards at least) for the encoding which for a single PC streaming setup like mine was a complete non-starter. This seemed to primarily depend on the distribution and not OBS itself, with some strangeness like Ubuntu 18.04 at the time having hardware acceleration but 19.04 did not. I believe at the time the flatpak also lacked hardware acceleration which if it was still the case would have been a blocker this time around as well since using an outdated version of OBS since new features tend to be rather significant in something so relatively recent as live game streaming.

Minor things

Beyond those two main problems, there were a few more minor things that I would need to figure out were I to decide on a more permanent switch but that don’t really impede my day-to-day too much. Namely:

• OneNote
• Development environment
• Hardware acceleration in Firefox

OneNote

I’ve recently re-discovered OneNote for notetaking, and so far it’s actually been rather nice to use for the small amounts of notetaking that I do. It seems to sync pretty snappily between devices, has performant enough clients for the operating systems I use regularly at the moment, and mostly just gets out of the way of me writing something short that needs remembering. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there isn’t a version available for Linux, outside of potentially a web-based one, which would mean I need a replacement. At the same time, my notetaking needs at the moment are rather light, so this shouldn’t pose too much trouble but still it is something that will need consideration if I make the switch in the future.

Development environment

This one is rather easy, it’s just mostly a matter of remembering everything that’s necessary. Currently use a fair bit of web development stuff, so Node, webpack and the like, and all of that probably even runs better on Linux than it does on Windows. Similarily, I do some Go develoment, and that is probably also more intuitive to use on Linux than Windows so no problem there, and my current editor of choice, Visual Studio Code, is also available. The biggest hurdle if one can call it that would just be getting everything set up the way I like it so that the threshold to get something done when I want to is as low as possible.

Firefox hardware acceleration

So this is just one of those things that yes, it’s solvable, yes, it’s not too much work, but quite honestly it should just be standard at this point and not something I need to go hunting for how to get working properly. I get that it’s probably a hard problem to get working for the generic case and with all the open and closed source drivers, but the unecessary CPU load just shouldn’t be there when I’m watching videos or doing other browsing on more graphically intensive websites. It’s a minor thing because I know it’s fixable just didn’t get to the point of looking up exactly how, but it annoys me that it’s a thing I need to fix in the first place.

Conclusion

In the end, this time (as well) ended up being a failure, but it did give me new hope once again that some day in the not too distant future this will be an option that I can reasonably choose, since the roadblocks are becoming fewer each time and the only really big remaining one is gaming which seems to be getting better each year on Linux with more support from publishers. Even there I also have pretty big hopes concerning the future since Blizzard has already supported Mac gaming for so long it seems reasonable that they would in turn also support Linux in the not too distant future. And if even if they don’t, at some point I’m probably going to have played their games enough and find others that I want to play, so maybe that’ll be a good opportunity to narrow my search and focus on ones that have Linux as a supported platform.

The general state of the desktop and seeing how good it has gotten also makes me think that there are some other systems in the house that can be converted since they don’t have some of the requirements I do, so at the very least the knowledge gained from the experiment will prove very useful to me and here’s hoping next time around everything’s far enough along that it doesn’t just stay an experiment!

I have a tendency to want to change things up once in a while, with everything from doing small tweaks to design, regularly changing transmog ingame, and with software for some reason it seems to mostly manifest with me trying out new browsers or giving Linux yet another shot as my main operating system.

One of these recent changeups was trying out the new Edge that has been floating around for a bit since I kept hearing quite a lot of good things about it though to be fair mainly in r/sysadmin so the criteria there are quite different to the ones I have when picking a browser for myself as opposed to a organisation choosing one for their own use.

Edge Chromium is really, and my god if you search my history you’ll laugh, but it’s really damn good. Maybe the best thing Microsoft has done since whatever the last good thing I can’t think of.

/u/Just_Curious_Dude

Still, it made me curious enough to give it a try and I it did end up being a rather positive experience overall. I enjoy the look and feel of the browser, more so than Chrome, and it does have some interesting features standard like the collections. It finally being available on more platforms than only Windows meant that I could actually give it an honest try since my browsing tends to be a mix of desktop, both Windows and Mac as well as mobile and I like keeping things synced between those so that I can pick up wherever I left on regardless of device.

That, however is where I started running into some problems. The browser is still in a somewhat early state, and while core functionality is definitely there—it’s based on Chromium after all—some features like syncing are not there making things somewhat difficult for me and overall the browser a bit hard to recommend. It did however help me identify a problem with a website I was developing because it was lacking an API that was available in Firefox so that was nice.

The lack of syncing cut my testing somewhat shorter than I had planned so I’m seriously reconsidering revisiting the browser sometime in the future when things are a bit more stable, and for the moment I’m also using it as kind of a “distraction free writing browser” for the blog since I have a tendency of having a lot of tabs open and it allows me to focus on just the writing. Opening a new Firefox-window in a new desktop would go just as easily but hey. To be fair, there was also the matter of the privacy concerns as well as the overall health of the web.

“Microsoft Edge has more privacy-invading telemetry than other browsers”
Impressive given that the competition is Google.

/u/Hero_of_Shadows

Regarding the former, while I think it is an important consideration I am at the same time for now stuck using Windows as my primary operating system so a lot of that telemetry is probably already available to Microsoft meaning I’m not overly concerned about increased exposure there but it was still a consideration in ending the experiment and does mean I’m a bit more hesitant to recommend the browser in general. It does also mean that if I were to succeed in changing over to Linux at some point in the future, I would still end up bringing that baggage with me (though I believe there is as of yet no Linux-version of the browser available, so that would be a pain-point as well).

As for the latter, I’ve been poking at web development for a long time and still remember having to do special-case things for Internet Explorer which makes me somewhat worried about the current trend of Chromium-based browsers gaining such dominance since a monoculture is bad for the overall health of the web since it gives too much control over the future of it essentially to a singe entity—Google—and the only real competition, with history repeating itself, is Firefox. This means that I am very reluctant to change browsers permanently even if I do get curious about what’s out there at times.

I have been feeling a bit of a nostalgia hit recently, having seen some gameplay from Shadowlands where a holy priest was played and really wanting to give the spec a shot again. So far I’ve ended up deciding against it, since I’m still somewhat familiar with the state the spec is in and there isn’t really any content that I do where changing specs would make sense along with my last impression of the spec in this expansion being somewhat negative with it just feeling so powerless in comparison to Legion.

It feels a bit strange how something so innocuous has managed to trigger so much desire in me for something I know I won’t actually enjoy all that much in the end, and perhaps consequently the most sensible approach would be to give it a short shot so that I have it over with so to speak and then not have to think about it again. The problem there becomes, the recent thinking about wanting to play my old spec has also rekindled feelings of wanting to play my old race, night elf, which of course isn’t something quite as easily manageable.

I still find the connection I feel there to be somewhat remarkable, especially now that I have over two years of quite active—probably more active than at any point prior to Legion—play on Horde. To be fair, at the same time it still somehow feels that I’m finding my feet a bit here, not when it comes to the community or the guild I am in as I quite like those but my character. Her latest iteration is, as mentioned here before, vulpera and while the race does feel quite nice to play and having the roll back is really cool, I still find myself somehow missing both being a blood elf but even more being a night elf. Now the former is of course still an option though I think toys or consumables for swapping appearance are the more sensible alternative there rather than a race change again, the latter is sadly still quite definitely off the table unless we get to start raiding cross-faction.

In the end these will probably be feelings I end up not acting upon since while they are valid they conflict with other desires I have that take priority, and I do also really quite enjoy both playing vulpera and discipline as well. Though to be fair, as far as specs go, I do have a bit more freedom to experiment so maybe a raid here or there as holy isn’t such a terrible idea, especially one of the boostraids since the spec might even be slightly better suited for that environment; more easily allowing for healing such large groups. In addition, I was also considering trying shadow again for at least an instance or two which does mean I need to look into the gear needed for that as well. I guess I have more things to consider than I thought…

Looking back at my recent thinking about fonts as well as my general desire to poke and prod at the design of this site is making me realise that design overall something that I’m rather interested in. I mean, this is something that I’ve known to some degree before and I do already lurk on places like r/web_design so it feels somewhat obvious, but it is interesting to note how interested I actually am in making this experience and that of other projects as good as I personally can.

At the same time, I don’t really think I could do work as a designer, the idea of taking someone else’s wants and vision and turning that into a ready and useable product seems a foreign concept to me and not really something I would like to spend my days doing.

This desire to constantly iterate on the design of my personal projects was actually something of an early stumbling block when starting to test out WordPress, since I was quite used to the quick iteration cycle afforded by static site generators: since you have all the source locally and can consequently edit and then re-generate the site locally it was really easy to iterate on the design. With a CMS like WordPress in contrast, if I wanted to experiment with the design I had to set up a staging version of the site in order to do that; this problem is solved now though there is still some funkiness going on with how my staging and live environment are linked occasionally causing problems when testing things out.

At the same time, I do have experience of refining the designs of others, the current design of this website being a prime example. It’s based off of an old fansite kit provided by Blizzard, just updated a bit and brought up to a bit more modern standards with responsive elements added so that it works decently on mobile devices as well. There are some parts of it that I’m not quite sure about still, like the seemingly somewhat low contrast on the article pages themselves as well as some of the link colours, but overall it has served me well in the past year or so. So maybe working with design wouldn’t be that hopeless of a proposition after all, especially since it wouldn’t necessarily be implementing someone else’s vision but creating my own of how to use something.

Design is also overall a very interesting field, especially since it does not just compass how things look but how they work and how they are to use, these two last elements getting a lot more attention recently than they have in the past at least as far as the web is concerned. Simultaneously, there is also a lot of pretty designs going on that have poor usability and it always makes me want to improve those things and make them nicer to use; it’s also one of the main problems I tend to have when dabbling in other MMOs outside of World of Warcraft, the UI gets in the way. Honestly, one of the things I like the most about WoW, is being able to customise the UI so freely and bring the information that is important to me to the fore while blending the rest out. This also always makes it so difficult for me to understand when people hate on addons in WoW and think they are somehow cheating, all they are doing is displaying the information provided by the game in a more sensible manner—well, most of the time, and when that isn’t the case steps are generally taken to remedy that. It just seems silly to hate on a feature that is there to make the game better for the players.

Circling back to my initial point, I think I need to start poking a bit more on the site again to fix those small annoyances I have with it—hopefully with the side-effect of making it more readable in the process.

Looking back at my activities in recent times I find myself reaffirming my conclusion that I’m very bad at grunt work, the menial things that belong to jobs and tasks that are simply doing something, usually repetitive, that simply need to get done. The most recent example of this being when I was poking around with fonts, once I had concluded that I probably couldn’t achieve what I want and needed to start looking at potential alternatives that while still modern would at least provided the correct feel I kind of just stopped or at least progressed in fits and starts, letting myself get distracted by the smallest things so that I didn’t need to just keep doing the somewhat boring and manual task of merely scrolling through different font samples and looking for something that caught my eye.

It’s also something that features somewhat heavily in my writing about World of Warcraft I notice, any time I need to do the ancillary tasks related to getting my character ready for the primary content I want to do I tend to get frustrated and not remain overly motivated to continue to do so. I feel this approach in something that is primarily there for entertainment makes more sense than with other pursuits, but it could still be a useful skill to take with from there as it could prove quite important elsewhere.

I currently have a few of programming projects I have been meaning to start on for a while, and while I have quite a clear idea on where to go with them and almost exactly what to do I just can’t seem to get started. It feels like it’s the same problem in this case, I like the challenge of thinking something through but once it comes to the “easier” part of actually implementing it my will to do so starts to falter. I’m not sure what exactly can be done about this, and I tend to have bursts of motivation where these things go easier, but it feels like it’s something I’m currently struggling with more than perhaps is usual for me.

The amusing thing is, since I tend to like reading and learning things, I think I already am aware of the tools that could be useful in combating something like this yet for some reason I don’t seem to be implementing them. It’s a strange feeling, knowing exactly what and how to get something done yet at the same time being unable to do so.

I stumbled upon a discussion about “90s fonts” on HN recently and since this blog has a bit of a retro theme going on as well I was quite interested and decided to do some further digging. In order to test this on my site I disabled ClearType—the brand name if you will of Microsofts font antialiasing—and set the font used to Arial and wow, that felt like pretty much the perfect combination. It had the same blocky look seen in the screenshots of the article and it just kind of felt like it fit perfectly in here.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no sane way of achieving this. If it were available, font-smooth feels like the only reasonable way to get the correct look but not only is it very much non-standard, the Firefox variant of it is only enabled on OS X making it not really fit for purpose.

Now the approach the original article ended up with was creating a new font which mimicked the rendering of that font on older versions of Windows, and while this looked quite good to me there were some problems identified in the discussion which made me feel that wouldn’t be an appropriate approach for this site. Also, from what I could tell, they didn’t make their font-files available, so that also put a bit of a damper on that thought—to be fair, I didn’t look at the source, maybe there was a simple note there with a license.

Someone mentions bitmap fonts being usable, but I didn’t really find anything to support this statement and rather more comments stating the opposite as well as the original article.

Idea #2: Importing bitmap font files
We couldn’t make vector fonts look pixelated, but could we get around this by importing authentic 90s bitmap font files instead? We had a Windows 98 disk image with all of the system fonts including MS Serif: a riff on Times New Roman in the bitmap .FON format dating back to Windows 1.x. Unfortunately, we quickly found out that CSS @font-face doesn’t work with .FON files, and none of the web-based font conversion tools that we could find would convert them to the vector formats that are usable with @font-face.

Convincing-looking 90s fonts in modern browsers

And even if they were useable there would be problems with scaling since bitmap fonts have one “native” size and anything else will not look all that good.

With all of this at hand, I concluded that there was no way for me to achieve this look in a way that would also be technically satisfying to myself so I then ended up spending some time hunting for other fonts which might satisfy my itch for a more retro look without necessarily being as authentic as this. I did find a style I find quite satisfying but in the end decided it’s probably better to leave well enough alone for now (there was also the slight matter of it being Mozilla’s core typeface, which made it feel somewhat wrong to use it). As far as I can tell the current fonts provide quite decent legibility and while they might not be retro still have a quite pleasant air about them making them nice to read.

So I like writing, should be somewhat obvious on account of me having decided to start a blog that you seem to be reading in the first place. Or at least, I like to see myself as someone who does like write, or I like the idea of being someone who writes—not a writer necessarily, since it feels like that comes with a different set of connotations that I’m not sure fit either me or my ideal.

However, what might also be obvious to an astute reader is that I’m not necessarily so dedicated to this craft since there is a tendency for my writing to be rather sporadic, coming and going as I have both an idea and inspiration to write about it. Once I sit myself down and start, I can generally get something satisfying but down—for me at least if not for the reader.

The process is enjoyable in these moments of inspiration but for whom do I then write, myself or you dear reader? Or merely for the act itself? Looking back at some of the things I have written before—like my writings about bosses we have killed or the like—I feel a certain uncertainty in those pieces, made for the act of making itself rather than with any more lofty goal, writing a guide that isn’t quite a guide yet not quite a recollection of the events nor a thorough analysis of the fight. These pieces seem to fall into that third category, made for the act of making itself.

They were also always the writing I felt least satisified by, trying to appease some nonexistent audience yet at the end serving no real purpose but to make something. But that act of making is in itself also valuable and while it may not serve the reader it does serve to satisfy the writer and her whims, and taking care of those is important as well. So in the end, those pieces were made to satisfy me yet they did not truly feel satisfying to me.

The other type of writing I have sometimes engaged in is simply trying to put my feelings on (virtual) paper in order to work through them, yet choosing to share them so that they may potentially serve as guidance to others or as memories to myself. It can be quite interesting to go back and read some of those pieces and look at the state of mind I was in at the time, especially now with the advantage of hindsight. I tend to gain a certain amount of resolve from those moments, since especially when looking back at times when things have felt hopeless in the moment those times have passed and have given time for better things. The best example of this, I think, are the posts during my transition from Alliance to Horde; those were somewhat difficult times where I was neither quite satisfied with the game nor my place at the time, yet both of those things ended up turning for the better and I made some cool new friends through the experience.

This process of writing things down can be quite freeing, giving another perspective on a matter and helping to process the feelings associated with it. I can remember this happening many times, having written about something and having it feel like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. Thinking about it, I think I need to start doing this around more things in my life though this place probably isn’t the right platform for that, having a somewhat constrained focus at least in my mind but who but I is to decide about what I write here? Maybe that is what I need the most in this time, to realize that my audience is me and not to write in order to appease others but to write to satisfy myself and get the things said that I want to say, not worrying too much about who they are for but me.

So that part of the expansion cycle is with us again, the endtimes. The raid is cleared, there is no new content on the horizon beside the next expansion and the general interest towards the current content is rapidly waning.

Raiding

We are still going somewhat strong and maintaining our weekly raids though we have those down to one per week now, but aside from that it’s mostly just the occasional mythic+ run along with the weekly alt-run that keeps us coming together and playing together.

The reduced activity has given me the opportunity to actually participate in the aforementioned alt-run and I’ve actually taken and geared my paladin well enough to be allowed to join in there which has been rather fun. My paladin I tend to play as a tank so getting to play another role again has been fun as well though surprisingly stressful even in a raid environment which I wasn’t expecting—usually I find raids more relaxing to tank than mythic+ but this somehow hasn’t quite been the case with Ny’alotha so far though I’m getting there with my comfort level.

This has also given me the opportunity to see how much of the raid I had been ignoring mechanically since these things didn’t really directly concern me though in at least one case it would have actually been useful to know. Three specific things come to mind: Shad’har tank mechanic; Ra-den phase two tank mechanic; N’Zoth Psychus phase.

Now the Shad’har tank mechanic is essentially don’t let your co-tank get two different types of debuffs which while quite simple as a mechanic and not something I need to concern myself with when not tanking is something that tripped me up the first time there.

The Psychus phase again is very relevant as a tank since I’m directly responsible for positioning Psychus correctly so that the debuff gets applied as well as ensuring the pool on the floor spawns correctly, and it’s also very good to know as a damage dealer so the correct tentacle is getting damaged it is largely irrelevant as a healer except for impacting how and where I move though even that is more down to environmental awareness than anything else.

The Ra-den tank mechanic however is something that might have been somewhat useful to know even as a healer though to be fair our tanks did call it and as such specific knowledge of how it works wasn’t important. But essentially, in phase two, Ra-den applies a debuff that does damage to the tank which scales with their current health at the time the debuff was applied. Knowing not to heal the tank before the debuff gets applied is of course important because of this, but as noted it got called anyway and I wasn’t focusing on healing the tanks in that phase so how and why it was important didn’t really register until way after progress was over.

All of this has however made me even more interested in maintaining more alts in Shadowlands if possible so that I have reason and opportunity to gain this insight earlier on in the content when it might actually prove relevant to progressing those bosses on mythic.

Shadowlands

Speaking of Shadowlands, we are slowly also getting more information to how the upcoming expansion will work and while my outlook remains perhaps more pessimistic than most I’m trying to keep an open mind.

The systems on the surface actually look quite promising, I’m looking forward to seeing interesting legendaries again and Thorgast could end up rather fun if implemented correctly especially considering my recent experience with another roguelike but I’m just worried they’ll suffer from the same problem that the Mage Tower in Legion and the Horrific Visions in Battle for Azeroth: being gated behind world quests/dailies. To me, this just adds a completely unecessary level of stress and frustration to the experience especially when playing multiple characters.

My other really big worry are the Covenants since even with the updated information of the initial switch being easy but returning being difficult I’m really worried about how Blizzard will manage to balance the abilities in a sensible manner as well as tying cosmetic rewards to gameplay since that will probably mean I won’t really have much of a choice in the matter. With luck those two things will align however I don’t feel that is overly likely. The optimal case is of course all of the abilities being close enough together that one can actually choose freely and this is more likely for the healers anyway than for damage dealers or tanks, but it is still something I’m looking at with more worry than excitement at the moment.

I think that actually sums up my general feeling toward Shadowlands: a mix of worry and excitement, though definitely more of the former; I’m looking forward to what’s to come but wary of getting overly excited.

For the King is a turn-based roguelike RPG that we have been playing recently.

For The King is a challenging blend of strategy, turn-based combat, and roguelike elements. Each playthrough is unique with procedural maps, quests, and events. Explore Fahrul in either single player, local, or online co-op.

So far it has been a rather fun time, we even managed to get to the final boss (we think) on our first proper run of the game though there our way was sadly cut short. To be fair, we did play on the easiest difficulty thinking that a good starting point, especially for something that can be so unforgiving as a roguelike.

The game is not without its flaws, there seems to be some occasional fast-forwarding going on where everything moves very quickly and I’m not sure what’s causing that, some player behaviour or potentially network issues. The turn based nature does make it rather slow going at times as well though it does provide for some interesting choices especially when navigating the overworld view.

Despite this, the core turn-based combat experience along with managing the limited resources one tends to have in this type of game have provided for some unexpectedly interesting gameplay. The game may be quite simple but the different classes, stats and gear provide enough customization and options to still keep it interesting to me for now at least. To be honest, this game really surprised me since I was not expecting to necessarily like it since I haven’t been that into roguelike games before, but maybe that’s the coop aspect of it talking and I’m just having good times with friends and wouldn’t be interested in the game otherwise. For that purpose though, I can heartily recommend it and I think that might be something particularily valuable in these trying times.

So progress is over for this expansion, we killed N’Zoth yesterday with a moderately decent performance of only 219 tries in total.

The fight itself is a big improvement on the heroic version, with actually some rather interesting parts going on for healers with all the damage coming in though it ends up feeling somewhat finnicky with how precise all the timings one needs to hit are; a mistake a minute or so earlier with a wrongly used cooldown might lead to deaths later on. Still, it does make the whole thing feel a bit more like a precisely executed dance than anything else, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing though it can get frustrating when progressing the later parts of the fight with simply how long it takes to get there. Having to maintain a decent level of concentration for 10+ minutes before one even gets to the new and interesting bit can be difficult at times.

The secret phase was also something of a disappointement, with not that much going on aside from the usual healing and damage. Sure, there is the dance where you dodge a couple of swirlies and yes some people have to disarm the bombs, but overall it felt more like a bit of a lull between all the activity in the other phases while still requiring somewhat precise execution on timing, namely when the mob dies.

Overall though, the fight did end up feeling like a good end to the expansion, even if there might have been some fights earlier on that were interesting and the patch overall didn’t really “save” the expansion as one might have hoped. Now I guess we just need to wait for the alpha or beta to start in order to see how Shadowlands is progressing, though I am more pessimistic than optimistic of its prospects at the moment.

So as mentioned, I was rather disappointed by the confirmation at BlizzCon that we won’t be getting cross faction play, mainly because I was hoping to get the chance to play Night Elf again but of course having the opportunity to play with some friends who are still Alliance was also a factor. With the release of the new patch however, that has lessened somewhat with the Vulpera being available.

They are obviously a completely different feel to Night Elves, but still, I think they are the first Horde race I can feel at home with though admittedly it is early days and time will tell. Just hoping we don’t get another raid like Dazar’alor where one gets turned into the other faction, since Mechagnomes are the Alliance counterpart and while I do find the concept cool, they just aren’t my jam at all. Though the race changes in Dazar’alor were somewhat random anyway, not following the counterpart rules of the Orb of Deception at all—played Forsaken, got turned into Human instead of a Night Elf for some reason.

I managed to find the Eye of Shadow in the auction house to a somewhat reasonable price of around 360 gold, and off I went to the Eastern Plaguelands in order to complete “The Balance of Light and Shadow” for the final part of the puzzle: the Splinter of Nordrassil. This was definitely the most difficult part of the whole ordeal: Molten Core is rather trivial and perhaps half the raid needs to be somewhat awake in order to get through it in a reasonable time and you just need to get lucky with the drop in order to get the eye from there; the Eye of Shadow mostly requires patience, either through farming or having enough gold; but this final part actually requires you to do something alone, or well, I did it alone at least.

To expand a bit on that, I saw some old comments saying other priests could actually help with the quest, as long as:

• they only helped by healing and not doing damage
• they also have the Eye of Divinity in order to see the NPCs
• they don’t move, since apparently even moving potentially triggers the failure state

There was another priest queuing for the quest after me, but he decided not to risk it and assist me and I managed to complete it anyway which was nice.

The quest itself is somewhat curious, waves of ghostly NPCs spawn that you have to keep alive while they get bombarded by skeletal archers as well as melee skeletons that spawn, the melee skeletons will also aggro you once you start healing so some way to deal with this is recommended, I ended up using Oil of Immolation which made rather quick work of them and saved me a lot of mana. I also saw recommendations to use Stratholme Holy Water but that feels somewhat overkill since one would need a group to farm it and the oil made short work of the skeletons anyway. What I definitely would recommend however is a couple of big mana potions, the quest has you pretty much constantly in combat and healing so you will probably be stuck inside the five second rule meaning mana will be a problem; using Renew worked well for me, downranked to rank three as well as max rank.

What makes this quest curious however, is that while you are essentially spothealing a raid, you don’t get any of the usual UI elements which you would normally use to do this and instead have to completely rely on the nameplates. What makes this somewhat more annoying are the debuffs which the standard nameplates don’t display meaning you do also have to keep an eye on the NPCs themselves in order to see if they are diseased or not—curing the disease quickly is vital since it deals quite a lot of damage.

Overall the quest proved a positive surprise since I’m not actually expecting to find much difficult content in Classic which was nice, though the biggest challenge being actual UI problems as well as proper consumable usage does dampen that somewhat. The unecessary waiting between tries forced by the 20 minute or so respawn of the questgiver is also somewhat disappointing but still a lot better than the original two hour one, that was actually something I was very happy to see has been changed in Classic—or maybe it was changed in one of the later patches, not sure, though a lot of old comments indicate the timer used to be two hours.

So the year is slowly coming to an end with the holidays approaching and we had our last raids on Sunday and Monday, retail and Classic respectively. There will probably still be some non-mainraid activity going on, potentially an alt raid on Friday and an optional Classic raid on Monday the 23rd, though it will be interesting to see how far we get since I’m assuming attendance won’t be especially high.

In the meantime, I think I’ll continue farming some transmog, with my current target being finishing the Naxxramas 25-man set. Only the gloves are still missing and they quite stubbornly refuse to drop, had an especially unlucky run yesterday with two pairs of set-gloves actually dropping from Sartharion but neither pair being the Priest ones unfortunately.

Another thing on the agenda will probably be finally getting the +15 achievement from mythic+, have somehow completely neglected that so far this season and it’s rapidly coming to a close so I’ll slowly be in somewhat of a hurry to complete it. Still, only 5 dungeons are missing so the bigger challenge will probably be finding the correct keys rather than actually completing the dungeons themselves, at this point in the season most of us are rather overgeared for +15 keys so they tend to go rather smoothly when we aren’t fooling around too much. I’ve also had a couple guildies mention they are happy to help, so getting the group together shouldn’t be a problem, it’s more the actually engaging and asking people that will be the “challenge” I think.

So that’s retail, as for Classic, I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled on the auction house since I got lucky and won the roll for Eye of Divinity on our previous Molten Core run which means I need the Eye of Shadow in order to do the quest for Anathema/Benediction.

Unfortunately, we actually somewhat recently transferred over from our overpopulated and Horde-biased server to a somewhat smaller server where we avoid both the rather long queues—an hour or two during the weekends and evenings—as well as the constat gank squads in the open world which is nice but the new server being smaller means both that the Eye of Shadow is somewhat more expensive here as well as a bit less available meaning it isn’t simply a quick matter of buying the trinket I do have to do some waiting. I did briefly try farming it with a guildie with no luck, unfortunately the droprate isn’t the greatest either and the mobs have a sufficient amount of health to make farming them somewhat tedious.

Still, I’m sure I’ll end up getting the trinket eventually, and probably still this year, but it is something of an unexpected setback in the sense of something I hadn’t considered while we were changing server.

All in all, I’m rather looking forward to this small lull in activity going forward, even if the two raids a week haven’t been exactly bad and actually quite fun so far, it’s still nice to have fewer things on the todo list for a while. Especially so considering 8.3 will probably be hitting sometime early next year, which means a lot more farming coming up with the cloak as well as new levels on the neck.

It seems I’ve now hit 100 posts on this here blog, which considering the date on my first post doesn’t seem like a whole lot—the first post being dated 2015-09-01—though it is still something of a milestone. The last couple of years beginning sometime in Legion have seen a somewhat higher level of activity from me than the Warlords’ days, though I still seem to keep something of a rather relaxed pace which seems understandable since I mostly write for my own enjoyment rather than to reach any specific audience or make money.

Looking back at some of some of my older posts, the blog also serves as a nice platform for myself to think through some of the things happening in my (gaming) life which enables me to put a better perspective on things, it’s also kind of nice to be able to go back and look at how I though of certain situations at the time and then be able to reflect on how that has changed.

A perfect example of this is looking back at my switch to the Horde which I was even at the time somewhat miffed about but I think actually took better back then than now. Having played my Hunter somewhat recently has really brought back how much I actually miss being a Night Elf as strange as that may sound and the recent disappintment with no upcoming cross faction play in Shadowlands kind of made that feeling worse recently while at the time I was taking a more optimistic stance to the whole thing. Maybe the eventual introduction of more customization along with Forsaken heritage armour sometime down the line will lessen that feeling somewhat but for now it is one of my major annoyances with the game at the moment.

But I guess all of this is just a very long way of saying: an arbitrary milestone has been reached, it has been nice so far, and hopefully I’ll end up hitting the next milestone a bit sooner than this time around!

Yesterday we ended up doing something interesting in Classic, namely helping a guildie finish up their Paladin epic mount quest. Due to us all being much poorer back in the day, this was something I never did end up doing during the original release of the game and as such was something of a new experience for me.

Now, of course, me playing a Priest and not a Paladin I didn’t get see all of the quest, only getting some snippets here and there of the quests that we did in dungeons and even then I’m not sure I participated in all of the fun but still, it was interesting to see what all needed to be done as well as the Paladin-specific final event in Scholomance where we had to fight through waves of shades and finally a Death Knight in order to free the spirit of the horse.

This final event proved surprisingly interesting, mostly when the caster shades arrived since they spawned and started casting on the nearest person it seemed, leading to a close call with myself and another party member before I managed to shackle one while we killed of the rest. Aside from that though, the event wasn’t overly taxing though this was probably partially due to our somewhat strange party composition consisting of two healers—myself and the Paladin.

Everything before the final event was mostly in the category of “do the dungeon normally, but the Paladin needs some quest items or needs to activate something for a quest” which meant it wasn’t really overly interesting from an outsider perspective though doing the dungeons was fun as usual.

Still, it was all well worth the experience and fun and now our Paladin doesn’t get left behind while running to the raid since he too has a fast mount so that’s an added bonus!

So as noted a while back I was in the hospital and have been in recovery a good while which has lead to me not talking as much about some of the recent interesting events—namely, PTR and BlizzCon—as I would have otherwise liked.

Recovery however, has been going well and I’m slowly starting to feel like I’m in somewhat good condition again and maybe I can slowly start gaming more again.

BlizzCon

So BlizzCon this year kind of went like expected, we got a lot of new announcements and they all looked quite interesting though the apology at the start did end up feeling a bit hollow since there was no action taken alongside that apology.

Seeing more story content for Overwatch is nice, having recently actually taken the time to read some of the comics the story and the world does seem really interesting so in a way it’s something of a pity that there hasn’t been more story in-game that we could explore.

Diablo 4 seems nice, though while that is a franchise I enjoy it’s not one I’m overly invested in, getting more story to play like with Overwatch will be nice but I’m in no real hurry to get to play it.

StarCraft ended up being ignored a bit it felt like, with not much new content on the horizon though that is somewhat understandable but still a pity since StarCraft was one of my favourite games growing up though I never got into the competitive side of it.

As for the “main dish” for me at least, World of Warcraft, the announcements left me rather disappointed. There was really one primary thing that I had wanted from this expansion, and that was being able to play Night Elf again and that unfortunately got definitely denied in the Q&A they held at the end. This kind of extends to my fear with the new Covenant system, there are some really nice cosmetic effects tied into choosing a covenant however there is also player power gated behind that choice meaning I might again be “forced” to make a choice I don’t really want to make.

As for the rest of the mechanics, Blizzard seemed quite clear in pointing out that most of the systems were in very early stages with them even being unsure how loot would work and 8.3 with the corrupted gear being one of the deciding factors there which means it feels a bit early to comment on all of that, though so far aside from the concern voiced in the last paragraph regarding the covenants the systems do seem a lot better than the ones in Battle for Azeroth with the tower having the potential to be as interesting as Mythic+ was in Legion which would be nice though I am slightly skeptical of the rogue-lite nature of it since that type of game hasn’t really been my jam so far.

Public Test Realm Raid Testing

The PTR has also been out for a while and we’ve gotten to test every single boss I think, some of them even on mythic—and some of them on mythic when they weren’t supposed to be available on mythic; due to some bug on the PTR, for the first Wrathion and Ma’ut testing we were thrown into mythic instead of heroic which while a fun experience was more buggy than the PTR is usually leading to not very useful testing on our part.

As for the rest of our tests, they have gone decently well and given us a rather good feel for the bosses—except N’zoth, that fight was too buggy for us to do any real testing—which is always nice to have in preparation of the actual content. However the tuning has as usual been completely out of whack, so if we actually want to get any practice on the later phases we’ll need to focus on the tests that come shortly before release.

Still, so far the raid seems rather fun with some bosses even bringing in some rather fresh mechanics—looking at you, Prophet Skitra—which is nice to see and others bringing back very annoying mechanics, namely the Void Miasma at Drest’agath—healing people when line of sight is a major issue never really felt fun, and was one of the more annoying parts in the Queen Azshara encounter so I’m not overly thrilled to see it will probably play a major role again.

Overall though, I’m hopeful when it comes to the raid even with the Discipline nerfs coming out on the PTR and look forward to progessing it after a nice holiday break.

So I spent the last almost two weeks in hospital, got into the ward Monday last week with the surgery scheduled for Tuesday and they deemed me fit enough to come home yesterday. It was an interesting experience, especially as someone who has generally not had many problems with her health, to spend such a significant time in hospital, completely bound to the bed for the first several day even, not being allowed to get up or move too much due to that potentially damaging the wound that was healing after the surgery. The healing is naturally still onoing, but I’m afforded a lot more movement now though sitting is still taboo.

It’s also interesting to notice that the things I expected to be problematic were really the minor things, like boredom or pain, and the much more mundane things ended up being the real problem. Case in point, as I wasn’t allowed to leave bed until Monday—almost a week after the surgery—I ended up being put on a liquid diet in order to spare my bowels a bit of work and pain. This unfortunately did not quite go as planned, and I spent the weekend with a very stuck stomach and even now though I’ve been eating solid food for the best part of a week my stomach is still catching up a bit. It all seems rather obvious in hindsight, but this was definitely not something I expected to be dealing with during my stay there.

Another kind of related point, eating when you can’t sit is actually really annoying, even more so in hospital where though you do have an adjustable bed it is made to be ergonomic and doesn’t allow you to contort your back in such a way as to allow your throat to go somewhat straight down while still not putting too much pressure on ones nether regions so as for it to count as sitting—basically putting more pressure on one’s behind than one’s back is bad. This was especially rough with certain types of food like rye bread that have a tendency to be rather rough and as a consequence were somewhat difficult to eat. One learns ways to work around this and as noted it does get much easier at home where one can assume a less ergonomic but more manageable position but still it was one of those things one doesn’t really appreciate before experiencing it.

Overall though, my hospital stay was an overwhelmingly positive experience: the staff was awesome with a great sense of humor, it was interesting hearing the stories and experiences of other people in my room who seemed to come from almost all over the country, it actually felt surprisingly freeing basically being absolved of all responsibility for one’s being with only the single-minded task of resting and getting better. Due to the flurry of activity, time also went by surprisingly quickly and there was rarely a moment where I really felt bored. So while I can’t really recommend that you try to get hospitalized, I do feel I can say that it can actually turn out to be a surprisingly positive experience overall.

So I managed to get myself a fast kitty in Classic, in other words the epic mount. It was actually surprisingly easy, considering how short a time Classic has been out and I haven’t really done any moneymaking activities in the game, mainly just ran dungeons. Sure, those dungeon runs were fairly successful and with a mage so my costs were low—not even water—but still, wasn’t expecting it to be this profitable especially consindering I played back in the day and was always pretty poor, always sitting around 50-100 gold.

Because of that, felt nice being able to achieve this in Classic, something I never managed back then only buying my epic mount while leveling in Burning Crusade though there I did later manage to afford the epic flying mount.

In general though, the epic mount seems much more common than back then, not sure if this is due to the patch we are playing or if players are simply that much more skilled or knowledgeable these days, I know that’s the case for me but it’s still interesting to see. What probably also helped me is that I’m just a lot more motivated to play the game now than I was back then somehow, and actually set goals and achieve things. My playstyle used to be a lot more aimless with several breaks which probably is what caused me not to achieve too much back then.

Still, with how seemingly easy it is to get the epic mount now, I would recommend it since the extra movement speed is nice even for someone like me who spends most of their time in dungeons or raids. It’s also one of the few sensible places to invest one’s gold I find, so that helps as well.

World of Warcraft Classic was released pretty much exactly two weeks ago by now, Tuesday morning at one in the morning. The launch uptill pretty much the last few days actually went surprisingly poorly considering how well Blizzard handled both Legion and Battle for Azeroth, with the game being unplayable for most people due to the queues on the servers. Basically if you didn’t log in sometime before midday you probably weren’t getting in in a reasonable amount of time which at times proved problematic for me with the queue being longer than the time until the next raid. I was rather disappointed to see this, since Blizzard had specifically deviated from the way the original game was launched and introduced layering in order to avoid this very problem, but apparently they didn’t go far enough with this approach.

Beyond that pretty much utter failure on Blizzard’s part, Classic has actually been a ton of fun and it has been interesting to see how differently people approach the game now that everything is a bit more well known than it was at the start as well as how the different pace of modern games seems to influence it as well. I think the most notable example of this are the “bombing runs” of dungeons that seem to really start when Scarlet Monastery becomes available and then continues in Zul’Farrak and later in Blackrock Depths. It seems to basically boil down to the Legion-style of large AoE pulls of packs which then get nuked down in order to level up quickly, not really doing the dungeons for the loot but for the experience. It is quite an effective method, especially with the amount of players on the servers since all of the outdoor content is very heavily farmed, so having your own instance to farm is quite a bit more efficient. I’m sure some of the professional levelers have more efficient methods of leveling, but for the more normal player like me this has been a very effective and fun way of keeping up the pace.

Doing the dungeons, it has also been interesting to see how my approach to healing in them has changed or rather stayed the same. I’m still trying to get in as much of my healing as possible through Greater Heal only, in order to stay as manaefficient as possible—the big difference to back in the day is that due to how big the pulls are I still end up running out of mana with this strategy, while that only used to happen when we had a really bad pull back in the day. Actually kind of used to pride myself on being able to do dungeon runs without needing to sit and drink, but that just isn’t realistic when you pull several packs and the tank is in need of pretty much constant attention.

Something else that’s a bit different this time around is that I’m now assining spell damage and healing a somewhat higher value than before, since it does seem to be one of those stats that no one really realized was good back in the day. I still really like spirit, but it of course doesn’t help much when my primary task is spamhealing the tank though that is getting to not be as important as we have moved into Blackrock Depths since we can’t quite do the pulls we did in Zul’Farrak and we also kite the mobs a bit more than before. Still, my higher priorisation of spellpower probably means I will need to start thinking about downranking at some point, something I purposefully avoided back in the day since I didn’t feel like stepping into the five second rule more than necessary was a good idea hence trying to only use my most powerful and manaefficient spell but spellpower naturally changes the HPM calculation on all spells.

Personal experiences aside, I also have to say, overall with the implementation aside from the queues Blizzard has been fairly successful keeping most things as they were along with some small interface improvements like the new raidframes which I don’t really mind since basically everyone used an addon for those anyway. There is a small list of things I’ve found so far that they’ve missed though:

• K was completely unbound instead of being bound to Skills like it used to be
• T was also unbound instead of being bound to auto-attack
• As introduced in Legion, you can’t buy partial stacks from vendors which at times is somewhat annyoing especially with water or the like
• Warlock pets despawn too quickly, making me unable to ressurect them

Now, admittedly, all of these are very minor things and the first two are easily fixed by going into the keybindings, but they were still things that stood out to me as deviations from the original.

The final deviation is of course the Battle.net integration and layering, but both of those were pretty much forseable so they’re not really worth mentioning—and layering is getting removed at some point in the future anyway so.

All of that summarised means I’ve actually been quite happy with Classic at the times I’ve gotten to play the game and this has lead me to putting in quite a significant chunk of time into the game which has been a rather welcome diversion from Azshara progression. Here’s hoping Blizzard sees this as a success as well and considers Burning Crusade servers since from the people I’ve spoken with quite a few of them would probably enjoy those even more it for many having been one of the best if not the best version of the game.

We did the thing a few days ago actually, just been too busy with Classic to post. I don’t really have much to say about the boss really, except that it’s probably the most complex and annoying boss I’ve played so far and from a healer point of view not overly fun, which was kind of to be expected when the world first was with only two healers. Still, finally getting the kill felt really good, probably even moreso due to that!

So despite our Queen Azshara progress still being in full swing, not much has been happening lately for me in World of Warcraft. Sure, there was that heroic Eternal Palace run that was rather fun, and my hunter has finally managed to find herself a new weapon after a long search but aside from those things it has been bussiness as usual, a bit of mythic+ here and there but overall not that much going on.

I did also finally stop slacking and got my neck up to 60 for rank three of the Crucible essence since it seems I had somewhat underestimated the damage potential of that one—or maybe I just didn’t want to spend the time farming Azerite—since I figured it could prove useful for the Azshara fight considering it isn’t that healing intensive. This puts me way behind the average in my guild, with several members already having pushed to 65 for the second minor essence, but I’m fine with that since I know I have neither the time nor the motivation to get to 65 before the progress is over and after that it doesn’t really matter anymore and before 65 there are no more significant gains for me to reach even if getting 62-63 should be fairly trivial without too much time investment.

Regarding time investment, one of the reasons I haven’t had so much time to spend playing World of Warcraft is that I’ve spent the last month or so at our summer house, enjoying the company of my parents as well as helping out with some of the projects they have going on here. It’s been a nice time overall even if I’m not quite as engaged with the projects as they are and I think the change of pace and priorities from city life does me good even though it does make some things more difficult, like finding time or things to write here.

I’m also looking forward to/dreading the launch of Classic, since I think it will be a nice distraction from the current state of the game as well as something that can instill some form of joy in some of the changes implemented since then that one tends to take granted now. There is however one big niggle with that whole thing: it seems most of my guildies want to start on a PVP server while I was looking to start on a PVE one which makes me have to think whether I join the people I know I’ll like playing with and have more readily accessible for spontaneous game sessions on the PVP server or if I go with my preferred server type and have to find new people to play with there. It’s a tough choice since if their interest vanes quickly and mine doesn’t I’m kind of stuck on a server type I don’t enjoy but on the other hand if I go off alone I can’t really join in on potential spontaneous post-raid (retail) dungeon runs (Classic) making it more of a consious effort to play Classic. I still have a few days to decide and have my name reserved on both servers, so that shouldn’t be a problem at least, but it’s still an unfortunate choice to have to make.

So with me playing the Hunter more frequently in recent times and many of the people I play with on Alliance not necessarily being active raiders currently, there was some interest in taking a poke at the new(ish) raid and see what the bosses in there were capable of and it also gave me a good opportunity to potentially get some more gear—unfortunately no luck with that.

We started out with a core of seven players, meaning we were a few short of being able to reasonably enter the raid necessitating looking for randoms to fill out the ranks. This lead us to the decision of going with the more PUG-friendly raid-size of 20 players, with the usual 2/4/14 setup—two tanks, four healers and 14 damage dealers. The bigger raid size allows for more individual mistakes from each player which tends to be a very good property to have when you are relying on players whose capabilities you have no idea of.

The raid started out well enough, with us killing Sivara on our first attempt though admittedly with heavy losses—it seems the decision to bring a larger group paid off, since several people clearly had no idea what they were doing in this encounter. I tried my best to explain the general tactics to our own group on TeamSpeak, knowing that they had little to no experience in the raid and this seemed to work out well for them for the most part.

After a successful kill we moved on towards the next boss, Behemoth, who did provide us with one wipe since several of our randoms did not seem familiar with the healing immunity magic and consequently didn’t get the buff allowing them to be healed—one of our own had also missed out on us killing the pufferfish on pull, meaning they didn’t get the buff at start and also ended up dead. A short couple of raid warnings later on the second pull we managed to down the boss with no casualties which was a relief since I don’t find the boss particularily interesting to play.

Radiance of Azshara again went smoothly, without many casualties and I believe only one try needed to kill the boss. To be fair, this boss’ mechanics are more standard faire than Behemoths’ and anyone who did some dungeoning in Legion and remembers Wrath of Azshara from Eye of Azshara knows something like 80% of the mechanics on this boss already, making success with inexperienced players more likely.

This, however, is where our moderately good run ended. We unfortunately got stuck on Lady Ashvane trying the relatively standard two-phase tactic but unfortunately not quite making it with our best try being with around 500-thousand boss health left. I probably should’ve done some more stringent pruning of people who weren’t performing or perhaps switched to the potentially more easy-to-execute three phase strategy if we had people failing, but the wipes eventually lead to the raid dissolving with the extra players we had found leaving. Luckily, this nicely coincided with a healer we know coming online who we knew and was reliable, so we decided to continue the raid in tighter setup of 2/2/6 though still needing two random damage dealers—for Ashvane we actually ran 2/1/7 since we still wanted to make the damage check for two phase and we knew our healer could handle healing it alone.

We rounded up the evening by killing Orgozoa without too much fuss and Queen’s Court with a lot of fuss, and I have to say though the first half or so of the raid was much easier with the larger group it was much more fun having mostly people we knew in the raid and being able to communicate properly even when we were having significant problems such as at Queen’s Court.

Overall I had a rather fun time doing some “casual progress raiding” in a somewhat more relaxed atmospehere than my normal progress raids, where while I did know the encounters many in the raid did not and I also had to play them very differently, not only because I was playing a completely different role from normal but also because of the small raid size towards the end necessitating me more frequently playing and paying attention to mechanics that I could probably normally safely ignore in heroic—it might actually be rather fun if we get this small raid going on a somewhat regular basis, at least for a while, and there seemed to be interest in doing so. Here’s hoping we find enough people to get going next week without having to look for extras!

So, well, we killed Za’qul. And, well, it feels like there isn’t that much more to say about the fight from a healer perspective that I haven’t already said. It’s basically: keep the tanks alive, handle the bursts of damage from the dreads preferably with some sort of damage reduction cooldown—making Priests and Paladins good—and for the rest, just play the mechanics. Sure, there is some jumping between the different realms—specifically the fear realm in the later stages—but even there you just have to follow the rest of the group and go down at the correct times.

This means the fight is a bit boring to talk about since it’s all more in the execution than any specific exciting mechanic, and while the fight does get a bit more intense with time it isn’t overly intense. We also ended up running four healers for this fight, though I could see the rekills starting to get done with three healers quite quickly, since there really isn’t that much healing to go around. So overall, a bit of a disappointment after Queen’s Court, but still we got him down which is always nice.

So I’ve mentioned having leveled my Hunter on Alliance before and in recent times due to some old friends who still play Alliance having returned to the game, it has given me the opportunity to play her a bit more and try out being a damage-dealer for a change, a role I very seldomly play in World of Warcraft. The experience has actually been a surprising amount of fun, with us doing mythic+ a couple of times per reset and Marksmanship proving to be a suprising amount of fun even with Barrage not being as good of a spell as it was in early Legion making the spec a bit less fun.

There is however, a bigger frustration I have with the spec and that is the somewhat silly way AoE damage works, with one target being good, three or more clumped targets being good, but two targets ending up as basically single target which can be very frustrating depending on the dungeon and the tank since one gets the feeling one isn’t contributing as much as one should on two-target pulls. From what I know, this is the primary reason our hunter in the mythic+ group I had Horde-side earlier in the expansion was playing Beast Mastery—a spec I do not really enjoy at all, and he I believe also didn’t find as fun as Marksmanship—which I feel is unfortunate. It’s a very strange feeling, seemingly being unable to anything sensible on certain packs.

Another slight frustration with the Hunter doesn’t really come from the class but rather from bad luck, with me not having looted a single new weapon in the three or so weeks that we have now been doing mythic+, leaving me to run around with a world quest reward weapon with very suboptimal item level and somewhat suboptimal stats. It’s frustrating especially knowing that we have several times done dungeons where an upgrade could have dropped and me at times even using a bonusroll in hopes of simply getting something decent yet constantly simply having the bad luck of not getting an upgrade.

Despite those frustrations, the experience overall has been rather positive and somewhat more relaxing than my tanking adventures—though those are enjoyable as well—and has given me the opportunity to do something completely different amidst the current mythic progress which is a welcome change.

So this is actually a bit of old news, but we managed to kill Queen’s Court on mythic!

The fight is actually a perhaps surprising amount of fun, being one of the more hectic fights so far as a healer with a somewhat constant barrage of high incoming damage on the group through the sparks along with the edicts that at time makes executing on healing cooldowns rather tricky, especially Repeat Performance as a discipline priest since it forces you to change the way you apply Atonement by silencing you after two consecutive casts of the same spell. This was fairly easy to work around by alternating between Shadow Mend and Power Word: Shield, but it was just another thing to keep eye on in a somewhat hectic fight.

Still, it’s also a fight that one can actually learn with the sequence of edicts being known and the bursts from the sparks being fairly predictable so once you get it down it starts feeling, well not easy but at least manageable.

Now with the kill being a few days old, means we have also had a decent amount of tries on Za’qul, which to be fair actually feels a bit more boring so far than Queen’s Court. The problem really, is that while there are some pretty large bursts of damage early on through the fears the rest of the time it’s mostly a case of doing damage even as a healer and playing mechanics—mainly the tentacles that on mythic come in threes—which just doesn’t feel quite as interesting as the previous two bosses. It does get better on in the later stages of the fight with the stacking debuff, but it feels like mosts tries so far we are losing people to the “simple” stuff of tentacles or simple bad luck with the spawn of the Maddening Eruption landing in the middle of the tentacles causing a wipe. So the fight is still tricky, it’s just that we haven’t consistently gotten to 40% where the fight really begins in earnest and the way there is something of a slog. Still, those last 40% will probably prove very interesting indeed and I’m looking forward to our progress there.

We managed to kill Orgozoa yesterday, and honestly my thoughts from the PTR kind of still stand. The fight is really rought to heal, yes, and has to be executed well purely from a mechanical standpoint, but as far as really interesting things actually happening during the fight? Not really overly so.

Phase two still really felt like the easier one of the two, mainly because from a healer standpoint you are basically back at the beginning of phase one with almost nobody having the debuff. Sure, there are some other things to watch out for like the stomps and we did have a few deaths and consequently wipes to those but that I think is mostly because the area of that ability is somewhat unclear and people had to learn that, but overall phase two just doesn’t have that much more going on—always having the adds there for DOTs was nice as a discipline priest though, getting that extra healing going on.

And phase one, well, it got really rough towards the end even with us five-healing it, but it feels like such a slow burn that while it is challenging it doesn’t really feel exciting or overly dangerous most of the time with potentially the exception being during the Arcing Currents when players have to spread out in order to avoid spreading the Incubation Fluid to unaffected players so they are outside of many area healing spells yet take a burst of damage, but even those weren’t really lethal if the players were topped properly. That was still the primary point we lost players especially towards the end where almost the whole raid needs constant healing so it is something to watch out for.

After we killed Orgozoa however, we did have a decent amount of time left to get a few trys in on the Queen’s Court which proved much more interesting. Now, I was slightly skeptical of the fight at first because even though some of the decrees can be annoying on heroic like Repeat Performance, they’re mostly somewhat ignorable. On mythic however, the pure damage coming in from the orbs along with the much tighter timing on both the decrees as well as things like the charge made the encounter much more interesting than I was expecting. Also, there always being a decree active and them rotating in a set manner makes the fight more interesting as well, since that allowed the designers to put in really harsh sequences like the orb explosions during Deferred Sentence which then very quickly gets followed by Obey or Suffer. That combination really ended up being the most difficult part for us so far and the one which I think we will need to work on the most.

So I think we have some very fun progress ahead of us, once we manage to reclear everything this reset.

So Method managed to snag the world first on Queen Azshara as is somewhat usual, though it seems to have been a rather close race with Limit this time around, moreso than the last couple of ones.

Method have done it! They've finished Queen Azshara off, claiming the World First and winning the Eternal Palace Race to World First. This is Method's 12th endboss WF and raid/race win, as well as the third of Battle for Azeroth!https://t.co/vlitnSMzrC#RaidProgress #RWF pic.twitter.com/BXJejSGccM

— Method (@Methodgg) July 28, 2019

That however, isn’t really what I wanted to talk about, but rather the somewhat unusal setup they ended up running for the boss, namely: only running with two healers on the first kill of the last boss of a raid. Now, playing a healer myself this is obviously something that doesn’t feel overly nice since it means that more healers will be benchend than usual and to me it already felt rough having three healer bosses since I like my fellow healers, but also from what I know this is somewhat unprecedented and it feels like it points towards some heavy flaws in the encounter design of Queen Azshara for this to be possible at all.

One large contributing factor to this being possible was the maximum health reduction debuff that you need to take in order to keep the different seals charged which mean there has to be overall less damage coming in or it would simply be oneshotting players. This was also a large contributor to Method’s decision to run two discipline priests I think, since shields give you that extra buffer on that low health—of course, discipline also brings with it some decent extra damage, and them already running only two healers indicates every extra bit of damage is welcome.

But secondly, as noted above, the fight on heroic as well just feels like it has very little incoming damage, with me on our kills generally spending more time doing damage than healing. Sure, there is some decent burst in the last phase but aside from that the fight felt kind of boring from a healer perspective and I guess that is now simply getting validated even on mythic which I think is sad to see.

It’s odd, all of this makes me kind of not look forward toward Azshara that much, since it makes me feel like maybe the fight won’t be that interesting. Now granted, Method still needed several hundred pulls to get the boss down, so I’m not thinking it will be easy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the fight will be interesting which is unfortunate for the end-boss of a tier especially for one with so much lore tie-in. I guess I’ll have to see once we get there, but for now my excitement for the end-boss is down somewhat though we still have a long way to go so there’s time to change that—I also somewhat doubt we will be running a two healer strategy since we only have one priest at the moment, but we’ll see.

We ended up doing some mythic+ after the raid yesterday as is somewhat usual, and it reminded me of something that had bothered me in Legion and is back in Battle for Azeroth though the other way around; namely the big difference between the fortified and tyrannical affix. Now, they make different parts of the dungeon stronger so it seems obvious that there would be a big difference between them, but the bigger thing I feel is not that there is a difference but that one of them always feels disproportionately harder than the other; in Legion that was tyrannical with some bosses simply one-shotting you if you didn’t have enough gear or later on if you simply played the wrong class or spec, in Battle for Azeroth however it seems to me that fortified is the much worse affix.

I think this change is due to Blizzard’s changed design direction with dungeons in Battle for Azeroth, putting more of an emphasis on making the trash interesting and actually having abilities to prevent the kind of insane large pulls that we saw towards the end of Legion especially in the Mythic Dungeon Invitational and while I think this design decision was a valid attempt at fixing that and something that is hard to change again for Battle for Azeroth, it does make the dungeons feel like much more of a slog for normal groups during fortified weeks as well as strenghtening the skip-focused metagame at the MDI which I think is more harmful than the one focused on large pulls. While those large pulls felt pretty insane to the averge player and even relatively high-end ones, they still required excellent execution and usually came with high risk while simply skipping the mobs while not risk-free is considerably less risky as well as from an esports perspective, being much less interesting to watch—this is probably also why so many players I know enjoyed the Reaping affix so much since it provided the opportunity to kind of re-live that feeling of making a huge pull and surviving it while also providing a nice opportunity for more multitarget focused classes to shine. I also feel that having very intense trash that constantly requires a high level of attention along with bosses that also tend to be mechanically intense even with fortified makes running dungeons much more tiring than it was in Legion and somehow also a bit less fun, and skips aren’t all that interesting either nor as generally available especially the ones done at the MDI since those often rely on the Night Elf Shadowmeld ability which you rarely have for the complete group on live especially since most of the higher-end activity is on Horde and not Alliance unfortunately.

Now, Blizzard has attempted to counter this skip-focused meta in the new season with the introduction of Azsharas’ emissaries that are often placed so that you have to vary your route or simply preventing you from doing a normal stealth or invisibility skip due to them having truesight, but I’m not sure this is a change in the right direction. As noted above, I don’t feel that the whole dungeon being this intense gauntlet of always complex encouters be they trash or boss actually contributes to a good dungeon experience, as a player it is actually nice having a bit of a lull during the trash while preparing for the next boss-fight with maybe some more interesting trash sprinkled in at times but not every single pack—looking at you, MOTHERLODE!!!.

Along with this, there is the general problem of the very high variability in the difficulty of different mythic+ affixes with this week being Grievous again which is just a pain to handle as a discipline priest making me much less eager to run significant amounts of mythic+ this week which I find a shame since it’s an activity I actually quite enjoy so being discouraged from participating in it doesn’t feel particularily good but this seems like something Blizzard isn’t particularily intent on changing.

Overall, I think that with Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard went a little too hard in the other direction with dungeon design and I hope we end up meeting somewhere in the middle with the next expansion where bosses one-shotting you doesn’t become a hardcap on how high of a key you can do that specific week like it was in Legion but trash still feeling more manageable even in large groups than it is now in Battle for Azeroth. If Mechagon is any indicator of future design changes though, I don’t think that is very likely given the trash in there but we’ll see with the next expansion.

We managed to squeeze in a kill on Lady Ashaven yesterday, on the last day of the reset bringing our total of first week mythic kills to four which I think is a rather respectable number this time around.

On the surface, not much changes with this fight from heroic with the primary difference being higher damage and healing requirements but in the case of this boss that was more than enough since the tuning is really rough meaning you basically can’t afford any deaths—that you can’t instantly battle ress at least—or you will not have enough damage to kill the boss in time. The bigger difference—for me, personally, as a healer—was the rather hefty amount of incoming damage as well as the fact we were only playing with three healers on this boss making every single healer mistake or general mechanics fail that much more critical, having just one extra coral patch up after phase two basically instantly spelled a wipe. I guess there is one significant difference to heroic there, when you laser the corals away in phase two they actually spawn a couple of spots on the ground that need to be soaked, if not they spawn new corals which spells a bad time.

In general, I found the fight suprisingly fun since there was almost always some upcoming timing I had to keep in mind and the rotation between phase one and two provided a bit of change in what I had to be watching, and because the damage check was so tight I actually got the opportunity to focus a bit more on doing damage during the lulls in my own cooldown usage which provided some interesting additional challenge since my damage actually mattered more than in other fights.

After the kill we had a little time left over to take a few pokes at the next boss, Orgozoa, and I can already tell that fight is going to be fun since during the few tries we did the healing requirement on individual healers seemed similar if somewhat lower than Ashvane with the difference being us having five healers on Orgozoa and only three on Ashvane. I even managed to go completely out of mana on one of our pulls which is impressive considering the fight lasted maybe three minutes or so which has me somewhat worried but simultaneously excited what that fight will bring, I guess I’ll find out this reset if we manage to clear out the previous bosses in a reasonable time.

So mythic week for the Eternal Palace started on Wednesday and we have managed to get stuck on Lady Ashvane as was to be expected I think with her being the first “proper” boss of the raid because she has something of a difficult damage check even while running only three healers. I believe our best try ended up somewhere along 40% with us managing to get to the third phase two and some way into it but that’s nowhere close to killing her since as far as our timings go, we are trying to kill her in the third one and we don’t quite have the damage for that yet. Still, I think we had a rather good showing for only three hours of raiding on Thursday, having killed the three first bosses along with heroic clear on Wednesday.

Wednesday in general was an interesting day, with a large part of the guild along with me deciding they wanted to farm mythic+ in preparation for the raid which meant I had to get up earlier than usual in order to be online when the servers reset. It was a fun time though the loot gods were not with us, with our group getting pretty much no titanforges and very few upgrades in general. I might want to do some more mythic+ on the weekend in order to prepare for the next raid on Sunday, though shouldn’t be quite as important for me since my gear is for the most part quite up-to-date and we didn’t really have healing problems on Ashvane as of yet though I guess it could enable me to do some more damage and it seems that Orgozoa could require a bit more healing again since I believe we want to run five healers for that boss.

I’ve also had the time to run Operation: Mechagon again giving me the blueprint for rank two of Vision of Perfection which was welcome for Ashvane—using it there for the little extra damage it provides and the cooldown reduction also proved useful—though I have to say I’m not a huge fan of the time gating there, would prefer something more farmable but I guess timegating is the name of the game for essences, either through limited reputation or weekly things like the mythic+ chest or Mechagon with the exception being that one very grindy battleground essence that I’m happy I don’t need to get since I’m not a huge fan of PVP.

In general, I think that’s something Blizzard failed on in regards to the essences, depending on “luck” you might be forced (read, heavily insentivized) to do content you might not enjoy at all in order to get the essence that is actually good for your class and spec in content you do enjoy doing. Simultaneously, I do think it is good that there is some incentive to try out different forms of content in order to see if they have changed enough that you might like them now but this approach just seems unecessarily heavy-handed.

Overall, the mythic week has started out very fun with finally some proper fun new content to do along with a renewed interest in mythic+ from my guildies which means more opportunities to run dungeons which I also enjoy so if it goes on like this I’d call this week a success.

On Sunday we ended up killing Azshara first try after some rough sub-one-percent wipes on Thursday and it was a very nice feeling even though it would’ve been even nicer to kill her already on Thursday since I think we would have ended around top 10 world at that point.

This kill was immediately followed by clearing The Eternal Palace on normal as well as reclearing once again Battle of Dazar’alor for the mount from Jaina, all in all a rather impressive set of farm achieved on one raid evening which took me somewhat by surprise but I guess should have been expected with our quick progress in the “pleb”-raid on Friday where we managed to clear normal as well as several bosses on heroic with alts as well as the greatly increased damage from the essences.

The raid in general is rather fun, though the last two bosses, Za’qul and Azshara, have me worrying somewhat for the more casual players since they again seem to be somewhat complex fights with several phases and a ton to learn. That said, they will now have the advantage of a big item level increase through the new raid that they did not receive in Crucible of Storms which might prove enough to make this raiding experience smoother as well as my perspective on the whole thing being rather far away from their experiences so such troubles are hard for me to predict.

That aside, I did find the Azshara fight rather fun though somewhat boring as a healer until the last phase with not much damage coming in before that. There are a decent amount of mechanics to think about, among them the decrees and mind control which I think nicely show some of the personality of Azshara—being so certain in her position as a queen as to commandeer people who are not her subjects, as well as being able to charm almost anyone to do her bidding—as well as the wards which we need to maintan in order to keep the water from killing us. With how the tuning was on heroic however, it does make me curious how many wipes we will end up seeing on mythic since I think we had much less trouble with Jaina on heroic than Azshara and Jaina was 300+ pulls—on the other hand, for Uu’nat we went in on heroic without any idea what to do while almost completely ignoring mechanics and killed him on the first try, and yet on mythic he was 300+ pulls as well, so maybe that’s no indication.

As for the rest of the bosses, my thoughts from the PTR mostly stand, with the exception of Orgozoa who proved much easier on live than there as well as Za’qul who didn’t have quite the one-shot potential with his fears on live as he did on the PTR making the fight much more manageable—of course, that is partially down to our gear level on live as compared to the PTR, so this might be much more difficult with less gear. Also, the Blackwater Behemoth is still a poorly executed environment, with not being able to eat under water preventing the group from properly recovering from a wipe as well as buffing up, that really needs to be fixed in some sensible manner though the fight itself seems fine now.

Yesterday we went ahead and cleared Operation: Mechagon on the live realms with hardmode and it was quite the contrast compared to the PTR experience, feeling somewhat easy even though we had the hardmode active which we didn’t for the most part on the PTR.

The biggest change I noticed was by King Gobbamak where the damage from the quake he does had been heavily reduced, not really even needing healing to keep anyone from dying as long as nobody got hit—still a good idea to top up the group but not nearly as intensive as on the PTR. The trash before King Mechagon had a similar nerf, where it still does significant damage but is much more surivable without instant reaction from the healer or using the absorb shields from the other adds.

Another interesting thing was the hardmode on K.U.-J.0., where you get a stacking slow debuff which ends you at 80% reduced movement speed. Since the fight is rather dependant on being able to spread apart as well as line of sight the boss, this proved somewhat tricky to work around though there was a nice corner to the left of the boss’ spawn—when you are looking at him standing in the room—where it was rather easy to do. With weaker gear or less damage I would think this might still prove somewhat tricky though, we didn’t need to play the movement mechanics overly much since we were able to kill the boss fairly quickly.

Finally, the big challenge came by King Mechagon himself, where the hardmode actually caused us a fair amount of wipes since the timing for it is somewhat brutal. The hardmode activates a instakill mechanic on the boss that charges up (down?) with time, the energy bar of the extra boss serving as a timer and the mechanic firing when the bar gets depleted. This happens fairly quickly, however it can be stalled with the interruption sequence. This flashes on the skulls on the side of the room when the cannon is at 35 energy and the buttons become clickable at 10-15 energy or so giving your group approximately 5 seconds to enter the correct sequence to prevent a wipe.

We solved this by giving each of the buttons a world mark and assiging one of the damage dealers and the healer to one of the buttons, then having them call out their world mark color after they had pressed the button to inform the next one that it was their turn. We also had a dedicated player watch the sequence and call it, so the rest could keep focused on mechanics—in phase one this was the tank since they had a good view of the buttons and didn’t need to focus on the other mechanics as much, in phase two one of the melees was responsible for calling this since they needed to move away from the boss anyway in order to arrive at the button in time. This worked well though it required some practise since the timing was really tight. I’m curious if an addon ends up being developed for this, since communicating it through voice almost felt too slow with very little room for error which I feel might be a bit too punishing on more casual groups which I feel should be able to complete this boss at some point.

Overall, the dungeon was fun and I look forward to seeing it on mythic+ at some point as well as maybe trying for the no-death achievement there apparently is rewarding rank four of the Mechagon essence, which is good since in the meantime I will probably need to run the dungeon a few times in order to unlock the previous ranks of the essenece since I think it could end up being rather good for some fights or mythic+.

On Friday I finally managed to get Pathfinder Part Two unlocking flying which was a relief especially since I seemed to be a bit behind the curve on that with several guildies unlocking it already on Wednesday and Thursday with one outlier unlocking it already on Tuesday.

To be fair, I took the lazy way out of only doing the “normal” daily things in the form of daily quests and world quests and completely skipping out on the hidden sources of reputation gain in the new zones in the form of fishing and rare hunting among other things—what other things I don’t know since I didn’t really want to put in the extra effort for small reputation gains. One small extra thing I did do was the pet battle world quests though those in and of themselves don’t give that much extra reputation, defeating each of them the first time provided a quest item for a decent chunk of extra reputation—especially in Nazjatar where I think you get 250 reputation per turn-in—which was a boon as otherwise I would probably have had the required reputation a day or two later.

The first thing I ended up doing with my re-found freedom was inviting a friend for a round of azerite world quests since I had been completely neglecting those in a small protest against Blizzard’s insistence to keep flying annoying to acquire. This small protest is probably in vain and more likely to hurt me than anyone else but still it felt good to do. Still, being able to fly again is just nice and I’m very happy that ordeal is now behind me so that I can enjoy the game more and be less annoyed by the trivial things in it. Luckily I won’t need to worry about not flying until the next expansion—hopefully, unless they again introduce a no-fly zone which I doubt—and that makes me look forward to new content even more since I won’t have to explore it on the ground.

I recently rediscovered Blizzard Watch which I used to read with some regularity a couple of years ago maybe but after that I stopped actively reading most World of Warcraft news sources except for MMO-Champion for patch news. Reading through some of the WoW articles over there I stumbled upon an interesting one titled “This raiding tier is not fun for a number of reasons. Is casual raiding dying?” which got me thinking a bit especially with the unrest in my guild over re-killing Uu’nat which was partially motivated by the difficulty of the boss and thus not wanting to play it again.

Now, I tend to enjoy difficult content and dislike trivial content as a general rule, though there are times when I just want to sit down and do some mindless content to pass the time. I also find it somewhat difficult to see normal and heroic as difficult, especially considering I boost both Crucible of Storms and Battle of Dazar’alor on heroic with something like half or one third of the raid being essentially dead weight. Still, we also have gear that probably significantly exceeds that available to the average normal or heroic raider which does make a big difference.

All of this made it really interesting for me to see the perspective that normal and heroic raids might be overtuned for the playerbase they are designed for at the moment, since for me and most in my guild they feel kind of trivial at this point even when they are released—again, we tend to go in overgeared into these raids so maybe that is to be expected. I can also very well understand that a player who has been playing for a very long time might be getting overwhelmed by the simple amount of mechanics they need to pay attention to per boss, since those have been increasing pretty drastically with time. Compare pretty much any Classic or Burning Crusade, probably even Wrath of the Lich King boss with current earlier tier bosses that tend to be easier and the amount of mechanics the bosses have have gone way up. The article makes the same point, stating that the time they need to spend mechanics has gone way up with Battle for Azeroth.

Now from a egoistical personal perspective, this is a good change since it means I have more access to difficult content which I enjoy, but at the same time I’m already raiding mythic which is the place people looking for difficult content are supposed to go and I also still find the earlier difficulties somewhat trivial outside of the PTR so having those earlier difficulties be too difficult for casuals also isn’t really benefitting me or anyone in any real way. There is one argument I can see for making normal and heroic more difficult than before and that is keeping it more in line with mythic so that the jump when going from heroic to mythic doesn’t become too big for players wanting to step into the next level of content, however this introduction has generally been done by having the earlier bosses be easier and them getting more difficult the further you get into the raid giving something of a smooth learning curve for people stepping into a new difficulty therefore I don’t really see this as a strong argument.

Even for me, there is also the flipside of difficult content, namely farm. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG after all, and that means that gear is a significant part of the experience as well as part of preparing for the next raid which means that the previous raid needs to be farmed in order to give the group the best possible chances when going into the new one. This also means that if every single boss has a high difficulty or high chance of wiping the raid due to individual fails it means that farm becomes more sluggish which also isn’t really fun since once you have killed a boss a couple of times it kind of moves into the trivial content category where you know what to do and expect and don’t really want to spend overly much time on that singular boss. I think that’s what is at the heart of the reluctance in my guild to rekill Uu’nat as well: somewhat significant time investment for something that doesn’t really provide us a tangible advantage and is more just a gesture of solidarity. Now I find that gesture really important personally but for others it’s just about getting the first kill as a group and what happens after that with mounts or achivements isn’t that important so I can kind of see that perspective even though I still find it rather rude towards our fellow guildies.

This all also makes me wonder how Azshara will be, since our short experience on the PTR seems to indicate the fight will be rather intricate even on heroic as there were already a somewhat significant amount of mechanics that you need to pay attention to just in phase one-first intermission-early phase two which would mean that the fight will possibly again prove somewhat difficult for your average casual guild which might prove very problematic for the game in the long run since casual guilds tend to be the lifeblood of the game where new players enter the game and then potentially at a later point move into more hardcore guilds or if they find themselves content there stay—I, too, have spent a significant time in casual guilds throughout my time in World of Warcraft and there have been very fun moments in there and without those times I wouldn’t be playing where I am today and would probabl have stopped playing before getting to where I am.

So in the end, this article provided me with an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really thought about since it isn’t really relevant to me or something I run into while playing, which is why I tend to really like reading blogs and the like from players who are playing the game in a different way than I am since it provides a new perspective and gives me something to think about, while also allowing me to question the assumptions I have about the game and its players. Hopefully the concerns in the article get appropriately adressed by Blizzard in the next expansion—I think it won’t be possible to change the way the raids are designed this expansion since it would be somewhat jarring for the new raid to feel significantly easier than the previous one since there has so far been a general progression towards harder raids as an expansion goes on with something of a reset with the first raid of a new expansion—and that the game overall starts getting more interesting again.

So it seems the weekly reset brought with it some changes to Nazjatar, namely fewer elite naga required for the bounty quest—believe it was 15 before, was only 5 now—as well as the requisition quests showing the areas of the map where you can find the items which is rather nice since it means I didn’t have to look that up somewhere else. Small changes but were still nice to see and makes it a bit less annoying to do the daily stuff in Nazjatar.

So patch 8.2 Rise of Azshara has been out for a week now being released last Wednesday and it feels so far we have seen the worst parts of the patch. Now, it was to be expected with a new patch that it would include lots of new world content and a renewed requirement to farm Azerite—neck level 55 being the goal for my guild—but the implementation of these new world quests as well as daily quests—wasn’t expecting to see those again—leaves something to be desired. Many of these require finding or killing something somewhat rare, like hunting six chests in Mechagon or killing 3 rare mobs in Nazjatar which means with bad luck you can end up running around the zone for half an hour without getting any progress on these quests which makes for a somewhat frustrating experience, and these type of quests seem to be a daily occurrence in the new zones.

Some of these quests are made significantly worse because they require you to interact with normal items in the world, like collecting the Sea Stars in Nazjatar or the construction projects in Mechagon and since these are under normal circumstances expected to be something of a rare thing or something thought to be a benefit for many players—the construction projects—only one player can interact and gain quest progress at a time meaning not only are you randomly running around looking for something that isn’t overly common and the quest doesn’t bother specifying where to find it but you are also actively competing against your fellow players since them getting progress means you don’t get any. This effect seems to be at its worst when you need to collect the Sea Stars in Nazjatar since you generally need ten of them and they don’t exactly spawn often, so even if you do know where to look it takes a while running around the area to get them all.

Another somewhat mean example of daily quests was in Mechagon on Monday, where you needed to contribute 1000 spare parts, which wouldn’t have been too bad if I hadn’t converted most of my spare parts into boxes of spare parts in order to save on inventory space—spare parts stack up to 250 and a box requires 250 parts to craft and also stacks, how far I don’t know, but I’m assuming 20 or so which saves a lot of space—and in addition to that you needed another 260 or so spare parts in contributions to a construction project worst part of which was that finding one construction project wasn’t enough and only got me 76% of the progress towards completing the quest.

In addition to this, something that slightly annoys me with the new zones is the amount of content that you need to stumble upon or look up in a guide. For example, you can unlock two extra world quests in Nazjatar per day by going to the pylon in the cave in the murloc village to the east of Nazjatar and doing a short quest chain—only two or three quests. These world quests give you an extra 150 or so reputation per day which while trying to get to exalted as quickly as possible in order to unlock flying is something of a big deal yet there is no indication that all of this content is there meaning those that don’t find it on the first day are permantently behind.

Now, I understand that these zones are meant to include a lot of exploration and to a degree being forced to run around these zones more does contribute to that goal but it feels rather frustrating to have something so central as flying gated behind this type of content that is quite frankly annoying to do along with the unclarity of how to go about doing it, and I know missing out on a couple of world quests for a couple of days isn’t the worst thing especially since there are many other hidden or luck based sources of reputation similar to that available in these zones. Despite that, these zones for me feel more frustrating than fun since the content they encourage me to do feels more frustrating than fun which makes me dislike them and demotivates me from playing the game a bit and that is not a good feeling to have from new content. Luckily this all will pass once I’ve farmed the reputation and can start ignoring these zones but I don’t think that Blizzard’s goal was having people looking forward to not having to do these zones anymore right from the start.

All of this is put into an interesting perspective when contrasted with Classic, since there it was the norm not to get too exact instructions on where to go in order to complete a quest, just a general direction where you can find the things you need and off you go. Of course, this generally lead to people looking up where to find things on the internet instead of discovering it themselves and the quests did provide some indication in what direction you were supposed to be looking instead of none like the quests in the new zones—one example of this being the bounty quests which just ask you to kill X amount of mobs yet give no indication where they are to be found, neither in the quest text nor a map indicator. It kind of feels that the developers were trying to replicate some of that Classic feeling through these quests but forgot the crucial part of at least giving some indication where to go.

Anyway, it shouldn’t be too big of a problem getting all of this done before the raid releases on mythic which is the important part, so maybe it isn’t that bad in the end though it still doesn’t feel nice having content that feels frustrating even if it is just in the short term.

With the new war campaign quests released with patch 8.2 including rescuing Bane it seems to be made moderately clear that many of the central characters are somewhat tired of the faction conflict—Jaina, Thrall, Thalyssra, Baine and Lor’themar as some notable examples. This kind of teases the potential of either an upcoming patch or the next expansions including cross faction play since if the NPCs are working more together than before—one of the arguments they already present is the fact that we have already worked together many times before—it would make little sense to maintain the faction barrier as a gameplay mechanic. In a sense, it also feels somewhat fitting that following the expansion that puts the main emphasis—in the beginning at least—on the faction conflict we get one where we kind of properly start joining forces and working together on a more permanent basis.

It also makes a great deal of sense in the light of Azsharas involvement as well as her being controlled by an old god as these are usually threats that we end up banding together to defeat. Another point potentially pointing towards this is whatever unkown force caused Vol’jin to appoint Sylvanas as warchief—everyone including himself had been assuming it was the Loa however they all seemed to deny it as well as several other death related characters and we left off with Vol’jin going into the realm of the dead to figure out what exactly happened there which seems somewhat risky since even getting to the point of figuring out that he indeed was being controlled by some mysterious force lead to several attacks against him as well as the player so letting him go along and adventure alone somewhere where we can’t really reach him doesn’t seem like the best move but does make me curious to see what that story is foreshadowing; it felt like something more than another old god since it had to do with the realm of death and they tend to be more void aligned but we will have to see.

Now this is all speculation on my part and I am curious to see where the story goes regardless, but I am really hoping this will actually be the case in the near future for a few reasons. Primarily, I just really want to play a Night Elf again since I just really like Night Elves and that’s my primarily annoyance “having” to play Horde. Secondly, “having” to play Horde. The faction imbalance at higher levels of PvE play is really bad which means that for anyone wanting to seriously participate in high-end PvE content be that raiding or mythic+ it gets really difficult to do so if you play Alliance making it not much of a choice since you will have great difficutly in finding others to play with and this problem seems to be getting worse over time—as an example, I know of at least a couple high-end guilds that transferred from Alliance to Horde at the end of Legion due to recruiting problems but have not heard of any transferring to Alliance even with easier access to the Hall of Fame being something of a small carrot. Recruiting is just hard enough as it is without making it even harder by playing on the minority faction—now I say minority faction even though from the stats I’ve heard the overall faction balance is decent and just the high-end is skewed but that doesn’t really help when you want to do high-end content.

I will actually be somewhat disappointed if Blizzard doesn’t end up implementing this in the near term—next expansion at the latest—since it would seem to be a clear indicator that they don’t see this faction imbalance as a problem which would seem odd. It’s also a problem that will get bigger the smaller the playerbase is since recruiting and finding groups will get harder even on the majority faction and probably close to impossible on the minority one and as it seems that World of Warcraft is in a slow decline—it is a really old game after all—this seems somewhat inevitable.

But I guess we will have to see, so nothing to do now but wait.

With timewalking being active a friend of mine asked if I wanted to level a character from 110 to 120 since it was apparently supposed to be easy to level through timewalking and this indeed proved to be true—I think we averaged two dungeons per level.

I used this opportunity to level my Paladin whom I rather liked playing as Protection before though not so much Holy since somehow the toolkit just felt lacking to me being used to playing Holy Priest. This ended up actually being a rather fun time after the first dungeon where I needed to get used to my keybinds again and rediscovered my abilities—one thing that surprised me was that Protection Paladins have bubble again, I believe it was simply a 40% damage reduction in Legion though I’m not quite sure anymore. What also contributed to the fun—for me at least—was it being The Burning Crusade timewalking—my favourite expansion after Legion—and the scaling being somewhat difficult again making smaller pulls with a bith of line of sighting necessary. It also really made me miss being able to effectively level through dungeons again, it was so much more fun than questing. Another cool thing about timewalking while leveling up with a character one played in Legion, is being able to use the “legiondaries”—the random legendary equipment from Legion—the whole time since your level gets scaled down so it stays active.

Tanking with a Paladin again was really fun as well, the Paladin was actually my first tank that I leveled back in Wrath of the Lich King when the mana management for them became a bit more sane and the easier time with keeping aggro made me more confident to try tanking. The ability at the time to easily generate area threat with Consecration along with friends wanting to take a poke at Horde characters and me consequently wanting to play a Blood Elf sealed the deal—Warriors not being available to Blood Elves at the time and Blizzard already having killed my interest in tanking with a Death Knight when they nerfed dual wield tanking. This makes me think, one of the things I would probably actually want to try with Classic is playing a tank—along with re-experiencing old school Priest healing—since I never really tried it back in the day though the time investment required for leveling makes me wonder how much I actually want to try this.

The whole shield and Consecration based tanking style I still find fun and in general I find myself strongly preferring tanks that can actually block—so Warriors and Paladins—over other tanks having played a bit of both Death Knight and Druid tank somewhat recently even. I also have to admit, Avenger’s Shield is also just such a fun ability to use and I makes me a bit sad to lose the legiondary that gave us extra damage and bounces to the shield since just seeing it fly around felt fun and satisfying. This all makes me actually want to play my Paladin more than my Warrior at the moment and the gearing and Azerite hurdle shouldn’t be too bad with the upcoming patch especially since it seems we get to easily unlock Azerite level 35 and the new Essences without much grind—well, the early essences at least. So that might very well be my secondary project for next reset, getting some questing in with my Paladin in addition to my Priest so that they both are at a decent point when it comes to essences, though this should apparently be easier with the Priest since from what I hear the best Discipline at the moment can be acquired through questing in Nazjatar which shouldn’t be too bad as long as there is no time gating—I don’t know if there is, haven’t really done much on the PTR outside the raid tests since farming the same content several times happens often enough on live for me.

I guess all of this means one more reason for me to look forward to the new patch and the next reset, I’m also curious to see how much I actually end up getting to use my Paladin since my Warrior so far hasn’t seen too much use—unfortunately doesn’t have enough gear at the moment to confidently tank alt keys for the guild and haven’t really been motivated to gear. Hopefully I get time to play both tanks a bit more, but I guess we’ll see that in the coming weeks.

With last reset being The Restless Cabal this reset it was time to take our poke at killing Uu’nat for a second time and unfortunately it did not go as well as Cabal did. Admittedly, we had many more new players in for Uu’nat than Cabal among them a new tank that I believe had never played the boss on mythic before so it was quite understandable that we did not end up killing the boss again—at least in the one evening we’ve had time to try so far. For me though, it was still fun seeing the boss again and getting some more raiding in—especially since it would have otherwise been only one raid day—even though I do enjoy the occasional pause in raiding the boss is still fun and we do have good reason to try for a rekill for some of the people that made significant contributions to progress but couldn’t be in on the actual kill.

What did somewhat disappoint me however was the attitude of some of our raiders, questioning why we were there again and seeming to be very unmotivated by the whole raiding thing which made me internally question why they then were in a raiding guild at all if they don’t like the activity. The worst example of this was one of our raiders stating they would only be raiding one day a week and only Battle of Dazar’alor until the new raid comes out which felt very rude and inappropriate. There are some attempts at discussing matters further so I’ll have to see where that goes, but overall something of a strange reaction I think.

That also seems to somewhat put into question if we will actually be able to get enough people together for next reset to try for another rekill, if not I find that a very rude way to show that these players don’t really care about their fellow raiders, something of a “I’ve got mine and you don’t matter to me” which I don’t really find an appropriate mentality to have in raiding. To be fair, it being summer does make it more understandable that players might not be available for raiding as much as the rest of the year and that does make me a bit worried about how we will manage the progress starting in a couple of weeks but that doesn’t really excuse the mentality or the statements made.

If we do end up having enough people to try for the rekill again, it should in theory get a bit easier with the Essences becoming available—of course this depends on people actually having and taking the time to unlock those essences. I just hope this all ends up being a minor footnote and not something of greater relevance since it is behaviour that seems to annoy quite a few of our raiders and I hope it doesn’t end up having bigger consequences for the future of the guild.

So this weekend had some more raid tests open on the PTR, Azshara Heroic on Friday for a couple of hours and all of normal except Azshara for the rest of the weekend and we took a poke in there again. Now the bosses we killed last time around all went down easily, after all they are the early bosses so that is to be expected. Now there had been some changes to the Blackwater Behemoth which overall made the fight significantly easier, though unfortunately they had disabled the use of the artifact fishing pole—or its effect rather, nothing happens when you equip it during the fight. But this time around the damage on that fight was much lower and the pushback also had a much shorter duration, making the fight much easier than before.

Orgozoa

The rest of the raid however, was a bit more interesting. The first new boss on the list was Orgozoa, who actually proved to be a decent challenge to us since we didn’t quite understand the mechanic at first and weren’t sure how to handle the intermission. Now the primary mechanic, at least from a healer perspective, is the Incubation Fluid that he spits on a random player. This is a DoT that lasts for the rest of the phase and deals rather significant damage. That alone wouldn’t be so bad since the debuff wouldn’t spread too quickly since the boss doesn’t use the ability that often but the boss also periodically casts Arcing Current on a player with the debuff that chains up to three targets and spreading the debuff which meant that by the end of the phase we actually had quite a bit of healing to do.

The boss also spawns three adds at a time that were rather easy to deal with though they do leave after them a pool that needs to be soaked—in our case the tank could soak all of the pools alone—or they will explode wiping the raid, this mechanic was actually present on the trash on the way to the boss.

Finally for phase one, the boss occasionally does these circles on the ground and you need to move out, it can get rather tight since it’s basically a “dance” mechanic where most of the room fills up with them and you need to move out until they disappear and then new ones spawn. This goes on a couple of times and the fight goes back to normal—the only thing to watch out for here is that people stay properly stacked or spread so that the debuff doesn’t jump to new people.

Then there’s the intermission which just seemed to be a case of run down the spiral quickly enough in order to interrupt the boss or you wipe, watch out for the mushrooms that knock you back on the way down.

After the intermission comes phase two, and honestly I can’t really say anything overly memorable about it even though I ended up healing it alone since our other healer died on the way down. The debuff from phase one seems to be back, but only one player ended up getting it so it was really easy to heal through. I guess the adds changed from mind benders to naga, or maybe both? Didn’t do much from what I remember, though that might change on higher difficulties. Once we got into phase two, we killed the boss and in general we didn’t have that many wipes here but I’m still interested to see the boss on mythic especially with how the damage was in phase one to see how extreme it will end up there—especially since we were only thirteen or fourteen while playing this boss so the room will feel much more full with a 20 person raid.

The Queen’s Court

The next boss was The Queen’s Court consisting of two bosses: Silivaz the Zealous and Pashmar the Fanatical as well as Queen Azshara a bit in the background toying with the players.

This boss in retrospect actually surprises me with the amount of mechanics there were that were relevant on normal since my expectation at least is that there are maybe a couple main mechanics for normal and the rest start being relevant on heroic and up but on this boss there are actually two different fail checks which can instantly wipe you along with the spear throw from the melee boss that will probably instantly kill a single player if not soaked properly—same idea as the charge in King’s Rest for example, the more people in the way the less damage the actual target becomes, though do keep an eye out where you stand if you get targeted since it leaves a damage effect on the ground.

Now, the first mechanic which could wipe you is one of the abilities Azshara uses, Queen’s Decree and more specifically Form Ranks. This spawns—for us at least—three circles in the middle of the room each of which need to be occupied by one player and if they are not when the decree expires they explode dealing damage to the whole raid with the damage at least on the PTR being such that all three circles being empty wipes the raid.

There was a second decree that while not quite as bad could still potentially kill players who didn’t know how it works or notice that they had it, Deferred Sentence. This decree gives you an increasing amount of stacks that are reduced when you move however you take damage from moving, but if you don’t move all of the stacks explode at once at the end for some decent damage. This wasn’t too bad on normal but I could see this killing people on mythic especially depending on what other sources of damage are active at the same time.

The second potentially wipe inducing mechanic were the Potent Sparks, three of them spawned around the room and started slowly losing health and when they die they explode dealing damage to the whole raid and apply a debuff increasing damage taken from that explosion by 100%. So not a new mechanic, but still you need to kill them staggered so that the raid doesn’t wipe. These never really posed a problem since it even seemed that the debuff might be missing on normal and our damage dealers did a decent job of making sure they didn’t all explode at the same time anyway so the damage we did get from the normal explosions was easy to heal against.

Beyond that, the boss had some other funky decrees and random damage, but nothing overly noteworthy since they were all quite easy to get the gist of the first time one was affected by them. There was a particularily annoying decree though, Repeat Performance, which silenced you if you cast the same spell twice in a row. This wasn’t too bad as a Discipline Priest since I could just weave healing and damage but it seemed to annoy some of our damage dealers a lot.

Za’qul, Harbinger of Ny’alotha

Now for the final boss of the evening, since we tested Azshara on Friday and the normal bosses on Saturday. This one seemed rather overtuned especially for our group size which did make it a very cool boss to play but also meant that we unfortunately did not down it—also thanks to it getting rather late and people wanting to go to sleep.

This was probably the most fun boss we tested even including Azshara since there was actually a decent bit going as well as some interesting mechanics for healers, namely the fears.

Phase one

Phase one of the boss is fairly straightforward and doesn’t last for too long, from 100% to 85%. Some adds spawn that you need to kill and a few players get feared—interestingly, for us even at the end when we were playing with ten, three people got feared which seems to indicate that even for small groups three healers might be preferred. Now the fear lasts for eight seconds and is dispellable, so if that was all it wouldn’t have been too bad for us, simply one person that was running around a bit longer since we only had two healers, but what made the fear probably our main cause of wipes was the fact that it explodes when it runs out or get dispelled and for a lot of damage—three simultaneous explosions killed pretty much anyone who wasn’t a tank.

I’m somewhat sceptical that the fear will remain with that tuning in the raid, since every single application would seem to require some pretty heavy cooldown usage to be manageable—remember, only eight seconds between the first and last blast at best—and I’m doubtful that is all that possible with how often the fear comes. I’m expecting that at least on normal the explode damage when dispelled gets removed, seems like that would end up as a heroic or mythic mechanic to give the boss that extra bit of something.

Phase two

In phase two all the players get sucked into the Fear Realm where everyone gets a stacking debuff which dealt a minor amount of damage, stacking up every 20 seconds. For the most part, this phase was over so quickly that the debuff wasn’t relevant, but in phase four you need to re-enter the Fear Realm in order to kill the adds from phase one since they don’t take damage otherwise, and the debuff puts a bit of time pressure on that especially for smaller groups.

The second new thing was a debuff put on a couple of players which left spots on the ground so you had to keep moving while placing them in order not to die. It also made the available space in the already somewhat small bossroom smaller, so I can see this being problematic on mythic and for bigger raid groups since I’m assuming more people get the debuff. It also seemed a bit buggy or overtuned, since you always seemed to take the damage when a spot got put down, usually there is a grace period for the player with the debuff so they have time to move out—will have to see if that gets changed, if not it puts a decent amount of extra strain on the healers.

The debuff is especially bad if it comes in conjunction with the fear which we had happen a couple of times, both debuffs on the same player with pretty consistently lead to their death. Any players with the debuff as the fear came were also more likely to die since the damage from the fear explosion along with the damage from the debuff was tricky to heal against.

Finally for phase two, occasionally a tentacle comes from the side of the arena and tries to poke the raid. The area for this was decently big and the effect always seemed to go towards the middle, so keep an eye out on rifts that form on the sides of the arena. The damage was healable for us, but might very well be a one-shot on higher difficulties.

Phase three

Phase three doesn’t have that much new going for it, you can enter the Delirium Realm where you get a haste buff but all other players are hostile to you, so only really makes sense for damage dealers but not too many of them since you still have the dispel mechanics to deal with. This phase generally went by really quickly and I barely noticed we were in it, but it did introduce the Delirium Realm to us so that we knew what was going on for phase four.

Phase four

The final phase and as far as we managed to get. The first thing that happens is everyone gets pulled back into the normal realm and you now have to manage the abilities by going into the correct realm in order to counter them. The summoner adds from phase one are up? Go to the Fear Realm in order to damage them so they don’t keep summoning more adds. The boss gets an absorb shield—yes, a new mechanic—and starts casting to deal high damage to the whole raid? Enter the Delirium Realm and get rid of the absorb shield to stun the boss and interrupt the cast, damage from other realms doesn’t affect the absorb shield.

It seems the boss can also split himself, creating a copy in each realm which start giving him more energy and when he gets full, I guess that will wipe the raid. I don’t belive we actually saw this mechanic in action, probably comes into play later in phase four than we manage to get to.

Finally, the fear from the earlier phases gets buffed, dealing more damage than before through the explosion making it even harder to heal against. In addition, players in other realms are phased out so you can’t heal or dispel them which probably means this will be a minimum three healer boss, though I guess when someone in the Delirium Realm gets the debuff they just need to get out of there since they can’t be healed anyway since everyone is hostile there. So two healers might be possible, but the damage at the moment really is quite heavy and I’m not sure there are enough cooldowns to deal with it with only two healers.

The boss—despite the tuning and incoming damage—seemed really fun. I am very interested to see the final version, if it stays anything like it was on the PTR it will definitely end up being one of the blocker bosses for many guilds.

Azshara

Now, Azshara. This was a heroic test, which meant we were scaled up a bit but also had more mechanics to tend with and the tuning was probably a lot rougher than for the normal tests along with a much shortened timespan—we only had an hour and a half or so to test Azshara—all of which meant we didn’t end up defeating her or getting overly far actually.

Phase one

The fight starts with Azshara spectating and her sending out two lovers to deal with the raid. These need to be kept either in line of sight of each other or out of line of sight depending on the cast, believe Painful Memories was the cast where you needed to separate them but can’t remember the name of the other cast—should be fairly obvious though. The melee lover also occasionally throws a spear on a random player which needs to hit one of the two pillars in the room or it deals significant raid damage. It will also hit any player in the way, so the path to the pillar needs to be made clear. This seemed to be a bit buggy for us, where the spear would occasionally hit an NPC and explode or hit the pillar but still explode, so will probably be an easier time on live.

In addition to the lovers, there are three seals in the room which keep the water outside under control and these need to be kept charged—charging them is as easy as standing in one but this does give you a stacking debuff reducing maximum health by 10% per stack which lasts for the rest of the phase. The energy in the seals get reduced by two things, Azshara which is unavoidable so just recharge them, and hulks I believe they were called, which spawn in the middle of the room and run to a seal and start stomping it to bits. These need to be killed as quickly as possible so they don’t drain too much energy from the seal. They were also crowd controllable once and it seemed if you stunned them at the right time they would change their mind on which seal they wanted to go to which meant they had a further way to run so more time to damage them without them breaking the seal. The best timing I believe was just before they reached the seal and started casting, but it wasn’t 100% consistent and might have been fixed for live anyway—if not, definitely something to try since it makes the damage requirement easier. Azshara also occasionally charms a player and forces them to walk into the middle, which could be bad when there was damage spots on the ground which got put there by one of the tank mechanics of the lovers I believe so try to keep the middle area clear and interrupt the charm when possible—I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite get a clear idea of how this charm mechanic worked since it was mostly the damage dealers dealing with it.

Intermission

Then we have the intermission, where Azshara decrees you have to do something—or maybe even two things—and if you don’t you get stacks of a debuff that will probably kill depending on the amount of stacks. I believe the primary decrees were: stand alone, stand together, move, stay still, soak the arcane orbs. All fairly straightforward and the arcane orbs need to be soaked anyway so they don’t explode, though the move decree was a bit unclear how it worked since we had players moving yet getting stacks of the debuff. A theory we had was that it left small spots on the ground which applied the debuff, so moving back and forth or in a small circle wasn’t enough but we didn’t get to test that theory properly—also possible the ability was simply bugged on the PTR.

Phase two

After the small intermission Azshara enters the fray and you get to deal with a couple new mechanics: a dispellable debuff as well as another charm. The dispellable debuff explodes when dispelled or when it runs out after 20 seconds, echoing of every other player with the debuff or Azshara that are in line of sight which basically means hide somewhere and get dispelled. This might get interesting on higher difficulties or with more players since there is a level of coordination required so that you don’t explode each other or echo from the boss exploding the whole raid.

The new charm mechanic actually properly mind controls a player making them attack the raid and gives them a decently sized absorb shield which needs to be removed in order to break the mind control—this seems like one of those mechanics which will be easier in big raid sizes since the amount of incidental damage will be higher and fewer players actively need to switch on the mind controlled player in order to break the mind control.

There was also a new seal in the middle whose energy needed to be kept low instead of high so that it doesn’t explode the raid, I believe decharging it gave a similar debuff to charging the other ones but since we didn’t spend a significant amount of time in this phase I’m not quite sure.

Conclusion

All in all, the bosses even on normal were a decent amount of fun to play for the most part—looking at you Blackwater Behemoth—and I’m now looking forward to the raid more than I was before. Even the first boss which tends to be trivial could have some interesting wipes up her sleeve thanks to the color mechanic which tends to lead to trouble so it will probably be quite fun progressing here “for real”. I guess I now just need to wait a couple of weeks or so for the raid to come out, we’ll see if Blizzard sneaks in some more raidtests in the meantime and if we end up participating in those.

So Blizzard recently posted their plans for European Classic realms and their plan seems to be to only have International (English) realms which has made several people rather upset—it feels like a third or more of the comments on the English forum are in other European languages complaining about this decision—and while I can see where this decision is coming from it still to me too seems like the wrong one.

As we get closer to WoW Classic’s release, we thought now would be a good time to talk about our plans for Classic realms here in Europe.
We’ve prepared several realms, which will include Player vs Player, Player vs Environment, and Role-playing realms.
For Classic, we’re planning on not splitting up realms by language. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, we think that it’s the best starting point for WoW Classic. An exception will be made for the Russian language, which will have separate realms due to its reliance on the Cyrillic Alphabet. For technical reasons this will also mean Russian is going to have its own separate game client, similar to what happened in The Burning Crusade.
We think this approach will give players more freedom to move around to where they want, and find guilds and friends that best match their interests.

Taepsilum – Community Manager

Now, my mothertongue never had language specific realms so I started out playing on English realms and ended up on one where the inofficial language at least was my second language and this is probably what is going to happen on these realms as well—inofficial language servers or a mixing pot of several languages on the same server being spoken in the public channels—and I don’t quite see how that will be beneficial in the long run since there will still in effect be language specific server they will just be harder to find like it was for me back in the day.

It will also be a bigger problem in Classic than it would be in today’s game, since in Classic you are locked into the server you start on and can’t really transfer away or do anything cross-realm, so if you unknowingly roll on a server where the inofficial language is one you don’t speak you might be in for a somewhat bad time since communication will be considerably more difficult. In general, this decision seems to poorly take into account the diverse language landscape present in Europe and even in the case that it goes as Blizzard fears—namely there simply not being enough players on single language realms—it feels like the more sane option would be to then merge realms instead of creating a solution for a problem that might not even present itself. Alternatively, if merging realms is considered a bad thing by Blizzard—understandably so, since it does present problems with names and who gets to keep theirs—they have since Classic already developed the technology allowing multiple realms to be in the same pool and share guilds, auction house and so on completely separate from the other cross-realm features impelemented since. This would still allow for that server community feel that several people think is important since you would still have a limited pool of people you play with but would mean that you don’t get the naming problems you would get with merging realms.

At the same time, part of the beauty of the European community is exactly the diversity of language and being able to overcome the challenges the game presents despite that extra difficulty in communication and it does keep the opportunity open for people to enter into communities which don’t have their mothertongue as the primary language—exactly this happened to me on live, have been playing on German servers and learning the langauge for over two years now and without the exposure that cross-realm gave me to those German servers this would never had happened. So there could potentially be a big positive in a small amount of cases as a consequence of this decision, so maybe it will all end up good in the end.

All in all, I guess my feelings on this decision are rather mixed. It won’t overly affect me personally since I have already been in the position of playing on a realm where my language isn’t the primary language at a time where I barely knew any English so I know the situation will be manageable. Simultaneously, I can understand that people don’t necessarily want to have the extra stress of learning or using a new language while doing an activity that is supposed to be relaxing or fun. In the end, I think people will find ways and means around that if they are truly interested in playing Classic be that through inofficial language servers or in-game chat channels for specific languages and this will all be a smaller issue than the forums currently make it seem.

This blog currently runs on Hugo but I’ve taken to poking around with WordPress a bit since while Hugo does its job admirably for me and I don’t really mind the write post, commit to git, push to server workflow I have going on with it there are some things that do annoy me, namely the lack of comments, having to manually enter the time and date of a post and not being able to automatically publish in the future—now that last point, I am aware it would be possible through some sort of webhook but I’m just not interested in setting that up at the moment and it seems like something that would be somewhat janky and unexact.

WordPress of course isn’t perfect either, since it requires something other than pure static hosting and will probably require more optimization from a performance point of view but I think having comments—yes, I know about solutions like Disqus but I don’t want the comments being hosted by a third party in a way that I can’t easily export to other places—as well as some other neat things enabled by the site not being completely static such as pingbacks might be worth the extra hassle of figuring out the hosting. I also think the slightly more visual editing flow might not be all bad though I’m very used to the the Markdown based editing available in Hugo but there are times where having something visual is nice, for example when doing something I don’t do as often like adding an image to the post, it’s nice being able to just add it through a visual interface instead of poking around for the proper syntax or snippet to do that.

It would however also mean being a bit more diligent with my backups or potentially getting some sort of managed hosting solution which I don’t really want to throw the extra money on at the moment, since with my current git based workflow my posts are most of the time on at least three different computers: my desktop, my laptop as well as the git server. This means I’m fairly safe from most hardware failures as well as natural catastrophes since the data is stored in a very distributed fashion, but if I start hosting WordPress which I would probably host myself the posts would as a rule only reside on a single central server—sure, they might be cached by a CDN for a short time but that’s not really a backup solution.

There is also a not insignificant amount of extra “junk” that WordPress adds to the site, in the form of some JavaScript for emojis as well as some CSS to support them and since that’s somthing I don’t really need it annoys me a bit to have it there.

Lastly, there is also the matter of getting my posts ported over to WordPress from Hugo. Importers in the other direction are easy enough to find, since static site generators are all the rage around techier bloggers these days but something that would cleanly import a Hugo blog into WordPress doesn’t seem to exist. It seems the best solution for me since I don’t have that many posts—only around 70—is to import them through the RSS importer and this has worked fairly well after I modified it a bit, there was only a single post I needed to manually fix. However, this isn’t a perfect solution since the internal links in my posts seem to be static which means if I end up changing domains which I’m considering going through those links would lead to a redirect. I’m also in general not a huge fan of internal links being static references instead of relative ones, since that means changes to the domain means a lot of editing of posts which is unecessary. Though thinking about it, I think I could probably fix that with some SQL, even now after the posts have been imported, hmm… Or maybe I’ll just modify the importer again and reimport, might be the easier solution. Or possibly the extra redirect doesn’t matter that much since I want to keep the old domain redirecting anyway in order to not contribute to link rot.

Whatever the case, there is still a decent amount of work that needs to be done if I want to go through with this change—which I think I still do even after all the many negatives and seemingly few positives pointed out here. While I have adapted the theme I use in Hugo for WordPress I still haven’t added some of the extra features I want to make use of like comments so that’s something that needs to happen. I guess there’s nothing else to do now than to get working on that.

This reset we ended up taking a poke at the Restless Cabal on mythic again, since apparently there is some desire to kill the bosses in Crucible of Storms again even though the original plan was to only kill them once each—the changed plan seems to have to do with some nice tank trinkets among other things.

Now going back was really interesting, since while the encounter is somewhat simple on the surface, there were still a ton of details that we had collectively forgotten not having played the boss since our first kill probably a month or so ago. Small things like exact timings of abilities, when to use which cooldowns and who needs some extra attention when the explosions come and they have the stacking debuff, when to dispel the debuffs in order to keep everyone alive while optimising the amount of damage they can do. So there was a lot more detail to the fight than I even considered during progress that kind of just came naturally at the time but needed to be quickly relearned now in “farm”.

It was actually really fun to see how much complexity was actually in the fight that had been forgotten, especially since once we did have the boss down and the few trys before that it had all become so routine as to feel trivial. That actually meant that even though we “wasted” almost three ours of farm on killing just the one boss, I actually still had a decent amount of time that evening even though that ended up being all we did. It was just nice to have some change from Battle of Dazar’alor since while sure, we have been doing a lot more Crucible than Battle lately we have still farmed Battle a lot more.

Still, we are only killing Cabal this reset and extending next reset in order to rekill Uu’nat, probably because they don’t want to risk us not finishing Battle for Dazar’alor—even though we managed that today and we still had plenty of time over in addition to an extra raid day—as well as probably keeping with tradition of shorter raid weeks during farm so they don’t want us to spend all of our raid days in Crucible of Storms. It’ll be interesting to see Uu’nat again next week, it’ll be a shorter time difference from the first kill but it will still be a good three weeks or so in between since the plan seems to be to try to do him on Sunday instead of earlier in the reset.

On a separate note, with 8.2 being a Release Candidate on the PTR I’m curious to see how long it’ll be until the next content release, rumour has it Patch 8.2 will be dropping on the 26th of June and with there being a two week off-season it stands to reason that the raid will become available two weeks after the patch which would give us only three weeks of farm remaining before the raid. It also means that it is rather unlikely that the Hall of Fame will end up being filled on Alliance side, for Crucible that is. I’m curious to see how Blizzard will handle that, simply having less than 100 guilds in there since I’m assuming Cutting Edge is going away with the release of the new raid and so far that has been a prerequisite to earn the tile from participating in a Hall of Fame kill. It also would make little sense to be able to still earn the title with potentially much more gear available from the new raid so interesting to see where that goes.

If the Hall of Fame doesn’t end up being filled, that will both definitely show the poor state Alliance PVE is—outside of the MDI at least, but those are premade characters—as well as the brutal difficulty of this raid with so few guilds managing to get Cutting Edge. It’s strange really, personally the fights don’t seem that difficult anymore but to be fair we had a pretty decent learning curve on them with over 300 wipes on each boss so maybe a lot of guilds just don’t have the time to do that because they might still be progressing in Battle of Dazar’alor? It’s a strange circumstance, but kind of cool to see some more limited content again even though it does unfortunately mean that fewer people can participate. I’m looking forward to seeing the final numbers on all of that, could it even end up being the raid with the fewest Cutting Edge guilds so far?

AP, Artifact Power in Legion and Azerite Power were the new “infinite progression” mechanics introduced by Blizzard in order to keep different types of content rewarding for max level players. Now this worked very well in Legion—for me at least—since it was the first expansion in a long while that I played all the way through. Simply always having something available to strive for was a nice change of pace since it meant there was always a reason to log in—this was especially powerful in combination with mythic+ since this enabled me to do fun and engaging content while still working towards that goal of the next artifact level.

Unfortunately, somewhere halfway through Legion this system changed for the worse and remains in this incarnation—though I would argue even worse—with Battle for Azeroth. The big change that came was a significant reduction in artifact power received through completing mythic+, now because the reward had always been rather low in raids but this meant that the most sensible way to gain artifact power became world quests meaning there was no interesting way of gaining it anymore. This made the whole system feel a lot more grindy since I don’t find world quests particularily enjoyable yet I like raiding and mythic+ a lot and now I was being pushed to participate in content I did not enjoy.

In Battle for Azeroth this same system remained of low reward through interesting content and high reward through trivial content continuing through world quests and with the addition of Island Expeditions. Now on the surface island expeditions sound like a cool idea: explore a new island and collect the azerite there, the problem comes with the implementation. Firstly, it’s a lot less about exploration since you are competing against another team even in the PvE mode where you compete against NPCs that behave slightly more in a “PvP” way but without much of the strategy of real players—you also don’t get to use your PvP talents and some abilities work very differently from actual players—but these end up being more of an annoyance than anything else.

Secondly, the content ends up just being so trivial as to be uninteresting: the opposing faction poses no real threat and neither do the normal mobs and they can’t really, since this is content that is supposed to be doable with any setup including three healers or three damage dealers severely restricting the possibility of Blizzard balancing it into something interesting. Now in the end, this is probably the better outcome since for me personally I don’t see how a more time consuming version of this content could be made interesting with the technology currently available as I’d rather just have it be over with quickly since it just feels like a grind.

Thirdly, the grind also feels much worse on alts in Battle for Azeroth than it did in Legion with the changes to how artifact/azerite knowledge work. This is the catch-up mechanic which makes it possible for alts as well as players joining the game later to achieve comparable levels of power to the players that have been playing throughout. The problem comes with how it was implemented, in Legion the amount of AP you gained from doing activities scaled up as artifact knowledge went up; in Battle for Azeroth the amount needed per level goes down until a floor of 1000 and that is still a rather decent amount of azerite power, something along the lines of three mythic islands or three to four world quests. Meanwhile in Legion, doing one world quest might have given you something like ten levels towards the end which means that alts not only have a more severe version of the problem of having to unlock traits for their new gear since they’ll probably be receving it faster than a main character that has been farming since the start it will also require comparably more effort than it would have in Legion.

Now, the other problem with azerite in Battle for Azeroth is the reason you farm it: the azerite gear. This system just doesn’t feel quite as rewarding as it was in Legion, partially because you keep unlocking the same traits and partially because at some point you just kind of have everything and the only reward is a couple more item levels on your neck—hardly anything to look forward to. The maximum level is even capped within reach and most players who can still be bothered to do the farm content are probably already at that cap—several in my guild are, I’m not because the content just doesn’t interest me.

This is getting changed with the upcoming patch as well as some buffs to the amount of azerite rewarded for some activities but I don’t actually see how it will really help the system since at the start there will only be three new ranks of real interest—the one major relic slot and the two minor ones of which the latter won’t be available—which means that most of the time while gaining a new azerite level you actually don’t get anything for it except for maybe a small boost to stamina—not really a system that motivates you to play. That along with the above mentioned problems of the relevant source of azerite just make the system feel a lot more annoying and a lot less rewarding than it was in Legion which has meant I try to avoid participating in it as much as possible which is somewhat unfortunate since I think I’m probably exactly the target audience of such a system: someone that prefers having something regular to do in order to keep me going.

It is also completely possible that I simply burned out on the system back in Legion when the gains from mythic+ were nerfed and Battle for Azeroth never really had a chance, but even then the whole system has been something I’d rather be avoiding from mostly day one which is not a good sign for such a major feature of the expansion. I’m hoping 8.2 will bring some improvements that actually make me care again but I guess time will tell.

So apparently MMO-Champion is being sold off by Curse and getting bought up by Magic Find.

Now it seems that one of the investors is the original creator of MMO-Champion:

I won’t be involved in the website, but for full disclosure I am an investor in Magic Find, and the team includes people who have worked on MMO-Champion since 2007.

I’m extremely grateful that Fandom helped us preserve the community and I’m sure the team will have more updates soon — Bouboille

which does make it seem that this will be a good change. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of Curse gobbling up so many gaming properties especially since some of their sites like WoWDB are just poorly functioning alternatives of better sites—Wowhead in this case. To be fair, competition is good and I was actually hoping that WoWDB would be good since Wowhead has some nasty history with the ads they serve, some of them being particularily loud or obnoxious—now on the other hand apparently the same can be said for MMO-Champion so maybe gaming sites just can’t afford to be too stringent about the ads they serve. But for me at least, when that competition can’t even manage proper responsive design and more importantly localisation of the different item it becomes kind of useless—I actually wanted to try to use WoWDB as my primary information source once but that attempt was instantly stopped by me having the game client in German and WoWDB only supporting English which was really unfortunate. I would still have probably missed the years of comments on Wowhead at some point but the faster loading speed of WoWDB would have probably kept me using it over Wowhead if it had remained an option.

Still, I hope MMO-Champion remains a relevant resource for World of Warcraft news since while Wowhead does provide similar content and even at times better and faster, the signal to noise ratio of MMO-Champion posts is much better. I have watched both feeds and Wowhead often includes to me irrelevant content like some contest or different announcements about the site; meanwhile the only non-relevant content I get regularily from MMO-Champion is the weekly summary of active world bosses and the weekly event quest—I generally don’t have a need for this content so which boss is up doesn’t really matter to me. Another reason I prefer MMO-Champion is simply the nostalgia I think, it’s the website I’m used to going to when I need to know what’s going up with World of Warcraft since it was pretty much the best alternative back in the day, sure things like WoW Insider existed but from memory they had the same problem as Wowhead has now: too much non-news content. It’s really nice being able to have an actual notification for new articles on MMO-Champion and be reasonably sure that it’s something of interest, like changes on the PTR or announcements of new features or interviews of Blizzard staff.

Now thinking back, I did also enjoy WoW Insider content—especially some of the columns there—and I haven’t looked at the successor Blizzard Watch in a while. Sure the focus is broader these days but I believe it is still possible to filter the content by game which would allow me to just view the World of Warcraft content, that might be something I want to start doing more regularily again. They even have a podcast I remember enjoying for a bit, so I guess there is a decent bit of content for me to catch up on.

In the end, I guess there’s nothing really to be worried about since I haven’t noticed any decrease in quality during the previous acquisitions and maintaining a pure news site is pretty simple as long as you can get the news out there quickly enough.

Sooo. Have had a couple of coop play sessions of Borderlands 2 this weekend and it has been a decently fun time so far. We decided to play the game since the Handsome Collection is currently available for only 6€ until the 17th of June I believe and includes a bunch of DLC and the game had interested us all from before already so it was kind of a good opportunity for it. Now I have been playing Gaige the Mechromancer which is one of the DLC character. She is actually a pretty cool character that as a special ability to summon a robot called Deathtrap that seems to be very efficient at meleeing enemies down and I recently got him the extra ability to fully restore the shields of an ally—this has proved rather useful in helping the party keep alive in sticky situations.

Now the game is a shooter looter or shlooter which means shoot down lots of enemies with a few bosses at times and loot new cool guns and equipment however here the game it feels has a couple of problems. The shooting—so far at least and to be fair we aren’t that far in—isn’t that great since it is so innaccurate though some of the guns feel kind of cool. This is made worse by my biggest peeves with this game: limited ammunition and somewhat bullet-spongy enemies at least in four player coop—the enemies health scales with amount of players I believe. There just isn’t enough ammunition in the game for all four players so you end up having to buy more at the kiosks selling it but simultaneously some weapons are designed around low damage high fire rate making these weapons make zero sense in a coop situation since you won’t have enough ammunition to kill anything with them—you could probably empty all of your ammunition into a single of the normal tougher enemies.

The low ammunition of course is made worse by the bullet-spongy enemies, since it can be very difficult to kill one of the “badasses” alone and when three or four of them spawn at a time your whole time might need to be a bit clever with their ammo in order to actually be able to kill all of them. This got especially bad at a spot in the game where waves of enemies spawned including a couple of the tougher enemies where pretty much all of us were running low on ammunition I think.

Now, different weapon types use different ammunition and you can carry several weapons so it is plausible that the idea is that you should be switching weapons as needed—and the game even encourages this through elemental effects on the weapons which cause them to deal extra damage to different types of enemies—but this also doesn’t really feel it makes sense to the core mechanic of the game which is looting cool weapons which you then aren’t supposed to use if you need to switch away from them. I actually very much like both accurate high damage weapons like snipers as well as more spray-and-pray weapons like miniguns but find myself steering away from the latter since I know I won’t have the ammunition to sustain their usage. I can understand ammunition in something like a survival game where resource management is a core part of the game but here it just feels like it doesn’t really fit that well—at the same time games like Diablo 3 have something similar simply through having to manage health and potions so maybe it is something that is part of the genre since they are both games centered around loot but I just feel having to bother with ammunition and not being able to use the cool weapon you like because you’re out of ammunition detracts more than it adds from this game.

Other than that though, as said Gaige feels pretty awesome to play with her robot buddy, we’re still pretty early in I think so we don’t have that exciting guns yet but I already have a couple that are pretty fun to use and the fights seem to be pretty dangerous or at least we pretty often have knockdowns with the occasional complete deaths sending you back to a save point. Even the shooting, I think the lack of ammunition is coloring my feelings of it a bit, since the guns in themself feel pretty cool but it’s just frustrating not to be able to hit anything except for close range when that’s really dangerous and you are heavily limited by ammunition and not being able to use the weapons I would more like to use because I no longer have ammunition for them—even the bullet-sponginess would be more forgivable in that case since I understand it’s one of the simpler ways to add some difficulty but when you feel you use a limited resource to no effect it just ends in frustration.

Despite all that, I have been enjoying the game and am looking forward to the next play session which I expect will be on Monday since all of us seem to like the game. Now here’s hoping the third installment coming later this year will fix some of these problems, maybe we’ll have a new fun game to play once we’re done with this one.

So with me having changed to Horde a while ago I ended up leveling a new warrior, since my previous one was still on Alliance and a different server and I wanted to be able to play a tank with the guild as well as the other people I now actively play with.

Another reason for getting back to the warrior was that it seems to have gotten some fixes since the pre-patch where they played really terribly and for some reasons warriors have always been the tank I most like the theme of—just being badass enough to handle all the incoming punishment, well the armour helps too. They are also the “meta” tank at the moment especially for dungeons, but seeing as that probably won’t be true with the next patch anymore and I’ll hopefully be playing the warrior for the rest of the expansion again—as long as it continues to play fun—that didn’t really factor into my decision. Generally being a good “meta” class doesn’t play into my decision on whether to play something, more important is the theme and feel of the class or spec.

Leveling the warrior went okay, I did something unusual for me and decided to level as fury instead of my usual choice of protection—I tend to prefer to play tanks and healers over damage dealers even for leveling. This was probably a good decision since fury was a decent amount of fun—I have always liked dual wield specs—as well as having some self-heal for survivability though it did get a bit tough at times at the very late levels and there I probably should have changed to protection.

Not leveling as protection did mean something new for me however: I needed to actually get the correct weapons at max level in order to start tanking. To be fair, I wouldn’t have been able to tank anything relevant anyway but still it was a new experience not being able to get started with my chosen spec immediately. This lead me to start gearing through world quests instead of the usual getting boosted in mythic+ by friends and guildies and it was actually somewhat of a nice experience. I’d actually done something similar not too long ago with my hunter that I leveled which is still Alliance and on another realm so I didn’t really have any choices beyond just gearing myself through world quests and there as here it proved to actually be a bit of a interesting casual experience. It was also interesting to see how luck-based world quests actually are since you need to not only get something in a slot where the item level is still an upgrade but the quest also needs to be one that actually provides the highest possible item level—a good example of this is from yesterday, where I actually saw a world quest on my warrior for a piece of 355 azerite gear even though I had already been getting mostly quests for 370 azerite gear and was wearing all 370 azerite gear as well as an average item level of 380 or so. This means world quests still have to a degree the randomness of being able to actually get useful gear from them as other content just that you know beforehand if you even need to bother—expecting titanforging of course.

It was interesting to witness this in play again since I have been mostly ignoring world quests for a while since the chance for relevant gear is so low—basically on most of my characters it needs to titanforge—and the content in and of itself isn’t that fun. What made it fun for a while on the warrior and hunter was the possibility to look around for new world quests and see at least one or two that gave a guaranteed upgrade and to be able to see that slow progress towards higher item level pieces after a while, still that doesn’t last long and is already ending pretty much on my warrior—I very rarely now see any world quest that provides an item level upgrade and while I know that world quests can scale higher it doesn’t seem like a realisitic gearing path for me anymore.

The general diversion into more casual content—leveling and world quests—has been welcome though as at the moment the general level of interest for the more interesting content doesn’t seem to be that high—or maybe more the availability of the people I would like to play with—and at times it’s just nice to be able to play the game at a slower pace. Maybe that’s what classic will end up being for me—the more slow paced casual diversion for the times when there is less going on in retail. I guess we’ll know that in a few months when it releases though we will probably be in the middle of progress again by then.

We took a poke at Operation: Mechagon yesterday on the PTR and it was a surpising amount of fun—especially since the tuning on some of the abilities is a bit extreme yet. We didn’t get to start quite from the beginnging since some people in the run had already killed the first couple of bosses and we also had the small extra challenge of doing the third and fourth boss on hard mode since they had begun that sequence—this made the encounters a bit more interesting though the hard mode mechanic didn’t seem that bad though it did mean I needed to play my druid instead of my priest which made the healing requirement at times more challenging since I have less experience healing with the druid and timers aren’t available yet so it was rather difficult to try to predict when the damage would come.

King Gobbamak

The first boss we fought was King Gobbamak. The boss fight seems to normally be fairly straightforward with some players needing to stand in the tank hit to split the damage as well as get charged so they can run to the pylons that stand around the boss area and charge them so that they kill the adds that the boss continually spawns. What made this fight more interesting for us was partially the hard mode—additional adds get spawned that follow the players and leave goop on the ground that kills you very quickly. These adds were also the reason we wanted a druid with mass entanglement. But the really difficult part was the area damage that the boss periodically does, stomping the ground and dealing heavy damage to the group along with rocks that fall one-shotting players. We actually two healed this boss at least for those damage phases since they ended up being just too much for my druid without the ability to predict them accurately.

That kind of was the whole fight though, kite the boss around the room due to the bots and activate the pylons. Somewhat simple but a relatively hard healing check at the moment—I’m guessing that will be nerfed before the dungeon goes live, but on the other hand it will be much easier to manage with proper timers so maybe it isn’t necessary.

HK-8 Aerial Oppression Unit

Next came the Aerial Oppression Unit, the boss that activates the hardmode on the three previous bosses and killing them on hard mode makes this one activate its hardmode as well. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure if we played this one on hardmode or not, since I don’t actually know if they played all the three previous bosses on hardmode or not and I did not pay attention to the name of the add.

Anyway, this boss begins with just an add on the ground being attackable and you can’t leave a circle around this add or you get ported back in. During this phase the bots describe by King Gobbamak spawn again and follow players as well as bombardements going through the middle of the circle. The phase was rather trivial for the most part with not overly much going on as long as one managed the bots well—again, this is why I was on my druid.

After this add gets killed, the Aerial Oppression Unit starts channeling and a tesla coil activates on one of the platforms on either side of the entrance. This tesla coil needs to be activated to interrupt the channel from the Unit however the way to there is trapped and you still have the bots that should not be kited up there so I rooted the bots one last time before we went up.

There are three types of traps: smaller bots that teleport you to the beginning of the maze; vents that electrify and stun you for five seconds as well as a rotating thingymajigg that also teleports you to the beginning. This part is fairly straightforward though you do have to try to be as quick as possible and the vents aren’t always overly clear as to when it is safe to go over them—recommend waiting until they activate and then going over quickly. We did also find that it was actually possible to avoid the first set of traps by just going around the edge but this was very fragile and somewhat risky so not sure I recommend that though it does cut down on the time significantly—I’m also expecting this be patched away before the dungeon goes live but you never know.

After the tesla coil is activated the Unit stops channeling and falls down to the ground and takes double damage for 20 maybe 30 seconds—didn’t look at the time of the debufff that exactly. After the debuff expires it flys up and you start from phase one again with the add on the ground. We needed two activations of the tesla coil to kill the boss and more than that might put undue stress on either healer mana or just the risk that more mistakes get made since the intermissions are somewhat dangerous if they take too long. Still, it was a fun fight and was fun to see more mechanics and phases on a dungeon boss again.

Tussle Tonks

After that you start going into the actual Mechagon complex and are met with the Tussle Tonks. This fight consists of two bosses, a big bot and a tank. The tank follows a random player, occasionally charges another random player and knocks them back as well as rarely doing very heavy area damage made worse by the arena actually being rather large and us being somewhat spread out so it was at times difficult to have everyone in range of area heals.

The bot on the other hand starts with three stacks of extra armour reducing damage taken by 99%. The tank needs to kite the bot to one of the hammers that are around the arena in order to remove one of the stacks—it bugged out for us though and the first hammer immediately removed two stacks which was convenient. The bot also occasionally does a whirvelwind attack which the melees need to watch out for as well as spawning mines.

The third enemy in this fight is actually the arena which occasionally spawns sawblades in a few different patterns as well as those hammers mentioned earlier—I belive they can also hit players if you are positioned poorly.

All in all the fight was relatively trivial outside of the area damage of the tank since few abilities did significant damage and the arena was probably a bit too big to make dodging some of the mechanics difficult as it was rather easy to spread out or simply stand so that you never got hit by the sawblades. The idea is neat but probably still needs some tuning.

K.U.-J.0.

After defeating the Tonks you get thrown down into the garbage disposal of Mechagon—some reward for winning the fight. Here was some rather nasty trash that had a rather significant area explosion on death that can be avoided through line of sight—would recommend this since we did have some deaths due to these explosions.

After the trash you finde a cute mechanical dog by the name of K.U.-J.0. and it is the next boss. The fight was actually even more simple than the previous one unfortunately. The boss has four main mechanics: a very heavy damage over time effect on the tank that needs to be dispelled immediately since the damage it does is completely overtuned—luckily it comes seldom enough that you always have dispel ready; secondly crates fall on players at increasingly frequent intervalls, these simply need to be dodged; the boss also heats up and does heavy area damage which needs to be avoided through line of sight—in other words, hide behind the crates though move away from them afterwards since they will explode; and finally the boss charges random players and does moderate damage.

And that’s the fight. We had one wipe because I underestimated the damage from the tank debuff and didn’t dispel it immediately—at the time I also didn’t know how often it stacked so I wanted to see if the tank survives until the second stack—but after that we killed the boss easily. Not every boss can be difficult but it felt a bit strange to have two easy bosses after two hard ones.

Machinist’s Garden

This is were the dungeon gets a bit annoying and puzzle-y. First there is a loading belt pushing you back while you need to dodge flame jets, not really difficult but a bit annoying especially since the belt isn’t that wide—here again you could avoid the pushback through going right on the edge but I did not even end up trying that since the belt was already narrow enough.

Second comes a stealth section where you instantly get teleported to the beginning if you fail and if you wipe on the next boss—Machinist’s Garden—you have to both of these again though you can disable the flame jets. Now neither of these two sections were difficult just something that you needed to do calmly which can be annoying after a wipe—luckily we didn’t have many of those on the next boss. However, these will be very annoying once the dungeon gets turned into a mythic+ dungeon since you are under time pressure to do them quickly however this makes you much more likely to fail and the whole group suffers from individual fails in the sense that they need to wait for individual players. It is cool that Blizzard at times does something different with dungeons but these sections just don’t really fit into mythic+ unfortunately.

The boss however was, again, not overly interesting—I’m getting the feeling that only the overtuned/hardmode bosses really were interesting for us. Was mostly just dodge the flamethrowers that spawn in the middle and go around the room, kill the small plants that shoot at random players before they kill the player. I actually can’t recall any other mechanics though I’m pretty sure there were others—we did kill the boss with two dead players so it wasn’t exactly trivial just felt a bit uninspired from a mechanics point of view somehow. Though I guess having a mechanical garden that turns out to be deadly is as a concept interesting but it might just be more difficult to turn that into memorable mechanics.

King Mechagon

Now, the final boss King Mechagon. This was actually a rather cool proper two phase fight with a decent duration.

Phase one

The boss flies on a small machine reminiscent of something like Mimiron’s Head. During this phase the boss regularily targets one player with a Giga-Zap which does heavy damage and leaves a nasty dot. For this players need to be a bit spread out so that two players don’t get hit—getting hit a second time from the zap is deadly since the debuff also doubles the damage received.

There are also small stationary bots around the room that deal ticking damage to players around them, the boss regularily recalibrates these causing them to move to a new position as well as dealing damage to players on their way there.

Finally, the boss occasionally flies into the air and stars bombarding the ground with a laser following one player. This deals deadly damage if you stand in the laser and moderate-heavy damage to the whole group—as a healer, pay special attention to the player that still has the debuff from the zap since they will die quickly if not healed.

Phase two

After the boss mocks you for only disposing of a piece of furniture—his flying machine—he jumps into a big robot suit on the far side of the room from the entrance. As the flying machine is broken he will no longer fly into the air but the two other abilities from phase one are empowered, the small bots now constantly fly to new positions and the Giga-Zap is now considerably wider and is cast three times in a row each time on a new player.

The boss also periodically throws a magnet into the room, which sucks all the small bots into one spot, dealing area damage to the whole group which gets reduce the farther away you are.

Phase three?

The King jumps out of the big mecha suit and melee attacks the tank. No mechanics, just kill him—a bit like the last boss of The MOTHERLODE!!!.

All in all, this fight doesn’t have that many mechanics however the tuning of those mechanics—especially the Giga-Zap in combination with the area damage—still makes it rather challenging to heal. This also made it for me at least the most mechanically interesting fight in the dungeon, since it was all healable without timers but you still needed to be on your toes the whole time and anticipate potential sources of damage the whole time. The intervals of the mechanics was also fast paced enough to keep the fight interesting the whole time—a fitting end to the dungeon.

Conclusion

I find the dungeon to be rather fun, though there are some parts I already see being very annoying once it becomes available on mythic+. Still, as it is it does give something of that raid feeling in a five player group and as such I think Blizzard has succeeded with their goal and I’m sure the few tuning issues there were will be fixed before the dungeon gets released on live realms. It was also really fun going in and poking on a dungeon beforehand, getting a early look at the abilities similar to how it felt doing the raid on the PTR. Learning by doing is afterall much more fun than just watching guides of other people doing it.

So, go do the dungeon once it comes out, seemed fun!

So we did some PTR raid testing yesterday, the first four bosses of Eternal Palace on normal with item level scaled to 405. This scaling made the raid a bit of a challenge actually, along with the tuning otherwise probably being completely out of wack on account of it being the PTR where that tuning is being done. Sometimes the raid test are also intentionally overtuned to allow people to properly test the mechanics and not just steamroll them—was probably also the reason for the item level scaling. Of course, none of us knowing any of the mechanics along with playing two healers for 15 raiders also contributed though I think having a third healer would just have made it boring—it was still normal after all. But my point is, people on live realms will probably have better gear and more of an idea when going in so it will be easier.

Another slightly annoying thing was, while we did have the Heart of Azeroth scaled to level 60 theoretically unlocking a major and minor essence slot, only the major one was available since we would have needed to visit the heart forge in order to unlock the minor essence slot. Now why we didn’t do this, well that scaling was only enabled inside the raid, so once we would have been at the forge we would no longer have had the neck at level 60 and as such the slot would not have been available to unlock. To be fair, I’m somewhat doubtful that most normal raiders will have that slot unlocked when they start with the raid anyway though that will depend on how much easier it becomes to get levels in the Heart of Azeroth with the next patch and how much time we have until the raid is released but it would still have been nice to be able to test a minor essence in addition to the major one.

Abyssal Commander Sivara

The first boss was pretty trivial and I think we ended up killing it on our first try. The boss basically had the mechanic from Guarm, where everyone gets a color and you shouldn’t run into people with another color. In addition to this the boss occasionally shoots out arrows in all directions that also have a color and you should be especially careful not to get hit by the ones that have another colour though even getting hit by your colour is bad since it is also a debuff with a small ticking damage effect and a secondary negative effect. These secondary effects seemed to a bit buggy, for example one of them was reduced healing but it reduced healing by 0% in other words not at all.

The last mechanic that was enabled on normal was a random player getting targeted by a spear of another colour that a player with the colour matching the spear needs to soak. Soaking this spear stuns you until someone removes the spear, which then of course also needs to be done by a player with the same colour as the spear.

All in all rather simple but it was also the first boss on normal. It could get somewhat interesting on mythic depending on tuning, but being the first boss the tuning probably won’t be that hard. Still, the boss at least had mechanics you couldn’t ignore unlike the first boss of Battle of Dazar’alor so that is a plus.

Blackwater Behemoth

The second boss we did was the Blackwater Behemoth, Blizzards new attempt to make an underwater boss. Or to be more exact, a boss with a third dimensions since the previous attempts weren’t really underwater but rather floating in the air—those bosses being Kael’thas as well Al’akir.

This seemed like it could potentially be the hardest early boss though again will depend on tuning. One of the big problems with this boss is being under water, which means that your movement speed is heavily reduced. Along with this, spells that you cast on the ground don’t necessarily hit you while you are swimming above the bottom of the cave, this was a big problem for me in the beginning since I tend to use Angelic Feathers as my movement speed ability and those are put down on the ground—later on I started swapping my weapons for the Underlight Angler, the artifact fishing pole from Legion. I would definitely recommend getting it if Blizzard does not nerf it before release since it’s a huge movement speed increase while swimming and actually allows you to swim against the pushback the boss does.

The other difficulty with this boss is the primary mechanic: everyone except for the main tank is heal immune—absorb shields worked while we were testing, which will probably mean that discipline priests will be rather strong here early on. To remove this immunity, you need to kill the pufferfish that are on the platforms around the boss but with the correct timing since you only have two of these per platform and the boss switches platform on a timer not dependant on health. This means the boss is also something of a damage check, since you need to be done with the boss before you run out of the fish and your raid is heal immune and slowly gets killed by the damage from the boss. The boss rather constantly does a chain lightning type cast on several players that increases in damage the more it jumps so the raid needs to be spread out—rather difficult for melees as well as while one is getting the pufferfish buff. The pushback which is a channeled casts also does a decent amount of damage so having players healable and topped up before it comes will probably be rather important—on our kill try we ended up focusing the pufferfish before the boss on the second platform for example. It will also be interesting to see how some tanks deal with this since the boss deals a large amount of damage to the whole raid if no tank is in melee range and it is of course hard to be in melee after the pushback.

The final mechanic are the intermissions, now these aren’t really anything more than swimming from one platform to the next however there is a small catch: if you are healable a fish from the depths will come and eat you while you are moving in between the platforms instantly killing you. This is also true outside of the intermissions so players need to stay on the platforms though there is a few second grace period so you can see you are in danger. During the intermission you also need to be careful not to swim into the jellyfish that are on the way since they also give you the healable buff.

All in all, it was actually a surprisingly complex boss for normal and I will be very interested to see how the tuning ends up being on live—this boss could pose some real problems for some guilds. Also, only the first four bosses being available I’m not actually sure if you can just skip it, we could definitely have done the bosses in another order so maybe that will be the solution for some.

Radiance of Azshara

This boss also surprised me a bit and was probably the second hardest one for us. It was basically a more complex version of the Wrath of Azshara from Eye of Azshara in Legion. So the mechanics that were the same: the boss is in the middle of a ring and you play around the boss—also, don’t use Shadow Step if you are a rogue—as well as the Arcane Bomb: players get debuffed with a bomb that explodes after a while stunning players in an area, dispelling the debuff allows the debuffed player to also avoid this explosion since the bomb is then left on the spot the player was standing when they got dispelled. The boss also spawns arcane tornades you need to dodge that knock you back and damage you when you get hit by them—with how much stuff is going on in this encounter this can easily lead to your death through a chain reaction.

Now the primary new mechanics—on normal at least—were the intermission in which adds spawn in one of four places that you have to get to since the rest of the room gets heavy ticking damage and the boss is taking reduced damage. Killing these adds allows you to damage the boss again as well as removing the ticking damage from the rest of the room. These adds consist of one big add that does a knockback with heavy damage which was the really dangerous part since getting kicked back outside the safe zone could easily lead to death. There were also smaller adds that need to be controlled and damaged down to prevent them from casting chain lightnig on the group.

The second new mechanic were lines of mines that spawned making moving between the different parts of the room rather difficult especially when one was trying to reach the adds. There were at times small gaps between the mines but we primarily worked around this by having one of the tanks soak one of the mines allowing the rest of the raid to get through—soaking a mine does spawn a new tornado though so need to stay careful.

All in all, mechanically the boss seems rather simple but like Wrath of Azshara back in Legion it’s just rather easy to be overwhelmed by all that is going on at the same time as well as the rather heavy movement requirement. We also tended to have a bad habit of spreading out a bit too much meaning it was at times difficult to keep players within range which was especially bad when they needed to be dispelled. Will be interesting to see how the boss plays on mythic—I’m expecting it to be interesting.

Lady Ashvane

The last boss we did was Lady Ashvane and she was rather trivial for us especially compared to the two previous bosses, we killed her on the first try. The boss starts with a big absorb shield that needs to be damaged down so that the boss actually takes damage and after a while she will recast her absorb—apparently this shield will keep getting bigger with each cast so it will be something of a damage check.

Corals also spawn periodically that then spawn orbs that move to the boss increasing her absorb shield. These orbs can be soaked by players but doing so triggers an explosion damaging the whole raid—this means that the longer the fight goes on the more damage will come in. Now these corals can be removed through an additional mechanic: several players get marked with a colour in pairs. After the debuff expires damage will be dealt between these pairs and can be used to remove the corals. We managed to keep the corals quite well in check though I imagine this will not be as easy on mythic. I think this will heavily influence the difficulty of the fight as well as how big the damage check will be.

Another mechanic that could make these marks more difficult to play are the stuns: for us three players got put into a water bubble and stunned within. To remove the stun the bubble needed to be destroyed. Now we did get some warning before this happened though we didn’t really use this to stack up which we should probably do on mythic. However, depending on the timings on mythic these bubbles might come inconveniently timed along with for example the marks which might make the positioning for those much more difficult.

Finally, the tank debuff or hit the boss does leaves a damaging spot on the ground so the boss needs to be moved around the room. I guess the room filling up will be the soft enrage, though I’m guessing the healers will be out of mana and the raid will have exploded to the orbs before that happens.

Now the tuning for Lady Ashenvale seemed rather easy and we got her down on the first try. But there were some interesting mechanics in there that could prove problematic on mythic and I’m hoping the boss will be more interesting to play there.

Conclusion

The testing was actually surprisingly fun and I’m looking forward to doing more in the future. Us being almost a full guild group with one external player probably helped, but still being able to do even normal bosses in a version where they can present some level of challenge was fun. It was also a great opportunity to get something of a sneak peek on the bosses that will probably be more valuable than our first clear on heroic since with the smaller raid size along with only two healers means there was more to do as well as more responsibility placed upon us two. In the heroic week we generally have enough healers that I don’t tend to have to do much and as a consequence don’t really learn what is dangerous on the different bosses. Now this can of course change between difficulties as abilities get added to the boss but still it gave some idea how the bosses actually work.

So, hopefully there are more raid tests soon!

I have been playing one of my favourite games again recently, Arcanum. It’s a CRPG released 2001 that unlike many popular ones released around that time is not based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset¹. I think this is what gives me so fond memories of the game, since while I do enjoy Dungeons & Dragons and think it’s a good ruleset for Pen & Paper it always felt somewhat lacking while playing it as a CRPG. Especially the whole “casts per day” mechanic I felt really did not fit in with CRPG’s that tend to be somewhat monster filled. It made casters really frustrating to play especially at low levels since you either did very little or ended up resting every couple fights. But this was about Arcanum, not Dungeons & Dragons.

Playing the game has been a somewhat strange experience, since I have really fond memories of playing it a ton as a kid and those memories seem to be very strong since I can still memeber the early levels really well and know almost exactly what I need to do, what quests are available where and how to complete them as well as how I want to level my character even though it has been several years since I last played the game—though I’m not quite sure how long exactly, I think I did another playthrough of the game ten years ago or so?

Still, I find the game excellent but this strange feeling of knowing exactly how everything will play out all the time is keeping me from playing the game a bit. I mean, I still enjoy what I am doing but it feels somewhat routine which is strange since it has been so long since last. The feeling will also probably dissipate a bit the further in I get since I actually haven’t played the whole game through that many times, only the early levels and maybe the first half or so?

I think I’m actually so slowly at my usuall stopping point back in the day, before going and visiting the Black Mountain Clan. For some reason this first proper dungeon used to intimidate me, I believe partially due to the Rock Golems there which can actually make your weapon break when you attack them.² Since I’m playing a melee character again this will be something I have to take into account before going in there—perhaps I should get some “expendable” weapon I can use to kill the golems? It’s actually really unfortunate, just got nice magical weapons for the whole party after clearing out P. Schuyler and Sons but I guess I need to use the other weapons for only one or two fights in there.

I think I’ll start enjoying the game even more once I get over that hurdle, and now with Uu’nat down we should probably be raiding less again which means I have more time for other games. Though maybe I’ll just spend that time boosting more instead. I just hope this game doesn’t end up the way Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey where I don’t end up finishing this run—haven’t really played Assassin’s Creed since that post, there as well I would need to get over the level grinding hurdle.

With that all said, the game is still probably my all-time favourite CRPG and if you haven’t already played it and like CRPGs I would definitely recommend you do so. But do read the manual, some of the things—like skills training—really aren’t explained at all in game. As a kid I had no idea what it did, just that you could pay a trainer to get some text to stand next to the name of the skill. But the training is actually really good, and among other things is what is required in order to be able to try to repair completely broken equipment.

If you do end up playing the game, I would recommend getting some of the community patches for it as well as the widescreen patch which is available and works well for the most part though it does have a funky effect on some screens. For example the character sheet and inventory are fixed size, so you end up being able to see some of the world while you have them open which is not the case in the original resolution. Also, depending on whether you like experimentation or just want to see the story, it might be worth looking into some good builds. There is a lot of freedom to the character creation, but there are very much “cookie cutter” backgrounds and skills you can choose to get a easier experience. In my opinion, there are also some somewhat misleading spells, that seem like they could be strong based on the description but end up being somewhat weak in actual usage. One example of this are the different elemental forms you can learn in the elemental spell paths—it seems really cool to be able to turn into an earth elemental or the like, but in my experience the damage and survivability wasn’t that great compared to some other choices. On the other hand, being able to turn into an earth elemental is really cool, so maybe that is enough reason to go that path—I know I made an elemental mage at some point that focused on the different transformations and had fun with it.

Now I’m actually getting the feeling of maybe wanting to remake my character and going for a more magic build again since those tend to be more interesting even if the melee builds can be really strong as well. Maybe I just need to get those first points in earth magic to get the extra strength and that would make my meleeing more efficient. I guess I have a plan for tomorrow then.

So I’ve actually joined a boosting community recently and have been on a couple of boost runs. It seems like an appropriate way to get some extra gold to cover raiding costs as well as maybe eventually be able to afford the much sought after longboi. Now that latter is more of a long term goal since I don’t know if I will be boosting that often and while the payout is good you do need to boost frequently if you want to make a lot of gold in a short period of time. It also depends on the amount of buyers per run, more buyers of course means more effective use of one’s time.

It has actually been a somewhat strange experience so far even though I’ve only been on a couple of runs. For one, how fun it has actually been considering we are doing content that is trivial enough for us to be able to boost somewhere along half of the raid. I guess actually having to boost all of those people is what makes it fun, since it brings some level of challenge back to the content actually having to think a bit more what we are doing there.

Complete side rant, there was one rather frustrating experience during one of the boost runs in Crucible of Storms. We were taking on a couple of more boostees than in the earlier runs and there was some uncertainty around us being able to actually make it through with so many boostees. Now we had a try and a wipe because of failed kicks on Uu’nat—I play Discipline so I can’t really react to fails that well afterhand, I have to predict them, admittedly I could probably have reacted better and it would have been fine. However, after this a call is made by the co-leader to bring in one more damage dealer and one more healer. Now, in theory this is a fine call since it makes it more likely that we are able to manage the amount of boostees but my issue comes here: the additional damage dealer was not told to interrupt anything which was the whole reason for us just wiping and we were doing more than fine up until that point. The additional healer also just meant that there was less for us to heal per person just making it seem that the healers weren’t pulling their weight. We of course easily kill the boss after that but we would have done that anyway if the kicks had been done properly which they were the second time around. As a consequence, we also didn’t try taking more boostees in on consequent runs—though to be fair I’m not sure if there was enough interest anyway. All of that just annoyed me more than it probably should for some reason, the “lost” gold isn’t that important just the complete misidentification of the issue and the overbearing response as a consequence.

Another somewhat strange and unfortunate part of the experience has been the—I guess—culture some of the players there have. Very much “let’s go boys” and lots of e-peen measuring it feels like giving something of a “boys club” feel at times. Now admittedly I’m seeing this more subtly for the most part and it’s probably something that they are bringing over from other communities they participate in rather than something innate for this community but it still doesn’t make the envirnment feel the most welcoming to me. It also feels really strange since there is so much talk in the Code of Conduct and so on about showing a professional image to the buyers by being on time and keeping the in-game raid chat clean but I guess this same professionalism isn’t expected to be extended towards other bosters.

Now as noted these are initial vibes and I haven’t been on that many boost runs yet and it’s probably very dependant on the leader as well as one’s fellow bosters—in fact the second boost run was much better than the first though that was probably partially due to very low participation in voice chat from almost all boosters present, me included—but it still isn’t really motivating me to more actively look out for additional boosting opportunities. I guess I should probably be fine if I avoid the outwardly obvious incompatible groups.

I still think I want to be doing more boosting than I have been so far, and Uu’nat being down should provide more opportunities as well as more importantly more energy to be able to do boost runs—that has actually a really interesting side effect of this progress that I haven’t though much about, actually just feeling like the breaks from raiding on non-raid nights were really needed.

Speaking of progress, one unexpectedly annoying part of it has been preparing the “foosts” (feasts) for the raids. Now there is a special version of the feasts that instead of the rare fish take the crafting reagnents from Uldir however there is of course a slight problem with this: we aren’t raiding Uldir anymore. There is something of a way around this, in that you can convert the Battle of Dazar’alor crafting material into the Uldir one with several different crafting professions. The problem here becomes when you want to convert 1000+ of the things it takes a lot of time even with the crafting enchantment—I think I spent 10-15 minutes converting mine. Now this doesn’t need to be done that often and it has been a one time thing for me so far but it has still been something of an unexpected and quite frankly unecessary small annoyance with regards to progress. Luckily that shouldn’t be so necessary anymore since from what I hear we will be getting a new feast in the next patch anyway and I don’t have that many of the materials left since we haven’t been clearing Battle of Dazar’alor since we started Crucible progress. But it would just have been nice to either have the transform cast be shorter or have an option to transform several at the same time.

Well that was quick. The most satisfying kill in a while.

So as noted we have been progressing on Uu’nat for a bit. This is still ongoing and I think I’m starting to get a good feel for all phases of the fight, phase three included.

Now my observations on the second boss have changed somewhat. It seems that for melees the fight is mostly rather boring, since two of the primary mechanics of the fight—baiting the Oblivion Tears to the edges of the room so that people don’t run into them; not running into other players while Unstable Resonance is active thus creating an explosion instantly killing players nearby while reaching your relic before the debuff runs out—don’t target melee players unless there are too many of them or too many of the ranged and healers are dead.

Phase one

Now even as a range and healer, phases one and two are getting to be rather boring. Sure, there is a bit to watch out for with the marks¹ and how the Oblivion Tears have been baited so that you don’t run into other players as well as me having the extra duty in phase one of carrying the void relic² so I need to be positioned well before Unstable Resonance is cast so that other players can get to me easily as well as move around me easily. This is mostly difficult right at the end of phase one, since the room keeps getting smaller in phase one and before the intermission to phase two it tends to have gotten rather small indeed making the last Unstable Resonance somewhat tricky to play. Still, the incoming damage isn’t that great for the most part so you can stay almost completely concentrated on the mechanics and damaging the boss making phase one not overly interesting to play repeatedly—I think this is usually the main cause of some of our fails with Unstable Resonance in phase one, the mechanic still requires a certain amount of attention and people just get so into the flow of the fight that they let themselves get caught in a bad spot or actually just let the debuff run out.

The first intermission is also not overly complex, use the storm relic³ to kill the adds that have accrued during phase one and then use the void relic² and soak the Oblivion Tears—so we have more room to play in phase two—and then drop it on the correct mark by soaking the Unknowable Terror. The room also gets bigger again and doesn’t shrink regularly anymore making phase two somewhat easier to play.

Phase two

Here the fight gets slightly more interesting from a healer perspective, since there are actually some decent bursts of damage coming in when the storm relic³ gets used to clear the adds which at times comes in combination with Gift of N’Zoth: Hysteria which deals a decent amount of damage to the raid as well as healing the adds. This means there are actually a few decent chances to use cooldowns and actually heal people in phase two, which is made somewhat difficult by the necessity to bait and the largeness of the room—there is rarely a moment where I actually have everyone in range allowing me to properly prepare for incoming damage meaning I have to take positioning into account in order to be able to heal people properly. This adds a somewhat interesting layer to the fight from a healer perspective, though it only comes up once for me at least in the fight meaning it isn’t that much of an issue. Positioning in phase two is made even more important by the Unknowable Terror which spawns a large area effect on the floor which will most likely kill any non-tank players—this ability is especially dangerous in combination with the need to bait the Oblivion Tears, since you can’t necessarily just run through the middle which is usually the quickest way out.

Now for the damage dealers there is one extra bit to watch out for in phase two: more frequent adds as well as caster adds. This means that the adds actually need to be cleared during phase two like in the first intermission as well as interrupted—interrupt fails along with Unstable Resonance fails are also the most frequent wipe reason for us. All in all it’s not overly complicated, though the amount of damage on the adds needs to be rather precise since they need to be killed through the effect from the storm relic³ and not directly by the damage dealers which means they need to be brought low together.

Phase three

Now the intermission going into phase three is similar as described above, kill the adds then soak the tears² and drop the relic on the mark—though I still have cooldown on the relic, so this time someone else is the primary soaker. The rest however, is much more hectic than any of the earlier phases. Phase three is played in a room that is sligthly smaller than phase two, so baiting the tears correctly is more important. The beams from phase one also make a return, which means you have to be positioned properly in order to avoid getting two stacks but at the same time also baiting properly so that tears aren’t placed incorrectly—for this, we have set spots for the ranges to bait as a group, so that hopefully the baits land correctly. Now the marks still have to be played like before, but now baits at time come in very close proximity to the marks so you have to be on your toes and not stand incorrectly once you’ve gotten rid of your mark. During all of this the adds spawn like before and have to be interrupted and dealt with like before.

In addition, phase three also has a new mechanic: Insatiable Torment. This ability reduces the healing you receive by 100% making you almost heal immune, with two exceptions: absorbs still work, which is why for the marks we use Rapture and shield the tormented players to allow them to survive since they usually need to split from other players; the tormented players also damage players around them leeching health and this is the other way they can be kept alive.

So phase three all in all is mostly familiar to someone who has played the other phases just with much more tight timings and less tolerance for failure. This does present something of a learning curve since you have to get used to knowing where to go beforehand so you’ll be at the right place at the right time but I think we are slowly starting to get over this hurdle. I think our best try was 12% so far and we have had several phase three tries in the last few raid evenings so hopefully this means we can down the boss sometime this reset still—would actually mean we get a decent world ranking again as well, which would be nice. But I guess we’ll know how that went in a week or so.

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Well, that didn’t last long. First kill was today.

So while I was watching a stream today and following the discussion on the Classic beta I remembered something: Blizzard used to provide fansite kits to the community in case you wanted to make a fansite for World of Warcraft. This lead to me wondering if they still do that and unfortunately I could find no sign of these kits on the official website, however I did find a couple of the old kits—namely the original one I had played around with and one for Wrath of the Lich King—from a third party fansite amusingly enough.

Now I have been considering changing the design of the blog for a while and although I do like more simple and elegant designs there was something charming about the idea of using one of these old fansite kits as the basis of that redesign especially since the blog has mostly World of Warcraft content so the theme still feels appropriate.

I decided to base the redesign on the Wrath of the Lich King fansite kit, since that one had more of a template for a website—the original one was extremely bare bones, only a header image with some links in the left column and content in the right column. With the Wrath kit however, it ended up being more of a case of bringing the code into the modern era where responsive design is a given as well as some other slight modifications to the details.

For example, I decided to keep the fonts I already had on the site since they do give a slightly cleaner look to the whole thing as well as not using the original header image—it was weirdly cropped and relied on some borders in the styling to complete the look. Instead I launched the game and took an updated screenshot of the map and used that instead. The new image is also bigger which makes it look better when the site scales up. Another small change was actually separating the two side iron borders so that they are two separate images, since they would have otherwise been at a fixed width from each other. I also cleaned up some small noise left at the outer edges, probably as a result from some background image that had been captured with the bars. I also slightly modified the gradient on the post title in post listings, it was an image but is now made through CSS. This allows me to use a bigger font on the post titles if I want to since it means that the gradient will scale with the size instead of being a fixed size. I did end up scaling the post titles in listings up slightly, since the original size was actually smaller than what I normally use for the size of the content. It would have felt a bit strange to have the titles be smaller than the content even if they are well separated through the red background.

The article pages stayed mostly the same from a content perspective, of course the scaffolding changed but the content font and such is the same as earlier. It still feels significantly different of course and I am rather happy with how it turned out.

The final change was getting rid of the footer since with the content being so clearly delineated in comparison to the old design where the header and footer clearly marked the boundaries of the content. This made the footer feel less necessary than before. And honestly, another reason was that I wasn’t quite sure how I would separate the footer from the content since while there was a horizontal border in the fansite kit similar to the vertical ones on the sides, it was sligthly bulkier and it did not feel like it properly fit in there since there were no joining pieces for the different borders. Maybe it would have looked fine but I personally was not happy with the result—though I am still considering, having nothing at the end of posts feels a bit empty.

All in all I am very happy with how the site came out and finally getting to do something a bit different. The earlier clean look was very nice but also in some way a bit boring and while I know it is possible to get it to feel a bit more interesting I do not know how to do that personally—and since this blog is a one woman show, me not knowing how to improve something kind of prevents that from being an option. Still, it was interesting to see with how little effort is was possible to convert an admittedly simple outdated template into something that reasonably well follows modern web standards and practices.

I might get back to tinkering with it tomorrow or at some other point, for now I just wanted to get it all out there. Now for some well deserved rest after a hard day’s work on this as well as some nice Uu’nat progress—should probably write a new post on that if I remember, we’ve seen phase three several times and have had some quite good tries as well though nothing close to a kill.

So the new raid has been out for a while new and we’ve been poking at it for almost all of our raid time since it came out with the exception of one half-clear of Dazar’alor. So far we have managed to kill the first of two bosses and happily actually killed the boss before significant nerfs. Unfortunately those nerfs also came to the second boss so won’t be able to say the same thing there. Still, the nerfs seem quite justified considering the silly setups we’ve seen for some of those early kills.

Still it has been really nice to have a new raid to progress and the bosses are also quite fun on mythic if rather boring and undertuned on heroic which rather surprised me. We actually had a decent amount of wipes on the first boss on heroic due to casts going through at the wrong time but ended up killing the second boss on our first try as if almost all of the mechanics were simply irrelevant—it was a really strange feeling.

On mythic however, it’s the other way around really. The first boss is deceptively simple: play the kicks and dispels correctly and that’s most of what you have to do in order to kill the boss. After that, it mostly comes down to correct timing of cooldowns for the healers and no individual failing too much. Getting all of this clean still took a fair amount of tries for us but once you learn the important parts and don’t stress too much amount the irrelevant bits the boss is rather straightforward to play. I did really like the boss though as it managed to give me several mechanics as a healer that were relevant which is somewhat rare.

The second boss on the other hand seems to have more things that are relevant for the whole raid. You have concerns about correct positioning both for baiting the Void Tears as well as not exploding each other wenn you get the marks and making it in time to your relic. In addition you more phase dependant effects you need to look out for in your positioning.

Uu'nat also has a decent amount of somewhat bursty incoming damage that you need to plan for as a healer, which makes the fight more enjoyable for me though cooldown usage being at times boss health dependent does make timing those cooldowns harder. The boss is fun so far though, even if we are only not so consistently poking at phase two. I’m interested to see how it feels to play phase three.

So we finally have Jaina down—a while ago actually—and it was quite the adventure. I believe we ended up with around 360 wipes, a bit more and two complete resets of progressing (three, if you count the one day of the reset we “killed” her).

The fight is quite the adventure, though phase one—especially with the nerfs—feels somewhat boring. Sure, there is a lot that can go wrong there and one does need to remain concentrated and most of our wipes were probably due to phase one fails but it still doesn’t really feel satisfying somehow. Especially as a healer, I got basically assigned to being a worse damage dealer since the healing requirement is so low. I did get to mind control Jaina’s minions off the ship though, so that was a plus.

The first intermission is the first really tricky part as a healer, since you need to keep a good eye on your group so they don’t die while also focusing on the rather significant amount off ground effects going on so you don’t freeze. Consequently, I belive our healers were the most likely to be frozen in our tries, though that did iron itself out quite well by the end and people getting frozen was more the exception than the rule.

Phase two begins with something of a bang for healers, since all the stacks you gathered in the intermission will keep on ticking. This was also where I got my first chance to do some proper healing as a discipline priest who is somewhat reliant on there being something to damage for my healing. So cooldowns are used and stacks get reset and the group gets to be somewhat stable for a while. After that phase two is in general moderately safe, there are some critical timings with the stack resets and Siegebreaker Blasts where we do use some additional cooldowns, but in general it’s pretty steady going.

The second intermission, in other words the wall and rescuing Nathanos, is mostly also pretty easy going. There are some quite high stacks going on when the intermission starts, but those calm down rather quickly and as a healer I don’t have to concern myself too much with the wall damage and Nathano’s health—or rather, the health of Nathano’s ice block. Consequently, this usually ended up being the place we used our mana potions in order to have as much mana as possible going into phase three which is where the healing requirement for this fight really is at its highest.

Now, phase three. It’s kind of chaotic, especially as a healer that needs to keep tabs on not just the fight mechanics everyone else is dealing with but also cooldowns and making sure they come at the right moment and don’t overlap too much. Since this phase should be quite short if played correctly—it becomes unhealable at some point, so there is something of a damage requirement—most of the healing here is covered by cooldowns which does mean that using those cooldowns at the correct time to maximize their value becomes more important than otherwise. It does make the last phase really stressful not helped along by it being, well, the last phase so it’s the one you get the least practice with but it is also a nice culmination to the fight and does feel fun.

That is in general a good way to describe the fight: fun. Sure, the first phase isn’t overly intersting from a healer point of view but even then I got to mind control people off of a ship which doesn’t happen often. The rest of the fight has a rather good pacing as well, keeping you on your toes pretty much the whole time since small mistakes rather quickly build up to big problems. It’s a really nice change of pace from Uldir and I hope the coming raids will be as good as this one.

The mythic version of the Battle for Dazar’alor was released this week and we’ve gotten a decent start in the raid so far, downing three bosses with good progress on Opulence though unfortunately lag problems prevented me from participating yesterday for a bit.

So far the raid has been rather fun, with overall interesting bosses. There are a couple which are somewhat frustrating to play as Discipline especially on heroic, since there just aren’t those damage spikes which Discipline thrives on healing away—constant slow ticking damage really isn’t a strength. This has already changed to a degree on mythic, with Grong for example having some decent damage spikes on mythic even though the boss felt rather easy to heal on heroic.

This week has also been really nice in regards to mythic+, since the affixes are probably the easiest ones overall and it is kind of baffling to see the difference affixes make. Keys that would have been hell last week are easy this week even though 2-3 levels higher. I don’t really understand Blizzard’s design in this respect, it feels strange to have the differences be so big as to discourage people from playing the content certain weeks.

With regards to big differences, with the new season we also got the new seasonal affix, Reaping. In contrast to Infested, this affix is actually reallyfun. It allows for some strategic play since you need to think about when it gets triggered but the way you deal with the affix—kill a bunch of mobs—is also just simply more fun from a mechanical perspective than trying to control the mobs that heal other mobs. It’s also more interesting to have something hectic happen like a bunch of mobs which need controlling and kicking happen occasionally than just bringing the correct CC to deal with certain mobs.

So far I’m enyoing the new season, hopefully that continues!

For the last few weeks I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey on and off. It has been mostly a good time with some frustations, mainly centered around the leveling system.

Now, why is the leveling system frustraing? Well, in essence it actually isn’t and does bring something of an RPG-feel to the game which I at least welcome since I tend to like RPGs quite a lot, Arcanum for example being one of my favourite games. The problem comes in how the leveling is interleaved with the questing.

Now, I’m a person who tends to like story in games, even at times when that story might not be particularily well written and so far I have found the story of Odyssey quite enjoyable with some interesting decisions even in the side quests. What however makes me somewhat miffed at times is the game’s tendency to encourage me to ignore the story and go do side activities, be it questing or the like. The most recent and egregious example of this came recently, where I finished some main story related quests and a character told me to meet them later in another area. Now this area is 10 levels above my level and the quest is also marked 10 levels above my level; the main story quest I just completed was of my level. Now they did also point me to some more appropriately leveled main story content though that was already a bit off the path, but completing that went quickly and only yielded a level or so and afterwards also provided more quests that were 6+ levels higher than my level. This is the point where the leveling system starts to detract instead of adding to the game.

Now one could make the argument that these are places where the game designers would have added in filler quests if it were not for the leveling system in order to pad out the play time of the game and actually having the option of choosing the content one does in order to get to progress the story is a better option, but the cynic in me feels these sections are there in order to push people to buy the experience boosts from the in-game store. And even if I were to believe that argument, I feel it falls somewhat flat since wouldn’t it be better in general to just remove the padding alltogether while keeping the optional side content for people who really enjoy the game or the gameplay? I mean, that is all content that I might very well be tempted to return to after I have completed the main story if I enjoy the game, I remember doing this with Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and Saint’s Row 3 for example. Both were games I greatly enjoyed and consequently I wanted to complete all available content after I was done with the main story. It feels strange that the developers would choose to actually detract from the main story in order to pad something so meaningless as a playtime number for a singleplayer game, especially since that number is already greatly extended for those people that want to keep playing by the side content as noted earlier.

Beyond that though, the only thing that has annoyed me with the game is the somewhat lackluster performance, it only runs at around 60 FPS though the frame times seem to be decent, I at least haven’t noticed any stuttering.

The rest, really, is quite good. I quite enjoy the setting as someone who has been rather fascinated by Rome when I was younger since ancient Greece thematically can be quite similar and having the option again of choosing either a female or male protagonist again was really nice, I really wish more games did that.

The “modern day” story telling has been kept to a minimum so far, which for me is a big bonus since that was something that completely ruined the first game for me and put me off of the series for quite some time. I still can’t quite figure out why they think we’re interested in some random people trying to find some old stuff over the actual main meat of the game, the historical storytelling. Hopefully it is kept to a minimum for the rest of the game, extended segments of that could be something that could really ruin the game for me. Another reason, by the way, why I found Assassin’s Creed: Liberation one of the better AC games, barely any interaction outside of the historical stuff (also the first one with a female protagonist, which is a bonus for me).

While I generally enjoy the game, it is also a game from which I have ended up taking several breaks due to the aforementioned leveling problem which makes me somewhat hesitant to recommend it. Now I have a friend who is also playing the game and seems to be enjoying it just as much as I while not being bothered by the leveling since she likes to do the side-quests and such anyway and if that’s your case then it would definitely be deserving of a recommendation if you like the Assasin’s Creed in general. But if you think that might bother you, it might be better to stay away. Even then, a ancient Greece themed RPG with action combat is already a pretty damn cool game and not something likely to come along anytime soon, so might be worth pushing past that annoyance. That’s my plan at least once I get the motivation to continue.

Patch 8.1 is upon us since yesterday which I think makes for a good opportunity to talk about some of the changes.

It’s a bit of an odd one, since it somewhat significantly changes class balancing and some abilities while some guilds are still progressing in Uldir, making the experience for the latecomers potentially more difficult which makes me somewhat unsure of how I feel about this. The most prominent example would probably be Zul, since with Rogues getting changed basically because of that fight it does make the fight somewhat more difficult to execute—we still killed the boss easily enough but the fight did last a bit longer than before.

There is also somewhat of a hidden boss buff for Zek’voz, at least in guilds that have a Discipline Priest. Because Evangelism now has a slightly longer cooldown—15 seconds longer, from 75 seconds to 90 seconds—it is no longer ready for every dance on mythic, I ended up with it on approximately 10-15 seconds of cooldown remaining when I wanted to use it. This makes the fight require slightly more coordination between healer cooldowns for guilds still progressing there though the fight is easy enough that it shouldn’t be a real problem anyway. Beyond that the change to Evangelism didn’t really feel noticeable to me since I usually wanted to use it in conjunction with Rapture anyway which has a 90 second cooldown, making the change somewhat moot. Mentally though, the difference is suprisingly big and does mean I’ll be a little more careful of using the ability opportunistically.

In general, I think the nerfs to Discipline felt manageable, it’ll take some time to get used to for sure and the increased mana cost of Power Word: Shield might actually mean that our gearing priorities change slightly against haste since one of the big benefits of haste was being able to blanket the raid quicker which is now much more mana intensive. The general reduced throughput isn’t really something I felt in fight though it was somewhat apparent on the healing meters on all bosses except for G’huun oddly enough. It could just be that it was a off-night for me as well, so I guess we’ll know that better once the next raid comes out.

Now there were some other moderately interesting things in the patch as well, for example the continuation of the war campaign though I haven’t really had the time to take a poke at that yet. Another big change was now crafted BOP items require skill in that profession in order to be used; this was hotfixed to only apply to new recipes coming with the next raid but it’s still an interesting change. It means it will no longer be possible to pick up a profession, say tailoring, craft some fancy pants in the first raid week or two and then drop tailoring and learn a more useful profession like alchemy since those fancy pants would end up being unusable after unlearning tailoring. This seemed to be mostly popular in the higher end guilds so it shouldn’t affect most players but is a somewhat interesting change nontheless.

Another thing of note was the addition of achievements for completing all mythic+ dugeons in time on +10 and +15, unsurprisingly this was bugged. Now unfortunately we didn’t have quite as much time as hoped last week so we were aware that we wouldn’t be getting the +15 achievement, but we also didn’t get the +10 and for some of us it was even displaying zero progress towards completing the achievement. Hopefully this ends up being fixed shortly, would be rather annoying to have to hunt for keys for the dungeons again. Especially so since we can no longer delete keys, run a dungeon and get a new set of keys which was possible up until the patch hit.

Just a minor side rant, that’s one of those changes I find somewhat hard to understand and I’m hoping a question to that get answered on Friday. I understand that it was technically a unintended consequence of the buggy keys in the first week of BfA with them carrying over from Legion that lead to this but it was something that in a sense was actually a very useful feature to people who prefer playing with a set group. We only have five keys per week we can use and getting unlucky can very realistically mean we don’t see a dungeon at all in a given week. This was annoying enough before from the perspective of Raider.io/Wowprogress score since trying to push that was the primary reason we kept doing mythic+, but it’s even more of a problem now with the defined seasons from Blizzard and actual in-game rewards tied to them. Simple bad luck could mean missing out on those which I don’t find a particularily good design decision especially since they now intentionally patched out something that alleviated that problem.

Beyond that though, I honestly can’t quite say what the patch brought since quite frankly the game isn’t holding my interest quite as well as it was in Legion which I find very unfortunate. It’s a hard thing coming from the (subjectively) best expansion to one that just overall feels meh. I’m not even necessarily saying anything is completely broken it just doesn’t feel motivating or inspiring and just that tad bit more boring than what came before and that’s enough for it just to feel bad.

The next raid will hopefully fix that a bit with some actual new interesting content to do and as far as timing goes the holiday season is about the best time of the year for the game to feel a bit boring since usually there’s enough other stuff going on so that one doesn’t notice that too much.

Here’s to better times for World of Warcraft in 2019!

Kind of.

So the last few months have been great and simultaneously not. Well it is a long time for everything to simply be great, so it makes sense that there have been some less great things in there I suppose.

To get more specific, we killed G’huun a few weeks ago already which was awesome. Unfortunately a day too late to make it into the top 100 for the Horde—or more specifically, to get the associated achievement since the top 100 guild killed G’huun the previous reset and we ended up extending and killing him on Wednesday. Still, the kill was awesome, we kept our integrity as it were and didn’t introduce extra raid days or prolong the raids in order to try and squeeze the kill which actually makes me really happy. Now I really like the guild and the people within in general, but that is one of the things I’m I guess most proud of that the principle of raid times is held to. Sure I could manage the extra hours and would probably enjoy them as well, but there’s just something cool about seeing the guild stick to its rules and still perform well.

Secondly, as noted, the guild has just been awesome. While I liked being in the old guild I love being in this one which is a very important distinction that does affect one’s enjoyment of the game greatly. I am also fortunate in that I still get to regularily play with people from the old guild, so it’s the best of both worlds in a way. There is only one slightly unfortunate part: the “dead game” meme. Now the guild in general seems to be rather meme happy which is fun, but there is this whole “dead game” meme going on partially due to the content being cleared and partially because the core systems of the game at the moment just aren’t as engaging as they were in Legion. Now both of these things are very understandably frustrating people to a degree—especially the latter I think—but to me the whole meme just makes the situation worse. Not by much, mind you and I would be playing the game less at the moment even without the meme but it just kind of unecessarily reminds me of the situation we’re in. At the same time, I guess it helps other people to make the situation a bit more enjoyable so there is that.

Now that specifically is the less awesome part: I’m just not feeling motivated to play that much at the moment. Now there are several factors to this, one is the azerite system feeling unrewarding meaning I’m not really participating in content that rewards azerite but one could argue that is a good thing since it’s not really the sort of content I enjoy overly much—island expeditions and world quests. The other part really is that one of the players in our regular mythic+ team has been unavailable for a while which means we aren’t doing as much mythic+ as before which combined with us not progressing anymore and thus clearing the raid more quickly means there’s a lot less for me to do in the game. Hopefully they’ll get better soon and we can get back to running some more mythic+.

Though mythic+ is actually one of the awesome things that happened recently, if a little late: we finally cleared a +15 in time. It was way later than I’d liked and we are very much behind the curve but we did it even without our full setup—which kind of makes me sad at the same time—but it does pave the way for us to get going stronger than before in the future.

And honestly, fuck the curve. We managed it with some pretty annoying affixes (fortified, quaking and bursting) and had fun doing it, that’s the more important part anyway. Sure a high raider.io score is nice to look at, but considering how buggy the Blizzard leaderboards have been not registering some of our runs the experience of managing it is more important than some number at the end.

Now the reduced motivation to do things on my main has given me the opportunity to level a twink which I ended up finishing sometime early Monday morning. I ended up leveling a Monk planning to play mostly Mistweaver with a bit of Brewmaster thrown in for dungeons since I hadn’t played a Monk at high level yet and it seemed to be a good filler twink for the healer roster after speaking with our guildmaster. Also I already have paladin, shaman and druid at fairly high level so leveling one of those didn’t seem sensible. It’s been interesting so far though I haven’t really had the opportunity to heal anything “real” yet, only a +2 and +3 key which even with my at the time around 290-300 item level gear was easy since we had some other geared people in the party. I’m really worried how I’ll manage my mana in raids though, which generally seems to be my biggest problem playing healer twinks—having no idea which spells to prioritise specifically in raids. Dungeons is generally pretty easy since mana mostly isn’t a concern; keeping people alive is. But raid fights tend to last for a long time and trying to heal the whole raid alone generally doesn’t end well unless the content is trivial to begin with.

Now I just need to gear the monk so hopefully I can sneak into a heroic raid this week. Beyond that though, getting proper gear is somewhat time-gated since I can’t really properly heal a +10 key yet so I’m kind of toying with the idea of leveling a second twink if I keep having so much time available. I have always kind of liked the idea of a rogue and learning to play one would be cool, so that might be the next project. I had even created one before the monk with the plan of leveling one but having a secondary healer character just to precedence so we’ll see.

Battle for Azeroth has now been out for a bit longer than when I shared my first impressions of it and my feelings on the expansion have crystallized somewhat even though it is still early days and I won’t know how it all turns out until the end of the expansion.

Mythic+

So far, doing dungeons has been rather fun in Battle for Azeroth. We are still very much in the learning stage and tend to run into some packs or bosses whose difficulty or mechanics surprise us—third boss in King’s Rest comes to mind as an example. I had barely noticed the DoT from the axe lady before this week with tyrannical and now that boss seems to be one of the hardest ones in the dungeon since it combines heavy movement due to the axes with heavy damage on one player due to the DoT.

As noted though, the fact that we are all still learning does mean that the rate of mistakes being made can mean that keys unfortunately don’t get played in time that very well could have been. But that is a part of learning and becomming better which in the end is what makes all of it fun. Sure, the accomplishments as well, but those mean so much less without the learning process and obstacles that come before.

Azerite gear

Now azerite gear is a strange thing, and I touched on my early impressions of it before. Going from Legion to Battle for Azeroth, we lost tier sets, our artifacts (with their relics) and the legendaries from Legion. All of these things provided different bonuses to our character that either made them play different or provided utility for certain situations—as a Priest, the cloak legendary for Holy stands out as an excellent example of extra raid utility that was very nice to have.

With Battle for Azeroth, all of these things in a way get rolled into a single system: Azerite Gear. Now for me, this system has a few flaws that stick out rather obviously:

1. Limited sources of gear.
   Since azerite gear is only available from sources with a weekly lockout, there is a very limited amount of the gear you can try to acquire in a week.
2. This becomes a big problem, when the trait(s) you need might only be available from the weekly mythic+ chest, meaning the chance of you getting the right item are very low.
3. Certain traits are just more fun.
   And when you gain a performance upgrade that then removes those traits, it’s not a great feeling.
4. Traits are selected per character, not per spec.
   This means in order to play many specs on a single character, you actually need multiples of the same difficult to get gear in order to perform well or intentionally make all of those spec potentially significantly weaker by selecting generic traits.
5. Utility traits will probably be locked when you get new gear.
   Some of those traits that are fun or just give nice utility—like the Prydaz trait—might not be available to you when you get a new piece of gear since your neck isn’t yet of a high enough level.

Now all of these problems kind of feed into each other except for the last one. But the limited availability of gear just makes it really hard to actually get an azerite piece of decent item level and even harder to get the right item level along with the traits one wants. This along with an upgrade meaning a trait one enjoys potentially disappering just makes acquiring new azerite gear feel kind of bad; the system inherits the worst traits of the three systems it’s replacing: the slow progression of the artifact, combined with the difficulty of acquiring gear sets comined with the frustration of the randomness of acquiring legendaries. Sure, with raids the third point is largely diminished since you know what the traits are on the piece of gear this specific boss drops, but considering how late into the raid some of the pieces are it may not be a realistic way to get that piece of gear anyway. Also assuming the raid piece is actually the one you want as far as traits are concerned.

Now they are working on the acquisition part, which hopefully fixes some of these concerns but we don’t know what the plan is yet and when they are going to implement it. Hopefully it ends up being something good since the current state seems to be frustrating a lot of players. But I don’t think anything less than a rework of the system can get rid of the bad feeling of getting a numbers upgrade that removes a trait you enjoy having.

Preach also made a video raising some other concerns, namely regarding the balancing of the traits and how some of them can be rather unstraightforward to figure out if they are good or not. Now this specific point doesn’t really matter much to me personally—since I would probably be looking up the ratings and rankings of the separate traits anyway and not just go by gut feeling—but it still does mean that I can’t just go and equip a new piece of gear and select the traits therein in any meaningful way without having to do that which also doesn’t really feel right.

I’m excited to see what if anything they end up changing with the system though, it feels like one of those things where the backlash might be big enough to actually cause some change to be made but we’ll see.

Guild

I don’t think I’ve ended up mentioning it here yet, but I’ve changed guilds (again…). This time around it was a bit different though, since it was less out of a desire to leave the old guild—have actually been playing relatively actively with some of the people from there—and more out of an opportunity to raid again with a good friend of mine.

The change has also felt different in a completely other way, namely I’ve felt quite at home here very quickly. Sure, it helped that I already knew a person in the guild and that I’d been along of some of their alt runs with one of my alts previously, but the general feel and attitude of the guild seems to be better aligned with me than in the previous guild. I guess that is to say, I feel like I’ve found my place here quicker and have been enjoying the raids tremendously so far. Hopefully that means I can stay here happily for a long time!

Raids

Speaking of raids, Uldir has been out for a while now and we’ve had the opportunity to poke down some of the bosses there, more specifically we are ⁶⁄₈ mythic since yesterday! We had a bit of a surprising stumbling block on Fetid Devourer and one day of somewhat slow reclear—as in, we didn’t reclear in a single day of raiding and needed to continue clearing the next raid day. But despite that, I’d say it’s been going rather well especially our latest catch: Zul.

The Zul fight is a strange one, since it ends up being so short it is quite simple but it seems so confusing on the surface with all the adds going on as well as having to move out of the raid, dispels and then something of a damage race in phase 2 with the AoE on the floor. The fight was really enjoyable though once we started to get it down, since progress was so clear to see and the healing required during the fight was also rather intense, kept me optimizing my cooldown execution at least. The fight also gave me an opportunity to use Divine Star for once, which was a nice change up from Halo since the cooldown is so much lower meaning I have more to do.

Uldir has been really good so far overall once you’re past the first two bosses. I didn’t hugely enjoy Fetid since there is more of a focus on positioning and damage there than healing and execution, but Zek’voz I also enjoyed since it required proper execution of cooldowns on my part for the dances along with playing the dance, eye beam and add mechanics properly. Especially the overlaps with the debuff/eye beam and dance provided some interesting moments in the fight.

Vectis I also found somewhat interesting—especially now that I can play Discipline there—even though it was a somewhat boring fight from an execution standpoint as Holy. Just spamming Binding Heal so that Salvation is ready in time isn’t the most engaging gameplay, but the healing requirement still made the fight interesting. Especially in the intermission where one needs to avoid stacks and still keep ones party topped from the debuff that keeps jumping around.

Discipline

Now I’ve briefly touched on this before but I’ve also really been enjoying Discipline. It plays a bit better in raids than in dungeons since you can better plan for cooldown usage with more predictable damage, but the spec in general plays quite good at the moment I feel and really fits my damage-happy playstyle as well. It wasn’t unusual to see Smite as my most used spell even as Holy, so playing a spec where it actually contributes to my healing as well makes a lot of sense. As noted before as well, Holy just feels so slow with the changes in Battle for Azeroth that Discipline becomes a even more welcome change to me.

I have been playing mostly Discipline since the pre-patch and it has been really nice if a bit new. Not as new as one might think, since I really liked spamming Smite as Holy as well, but it does take some different thinking to play Discipline, especially when preparing cooldowns.

However, now I have had a couple of opportunities where it simply made more sense to play Holy which one would think is great since I loved the spec in Legion—so much so, that I basically didn’t play Discipline at all in Legion even to my detriment at times since it was such a strong spec—unfortunately, Holy just doesn’t play very fun at the moment.

Legendaries

The smallest contributor to this is the lack of legendaries from Legion. Holy didn’t have the most exciting legendaries in Legion, in fact one of the most used ones was just a worse version of Reincarnate from Shamans¹. It was however, still a very nice wipe recovery mechanism in raids allowing you to get back to trying the boss again faster in many cases. It also functioned as a powerful cooldown through Spirit of Redemption, since it essentially gave you free rein to heal for a short time with Spirit of Redemption making you invulnerable and giving you infinite mana. It was also a way to use two potions in one fight since death starts your potion cooldown. This made it a very strong utility legendary.

However, the legendary I miss far more and that ties into the next point, are the legendary bracers that reduced the cast time of your primary healing spells while you were over 75% health. These were a mythic+ favourite of mine.

Haste

Now the lack of that legendary along with the tiny amount of haste we have in the beginning of the expansion makes the spec feel extremely slow and sluggish. This will hopefully be fixed to a degree with more gear, but it does give the spec a terrible feel at the moment for someone used to the extremely fast pace at the end of Legion—I had sub one second cast time on some of my primary spells with the legendary bracers, going back to almost a second and a half is a huge change in pacing.

The lack of haste is made even worse since Light of the Naaru is, well, not missing but basically unpickable at the moment which brings me to my next point.

Talents

The talents are kind of terrible though maybe actually a bit better than they were in Legion. We still have Enlightenment/Trail of Light and Binding Heal/Surge of Light to switch between for raids and there is actually a choice between Benediction and Halo depending on the encounter—maybe even Divine Star if people are stacke enough or the damage pattern is correct.

But the problem—though I guess that was the design intent—is really the last row. Now there is actually a cool choice here between Apotheosis and Holy Word: Salvation and they are both nice powerful cooldowns to use though they both have their clear niches—mythic+ and raids respectively. The problem really, is that Light of the Naaru is competing with them and can only win for players that want a really passive playstyle and while it’s cool that the choice exists for such players, it makes the rest of us suffer with a spec that just feels insanely sluggish when compared to Legion which as noted is made worse by the limited haste available at the start and lack of legendaries to speed up casting.

Conclusion

The core mechanic of Holy, the powerful Holy Words is what makes these long cast time and lack of extra cooldown reduction feel so bad. I want to be casting lots so that my fun spells are available again but the time in between just feels extremely drawn out and I feel kind of useless since my spells don’t do much in the meantime. As Discipline, sure I’d like some more haste but I also have a ton of smaller cooldowns I can stagger to do useful things and they aren’t dependant on me casting certain spells to come back within a reasonable time. Those cooldowns are also powerful enough that they give me a more clearly defined role within a raidgroup which means I know I can take it a bit easier when I’m waiting for them to become available again. As Holy I don’t have this luxury since I need to keep casting and using mana in order to have my cooldowns available in time again.

It’s a strange feeling, going from feeling it was almost a necessity to learn Discipline in order to remain competetitive to feeling I much prefer the spec after all these years due to the changes made in Battle for Azeroth to Holy. I guess it was about time for me to change things up a bit though and not be so constrained by my past feelings of the different specs. Now I just hope I don’t have to play Holy too much until the spec starts feeling a bit more fun again.

Blizzard added something really cool for tailors in Battle for Azeroth: Resilient Spellthread. It prevents you from being dazed in Kul Tiras and Zandalar, which is a really nice perk to have before flying is active and while outdoor content like world quests and herb farming are the most relevant.

Unfortunately, Resilient Spellthread hasn’t worked for the whole expansion and recently got a silent nerf to the description¹ stating it only works while walking and running, not mounted which would be the most useful part.

Permanently embroiders your cloak with resilient spellthread, preventing you from being dazed while in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. Only the tailor’s cloak can be embroidered, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound. – Original text

Permanently embroiders your cloak with resilient spellthread, preventing you from being dazed while running or walking in Kul Tiras or Zandalar. Only the tailor’s cloak can be embroidered, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound. – Updated text

This change has understandably left many tailors somewhat miffed with me among them. Now, tailoring has for a long time been a profession with little long-term usefulness though an expansion like most professions where you primarily craft gear but this just leaves one feeling robbed of something that was clearly inteded to be there and it just kind of seems they couldn’t be bothered fixing.

Now that is possibly unecessarily harsh language; I recongize that software development must have priorities of what gets fixed and in the grand scheme of things one broken utility effect for a profession that the majority of players probably does not have isn’t high on the list. Or maybe it was always inteded to only work while on foot. That does not change the feeling this change leaves behind.

Now there are two other utility spellthreads for tailors, one that decreases threat and another one that decreases falling damage and I am running around with the reduced falling damage for now to at least get some utility out of the profession. However, being immune to daze really was one of the cool things I was looking forward to with tailoring in Battle for Azeroth, and now with that gone and the rarity of Anchor Weed and the despawning nodes which are becoming a meme I am seriously considering switching professions. I have mixed feelings about this since I’ve had the profession for so long but looking at it logically the doubled flask duration of alchemy is the only profession perk that makes any sense at the moment.²

It’s really unfortunate that the other spellthreads feel so lacklustre since we as tailors haven’t really had anything new and useful to craft since the Frostweave Net in Wrath of the Lich King. Now I have been using those rather actively since the extra 3 second root is a nice thing to have, but the tiny amount of utility it brings just does not feel worth the price of keeping the profession around for me.

Now, before someone argues “but you can craft gear!”, that is really low on utility for two reasons. Firstly, it is rather slow with the materials for that gear being timegated by dungeon and later raid lockouts. Secondly, once the raid releases on Wednesday, that gear is completely irrelevant since the raid will drop as good—or better once mythic releases—gear anyway. It might bring some small utility to players who are focusing on the easier tiers of raiding or not raiding at all, but with titanforging I’m not even sure that applies. I’m also ignoring the item level 300 gear since that can be bought and is so low item level anyway as to be completely useless.

In the end, I think I’ll watch out for hotfixes until Tuesday or so hoping this gets fixed, and if not I’ll start leveling alchemy so I have that skilled enough to get the extra hour on flasks before the raid on Wednesday. Might need to do some extra herb farming, so probably good to get at least a days head start on that.

So I mentioned some of my frustrations with reputation in Battle for Azeroth in my previous post and I think my feelings might’ve changed somewhat. This I think comes primarily from the vastly different nature of reputation in Battle for Azeroth compared to Legion.

Now, there is still a primary very important faction to get repuation with, this being the Honorboud for the Horde and Seventh Legion for the Alliance since these factions gate a dungeon behind them. What is significantly different from Legion however, is the pure amount of world quests available for these factions along with the speed one gets reputation. In Legion, getting the Suramar dungeons unlocked was something of a significant farm whereas in Battle for Azeroth, I only really started poking at the world quests on Thursday and was done by Sunday or Monday. This significant shortening of the farm naturally leads to it being much less annoying than it was in Legion. This also significantly helps because I think a big source of my frustration with this system came from the uncertainty of me being able to do the dungeon in a timely fashion¹ and now once that stress has been lifted I am also less frustrated with the system itself.

There is also another significant factor to this that I did note in my earlier post, specifically having something to do. In the past couple of days I’ve found myself simply doing every single world quest available just from the continued desire to keep playing the game and trying to find something sensible to do within the game and the world quests have presented the perfect outlet for that. This has allowed me to even surpass the required reputation for the dungeon and actually finish the War Campaign, well for now at least. The game and the quests themselves do state that it will be continued², but this chapter is finished for now. So me being motivated enough to be doing the world quests somewhat unrelated to the rewards they bring kind of negates the whole frustration I might’ve felt with having felt forced to be doing them. Well it isn’t strictly true that I’m doing them regardless of reward, since completing the world quests is bringing me closer to Pathfinder, Part One³ which will allow me to ride faster and eventually be a part of the flying requirements. But the biggest stopper on that achievement will be the Champions of Azeroth which have a very limited amount of world quests available anyway that I would definitely be doing every day so it isn’t really getting me the achievement any faster.

In the end, this is kind of a long way of saying I was stressing out and worrying about things that ended up being fine in the end. Though there is somewhat of a sad end to the story after all: we’ll have to look for one additional player in order to complete Siege of Boralus in the first reset, since one of us hasn’t been doing barely any world quests and is unfortunately not going to have the required reputation in order to participate. It is an unfortunate situation but considering the requirements were known we can’t really blame the game for it but it still feels bad that he can’t experience the dungeon with us.

So Battle for Azeroth was released a few days ago and so far it has been something of a blast, it has been really enjoyable to have something to do again in the game after the quiet times at the end of Legion where I was almost only logging in to do raids with the occasional mythic+ sprinkled in.

The start went by rather quickly, we managed to get to 120 directly on Tuesday and still have enough energy after a small sleep break to clear all of the available dungeons on heroic—that left out two dungeons, Siege of Boralus which was locked behind reputation and Kings’ Rest which is only available on mythic. It was really interesting to see the dungeons for the first time since I hadn’t really spent much time on the beta at all though they were for the most part a bit easy, which I guess is to be expected from heroic dungeons.

There were a couple of notable exceptions though, primarly Shrine of the Storm and Temple of Sethraliss¹. The end boss in Temple even prompted a respec from Discipline to Holy for me, since I couldn’t quite figure out on the spot how to manage the single target healing requirement of that boss without any mobs present.

Temple of Sethralis

Since these dungeons are new, I should probably elaborate. The final boss of of Temple of Sethraliss is basically a healer fight with other roles being in more of a support position: a mob in the middle needs to be healed to full. The problem is that you can’t heal that mob the whole time since it is immune to healing so first some channelers need to be killed after which you have a short window, maybe 10-20 seconds or so to heal the mob. While this window is open and later on in the fight as well, there’s a rain of frogs going on which leave a debuff behind when they touch a player, reducing that player’s healing by 50%. Since we weren’t completely aware of that mechanic, that probably also played a role in my initial difficulties as Discipline in this fight.

It is still a dungeon where I will probably prefer going in as Holy as opposed to Discipline on mythic+ simply due to the last boss and the healing requirement there, though I am interested to see how that fight scales with higher mythic+ levels.

The dungeon also had some interesting moments with some “true” Player versus Environment elements, where you had to dodge arrows falling from the sky or navigate through a labyrinth of moving lightning orbs. Interestingly, these elements also scaled up on mythic which we did later on, the arrows were much harder to dodge with them being close to impossible to dodge without movement speed increase if the circle spawned on top of you.

Shrine of the Storm

Now the other notable dungeon was Shrine of the Storm. This one was less about the bosses and the environment and more purely some rather difficult trash. There are some particularily difficult mobs in the beginning, a form of water elemental which stuns the whole group, throws you up into the air and then damages you with falling damage. For mythic we figured out some ways to skip most of these mobs which of course was less helpful after some wipes, but it will probably still be a very useful strategy for mythic+.

There was also a rather annyoing mob later that did an extremely painful beam on a single player, which I had some difficulties dealing with though luckily it was heroic and still manageable especially once we noticed the rune the mob left behind which reduced damage taken significantly—at least when people were attentive enough to actually move into the rune.

Beyond that most of the dungeon was smooth sailing, excepting the last boss on mythic but even there we quickly figured out what we needed to do.

Reputation

There is one slight thing that is annyoing me though, much less so than in Legion but still. As noted, there is one dungeon that is locked behind reputation and Blizzard decided to once again do a reputation gated questline in order to unlock this dungeon. Now my problem comes from the fact that one needs to keep doing world quests in order to acquire this reputation while I would much rather just be able to sit down and farm it out in a group in a single or several sessions. Instead it seems necessary to check in on the world map often to find available world quests for this faction, which I suppose increases the engagement statistics for Blizzard but is a bit iffy as a player. On the other hand, it’s a much lower reputation requirement than in Legion with Suramar which is a big improvement and I guess it is one of the things contributing to me actually having something to do in the game again which is a positive.

Simultaneously, for “slow burn” reputations that one simply wants to get in due time which don’t gate critical content, I do prefer the whole world quest model since we are encouraged to do those anyway for emissaries and Azerite.

Azerite armour

Which does nicely bring me to my next point, Azerite armour. Now so far I’m not that convinced by it, since most of the bonuses I’ve seen so far have been rather unspectacular and I can’t use the bonuses on most of my gear yet since the requirement on mythic dungeon gear to unlock those traits is so high even after they reduced the requirements. I am however really curious to see what ends up happening with the raid gear, and there is an interesting trait or two already available so there is certainly promise. I’m also interested to see how the “Prydaz” trait scales, there were some people on the beta noting that it doesn’t scale very well but maybe it will be less mandatory for mythic+ than Prydaz itself was in Legion as a Priest.

Conclusion

All in all, there is still very much wait-and-see going on, mythic+ isn’t available yet and neither are the raids which is the content I primarily enjoy. But the expansion has started of really fun and it is nice to be able to do some of the more casual stuff from time to time without too much stress about time and performance. That said, I’m still looking forward to more content unlocking and getting to do the things I enjoy most, but the start of the expansion has given me a good feeling about coming times and I hope that lasts.

The pre-patch has been out for almost a week now and so far it is actually feeling rather good despite all the scaling issues and bugs.

It has been really nice to be able to do some mythic+ again since there is something of a renewed interest for that type of content, primarly due to everyone needing to learn their classes and specs again. It has also given me the opportunity to start poking at Discipline properly which has been a nice change of pace—especially since Holy seems to feel rather similiar to before except I now have on more big cooldown, and that is one really big cooldown potentially one of the strongest healing cooldowns available at the moment. That has been especially nice since unfortunately cooldown wise Holy was very weak during Legion so it is nice to see a bit more utility in that sense being available. I’m still not quite sure how to properly manage getting that cooldown reset though, there have been murmurings of it being doable in 3-4 minutes but I can’t seem to reach that, maybe the circumstances that are being assumed just haven’t been available in raids so far.

Discipline has also been really nice to play, so far only in mythic+ and nothing particularily high, I think the highest key was a Arcway+21. But it has been nice getting a feel for Discipline and I think it plays a bit better now without Plea since the descision what to cast feels a bit more straightforward. Having played my Restoration Druid twink I think also helped a lot with getting started as Discipline, since I had gotten used to the playstyle of being prepared for damage ahead of time instead of simply reacting to it as I can rather easily do most of the time as Holy.

Unfortunately I haven’t yet taken the chance to play my Druid, but that somehow feels a bit less interesting now that I also have Discipline to learn and as such something new and interesting to do with my main. I did however get to tank a couple of dungeons with my Warrior and it went reasonably well though the changes there were felt a lot harder especially when it comes to the global cooldown. Ignore Pain, in other words my primary damage mitigation mechanic, being on the global cooldown was a rather frustating experience. It wasn’t really helped along by Devastator and the talent that gives you rage through Demoralizing Shout now sharing a tier, since I was used to the rage gains of both I felt a lot less survivable than before which is a feat considering Warrior tanks were rather easy to bring down. This unfortunately lead to me not enjoying tanking with the Warrior as much anymore, which is unfortunate since it has been nice to have an Alliance character I could play with from time to time along with being able to tank. Having a feel for both the healing and tanking aspects in dungeons I feel really helps me in becoming a better healer and being able to better predict the damage the tank should be taking, which will of course become even more important if I plan on playing Druid or Discipline more since those are both rather reliant on being able to predict incoming damage. It was only a short test so far though, and I definitely want to try the Warrior a bit more but the initial impression was unfortunately not that good.

The pre-patch also has me really looking forward to Battle for Azeroth now since that’s when the specs will be really fleshed out with the Azerite traits. Also that is probably when I get the chance to start raiding a bit as Discipline once I have some more experience playing the spec, which I’m looking forward to a surprising amount considering I barely played the spec during Legion. I’m even considering deviating from my normal leveling routine and going Discipline for leveling instead of Holy, since that would probably be more useful with the DoTs available though I’m not sure how much that will matter since we’ll be leveling in a group anyway meaning my damage shouldn’t be of consequence.

All-in-all though, the pre-patch was really reinvigorating and has given me and my friends renewed motivation to play the game which was sorely needed and now we can start preparing for the launch of Battle for Azeroth!

There’s actually a surprising amount going on lately, much of which I haven’t written here about. To be fair some of that stuff is fairly recent, like the recent confirmation that the pre-patch is coming next week which is something of a big incoming change that I feel didn’t have a lot of official notice. I mean, it’s already Friday as we learned, which means that the patch is coming in less than a week. That feels like really short notice for something that so significantly changes the game. To be fair, it was somewhat foreshadowed with them saying the PVP season will end soon and with it being four weeks before the expansion launch, it can’t end up being much later.

Pre-patch

So let’s talk about the pre-patch a bit more in detail. I’m excited to see it coming even though I am miffed about some of the changes, since that will be the first feel for many of how Battle for Azeroth will play out. Now I have been poking a tiny bit at the beta myself, but a lot of people don’t have access to that. Of course we will be missing the new artifact along with the azerite armor, but all of the skill changes along with the loss of our artifact weapon are coming with the pre-patch. This will give a good opportunity for people—me included—to familiarize themselves with the class changes in preparation for Battle for Azeroth. I’m also kind of excited since this means I’ll be able to raid with the new talents and so on, and while those aren’t balanced around 110 content it’ll still give some indication how the end-game will feel like.

It’s also a good opportunity for me to maybe start taking some bigger pokes at Discipline, a spec I’ve so far pretty much completely avoided playing. I’m not conviced I’ll hugely enjoy playing Discipline but with the level of raiding I seem to be going to do with Battle for Azeroth it feels it makes sense at least being familiar with my second healing spec even if it’s not my first choice. I just hope that doesn’t end up with me pidgeonholed into playing Discipline the whole time.

There is one change that makes me sligthly miffed about the pre-patch coming though, namely the removal of master loot. Now I’m not sure I’m a huge fan of this change in general but it seems to be one we have to live with. But why it specifically bothers me, is that we are still in the process of trying to get the mount from Argus to players who participated or were in the guild during progress and have received some new recruits along with promotions to raider since then. This change now means that some of our raiders who contributed to the boss actually being downed might end up being out of luck and some person we aren’t even sure we want to keep in the guild might end up getting it. This is one of those situations I feel makes it a big mistake for Blizzard to force this change upon guilds.

Druids

Or rather, one specific druid, namely my twink. So a month or so ago by now I ended up boosting a druid for myself to 110 in order to have something to play for our planned split-raids. We are going to be doing split-raids to be able to get everyone the mount in time before the launch of Battle for Azeroth. Now as mentioned above we’ll have to see how that turns out with the loot change, but hopefully it all ends well.

Playing a druid has been an interesting experience so far and has given me a somewhat new found appreciation of why they were so popular for mythic+ during Legion and that reason is rather simple: I’m already surviving abilities without cooldowns that my priest would die to without cooldowns. I mean minor cooldows or trinkets, sure, but priests don’t have very many of those to go around especially if one gets unlucky and Desperate Prayer decides not to reset its cooldown. This really makes me hope they get the balancing around not only throughput but survivability and utility down much better in Battle for Azeroth since it kind of sucks being somewhat excluded from a major part of the game that is my favourite part of the game along with raiding. Mythic+ is probably one of the big things that has made me play and kept me subscribed throughout Legion and seeing first-hand how broken the balance is makes me somewhat frustrated. It might even end up with me making my druid my “mythic+ main” which would be a really sad turn of events. I’m also not sure how viable that strategy is with the changes to the druid talents which I feel makes healing mythic+ as a druid significantly harder, though I have no actual experience of those changes yet.

Guilds

Now there is one final strange thing that actually happened just a few days ago: I ended up being contacted by one of the guilds I applied to way back when. Now this puts me in a rather interesting situation, since I wasn’t really looking to change guilds and I kind of hate doing it. It is with some sadness I counted that this would be my fifth guild change during Legion which feels like a ton. Now two of those were leaving at the time basically dead guilds which is of course justified and a third was due to some rather heavy disagreement with the leadership of some decision being taken—I also wasn’t the only person leaving. So while it is all rather justifiable and it is a game after all where the primary purpose is to enjoy one’s time which does mean being in a group one enjoys playing with and has similar goals, it still feels somewhat wrong for that number to be ending up so high.

At the same time, I had hoped for this outcome since I know some people in the guild and would be very happy to be able to raid with those people again. This is why I made the decision to at least go forward by expressing interest in their offer. Nothing is final yet and they still have some internal discussion to do along with probably a interview with me to do assuming everything goes well, but I’m feeling really good about the direction this all is going in. It’s also something of a win-win scenario for me, since even if they don’t end up taking me in I’m rather happy where I am now and having to think about this potential change of guilds has really solified that feeling for me since I have at times been unsure how well I like the guild and now I feel certain that I enjoy raiding here and will be happy with either outcome—changing guilds or staying put—and that is obviously a rather good position to be in.

Somehow it’s been a while again, but that’s probably because it feels like not a lot has happened though that might not be quite true. I’ve picked up streaming as a fun little thing to do, still expanding on it and not quite sure where exactly I want to go but so far it’s been fun though also frustrating at times since I’m so directionless. This has also led to me being somewhat motivated by statistics, which while they seem decent on the surface since I know many awesome people that want to support me also show that the stream isn’t really interesting people since they don’t stay or follow so I’m left wondering what I can do to improve there. But I guess time and experimentation will bring me somewhere, hopefully.

Streaming is also a really different experience from writing this, since firstly it’s all real time and secondly I have those statistics available. For this blog, I’ve made the decision to not really promote or link it anywhere which naturally restricts the amount of people coming in. I also have no analytics running so I have no idea if people are reading anything I write combined with no comments. That makes it a very “putting something out into the void” experience, which is distinctly different from streaming though is the approach I took when starting the stream—since then I’ve expanded to people actually being able to hear me on stream along with whatever VOIP we happen to be using at the time, usually Discord but Teamspeak at times as well.

I think that history might be what also confuses me about what I want from streaming, I know I like playing around with technology and streams and video production and so on are exactly that which makes it enjoyable to me so the whole “putting it out into the void” approach should be appealing in and of itself. I also don’t believe I want to start with streaming as any sort of primary income, since it seems it requires quite a different personality from what I have along with requiring quite a lot of dedication even on days one isn’t really feeling like it. Simultaneosly as stated, I notice myself focusing on and following the metrics and give at least some thought to how I can improve the stream for viewers and hopefully gain some more followers potentially leading to me being able to be partnered on Twitch which would be kind of cool—50 followers being the last milestone I’m missing there. I guess this is where the whole networking thing would come in, getting to know other streamers and getting hosts and so on but that’s also not something I particularily enjoy doing. This has led to me just hoping the random people stopping by due to the viewer count end up liking it and following and that isn’t working very well so far. Maybe it will work better in the future, since viewers tend to bring in more viewers in kind of a positive feedback loop, but for now people don’t stay or follow.

It could also just be down to setup or content of course, I got some reports that apparently the VOIP was really loud at times, so hopefully I can fix that and make it all more even—that should actually be a somewhat easy thing to fix so maybe I need to get on that since I basically know exactly what to do.

I do think I’ll keep streaming though, some of my friends seem to rather enjoy being able to look at what we’re doing even though it’s content they themselves don’t want or can’t participate in at the moment so it is providing a service to them at least. And somehow it feels a bit fun having it running in the background, just from a tech enthusiast point of view as well.

For some reason, I’ve been playing Skyrim again—I’m not quite sure what it is with that game but somehow it keeps drawing me back in from time to time. This time around, I’ve started a new playthrough as kind of a mage-y character mostly focusing on destruction so far with a bit of poking into conjuration which seems like a rather useful school of magic to have as a distraction—I’m not very durable as a mage after all, so having something summoned to take the hits is useful.

It has been fun so far, I’ve managed to play through the College of Winterhold campaign and have gotten a good start into the main campaign. It is a bit sad to see, however, how quickly it all goes past when one is moderately familiar with what is going on—it feels like the campaigns are rather short and shallow.

I mean, take the mage campaign for example: I’m barely getting started in the college, go on a field trip, find some big magical artifact, get sent to find another artifact related to the original one and to get advice on how to find it. After that, I basically get promoted to being the archmage of the college. Sure, there are some intermediate steps in there, but they tend to be rather short and samey which really makes the whole experience feel really compact.

I tend to find that the other Skyrim campaigns have a similar problem, where you get one small starter quest, then get a big goal and a few smaller goals around that and after completing those you’re the leader of the guild/college/whatever. And this is a pattern that from what I can remember tends to repeat throughout the guilds, at least Dark Brotherhood and Thieves’ Guild, not quite as sure about Companions as I’ve only played that storyline once I believe. It’s a rather unfortunate flaw in a game that otherwise is good enough to keep me coming back since I feel like I want to play it again which clearly means they have done something very right with the design of the game as well. Or maybe it is the very fact that I have played the game so much that is preventing me from enjoying these more focused experiences?

At any rate, I’m enjoying myself so far and I think I’ll keep enjoying myself for a while still—probably through the main and Companions’ campaigns considering where my strengths lie.

Somehow, it has been a while since I’ve decided to write something which feels slightly strange. It is partially due to not much happening I think, mythic+ was really quiet last week for some reason with barely any runs going on. We did take a poke at a Lower Karazhan +26 but unfortunately decided not to even finish it much less do it in time. That was also Tuesday evening so we did not get a chance to go on and try the +25 at a later date which I find slightly unfortunate—though it would’ve proved rather difficult with Moroes and grievous which is an especially painful combination even without tyrannical.

What has been happening, strangely enough, is some more leveling. I actually have two character’s I’ve been leveling a bit, namely a Highmountain Shaman and a Nightborne Warlock—mostly just so I have the appearances unlocked in case I want to play one of those races.

It has been going decently, getting to Karazhan again was really nice since that’s just such an amazing spurt though it does make normal leveling thereafter that much more difficult. I honestly don’t know how I feel about the classes yet—I probably won’t play the warlock much after leveling because I tend to not like playing as a damage dealer and that is the only choice as warlock but for leveling alone Affliction has been rather nice so far and it goes at a decent pace but then I’m only in Classic zones at the moment which are rather a lot easier than the later zones.

The shaman, on the other hand, feels really slow at the moment both as restoration and elemental. It just feels like the casts take forever and they don’t feel overly impactful. This might be a case of poor gear which is understandable while leveling especially since we’ve used some more unusual methods that don’t provide much relevant gear. But we’re about to start with Legion zones—specifically the invasions—which should provide a rather nice boost of experience and hopefully a bit of gear as well.

Speaking of unusual methods, we did some more experimenting this time around specifically going into Firelands and trying some of the trash there. It wasn’t something I would recommend since the packs there didn’t give overly much experience and were actually rather hard to kill even though we went in there more overleveled than Karazhan—72-73 into Karazhan, 90-91 into Firelands. Though the turtles there did give a rather big chunk of experience, almost 3000 each and they were also much easier to kill than the other packs. Unfortunately, there aren’t overly many of them so the instance limit will be the biggest blocker along with how much one will need to move. But Tol’vir is around those levels anyway and much more lucrative so I would suggest going there until 91 or so and after that just doing treasures and bonus objectives in Draenor—that seems to be the quickest route.

So we actually managed to get some mythic+ “pushing” done with our new alts, we didn’t get spectacularily far yet but still up to a +10. Unfortunately we ended up depleting that one due to one of us having disconnects which made some of the bosses take a long while to kill. Despite that it was quite a lot of fun which probably surprises nobody I think—after all, mythic+ is still enjoyable and getting some of the challenge back in the lower keystone levels due to actually being geared appropriately for them rather than horrendously overgeared unsurprisingly led to those dungeons being fun again. That along with the new perspective of another class.

It has also been interesting to see people playing those new classes and how quickly and well they end up adapting to them classes. I think all of us are adapting somewhat quickly though I still feel I do a terrible job at playing a Death Knight with some real newbie mistakes in Neltharion’s Lair on the last boss for example. This was primarily due to me being somewhat overwhelmed with trying to remember a new set of keybindings while juggling a new-to-me mechanic—gripping mobs—along with proper positioning of the boss. With that triple threat I ended up positioning the boss poorly at times. I also ended up somewhat confused as to what exactly counts as active mitigation for a Death Knight since I had been assuming just having Bone Shield stacks up would be enough but that was not the case. This confusion added a certain incapability to concentrate.

At the same time, that confusion is the exact reason why we decided to go the route of doing this “pushing” on our alts since it allows us to iron out such mistakes and not make them in the future and as such helps us learn our classes better in the appropriate environment. We already had one instance where our tank in a somewhat high Black Rook Hold key either wasn’t aware of what active mitigation was for Death Knights or just the necessity to keep it up for the Shear on Illysana which felt somewhat awkward later on. This demonstrates rather well that there are some things that Blizzard could be a lot better about signaling—specifically what exactly counts as active mitigation and possibly even more strongly showing those requirements in the Dungeon Journal though it is usually noted in the ability text but maybe a custom icon like there is for interrupts would be good as well?

Beyond that though, it has been a good experience so far and I’m slowly coming to terms with how the Death Knight tank works, how much I can handle and what I survive which is good. There has been one small oddity though: none of us has gotten a legendary so far. With the amount of mythic+ and what not done along with some of us having a weekly chest as well it feels somewhat surprising that the bad-luck-protection hasn’t kicked in yet and given us a legendary. That is of course something of a limiting factor on our ability to progress forward in mythic+ as legendaries—especially at this item level—are a significant boost. Even a bad legendary would be a big upgrade over the gear we are using at the moment. Here’s hoping we start seeing them roll in soon, and hopefully we end up getting some of the decent ones and not the useless ones. But that will be for the coming weeks I think, not sure how much more time we’ll have this week along with not having done so much mythic+ on our mains yet.

So I managed to reach 110 with my Death Knight on Tuesday, which was before the reset meaning I had a nice 960 item waiting for me in my Order Hall today since we also managed to do a quick +15 key for me and the other level 110 in our leveling group. Unfortunately, I got a ring which feels like it would be a somewhat small upgrade compared to one of the major slots like chest or legs but was still nice, I believe the stats are at least decent as well though I do need to poke into Blood Death Knights a bit more in order to confirm that. To be fair, I already have a 950 chest I got from the weekly for doing four mythic dungeons, so maybe a ring wasn’t that unlucky.

Unfortunately, two out of four in our leveling group of four did not manage to get to 110 in time, hopefully, today or tomorrow at the latest so we can get to doing some dungeons. We have been planning to do some lowbie dungeons, potentially starting with running just plain mythic dungeons for gear and then mythic+ afterward. Might end up starting with mythic+ immediately since it’s so easy to get gear at this point, especially with I believe most of us have some of those Argus tokens stacked up somewhere.

Beyond that, there was something of a nice surprise this week—even though I had heard rumblings about it earlier—with the second mythic+ affix being changed from necrotic to volcanic. That will make this week quite a lot more manageable than before even though trash will still remain relatively painful with teeming and tyrannical is generally quite a huge spike in the general difficulty—much bigger than fortified. Still, I think it should be a pretty nice week for getting started with the new characters since fortified doesn’t become a big problem until higher keystones and all of the other affixes are quite manageable.

For now, though I’m just happy to be done with leveling for now because while it was fun doing it in a group the last few levels were a bit annoying since we decided to split up which led to me having to level alone a bit which isn’t the most engaging thing as a tank. Overall the leveling experience was rather educational since we ended up doing some more unorthodox tactics that I was unaware of—namely trash farming in Karazhan and Tol’vir. This was possible thanks to the buff given from out-leveling content intended to make old raids and whatnot still soloable with the stat squish that came in Warlords.

It worked strangely well in those two places, other dungeons and raids not so much. We did try some of the Wrath of the Lich King raids but unfortunately, those were not worth farming as they always presented some sort of problem—examples being the debuff that heals mobs when dealing damage in the Obsidian Sanctum or just how plain hard the trash was in Ruby Sanctum. Naxxramas and Icecrown just didn’t seem worth it on the basis of experience gained. We didn’t really end up trying the Cataclysm raids since we already had Tol’vir available and that worked rather well.

Finally with Warlords we—though I suppose this is more common knowledge—farmed the treasures and bonus objectives of the zones rather than questing. They went rather quickly once everyone was the appropriate level—we tried starting already at 88-89 but we couldn’t loot the treasure and the mobs were already rather dangerous—and were rather easy sailing, would definitely recommend for people planning to level especially in a group since the bonus objectives are so quick to complete. Having a group and being on voice comms also helps quite a lot with the boredom that can creep in while doing such farm focused tasks which is also nice—I’m not sure I would’ve done this whole leveling adventure if I was alone, I probably wouldn’t even have started it.

Now I guess I just need to wait for everyone to get to 110 and then we can start doing some dungeons which I’m really looking forward to—get to properly tank a bit again.

Last weekend I actually ended up doing a bit of leveling again, which even though quite a bit slower now with the changes in 7.3.5 was surprisingly fun, just running through dungeons with friends. Didn’t really do any questing except for the odd dungeon quest which tends to be my preferred way of leveling since group content is much more fun than solo.

What was more surprising however, was how big the changes to dungeon leveling actually ended up being, not having tried them myself since the patch. One truly does need to pull quite calmly, at least once we started getting into Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King-content. Part of that however might be how unused I am to playing a Blood Death Knight, not having tanked with a Death Knight since Wrath of the Lich King and back then not as Blood but rather Unholy. It feels strange compared to a Warrior and at times rather frustrating as I’m not quite sure yet how to manage my runes and runic power yet in order to ease the job of the healer as much as possible. I also keep forgetting some of my abilities, which certainly isn’t helping but that’s what leveling is for—learning the class and its abilities—though at times it frustrating not having core abilities in dungeons—for example, I had to do the first few dungeons without being able to interrupt which feels like a bit of a pacing issue. I know that’s primarily an issue with Death Knights due to them starting at a higher level and consequently having a somewhat different pacing to their abilities, but something so core missing at such a level when the dungeons are already expecting interrupts to be available feels a bit iffy.

Despite that, leveling has been fun and I think one of the big contributors to that has been being able to tank a bit more again. Dungeon tanking remains really fun even though I’m not as convinced by raid or mythic+ tanking—mythic+ tanking just feels to focused on managing silly pulls and kiting the mobs which doesn’t feel like tanking as much especially during weeks like this one with necrotic. Managing necrotic stacks does obviously increase the difficulty of tanking but the amount one can do alone feels limited at times though I guess that’s the point—dungeons being a team effort and all.

Still mythic+ at least on the higher levels feels much more gimmicky than standard dungeons.

I am still looking forward to be able to do some mythic+ once we finish leveling though, since getting a better perspective as a tank will probably help my healing as well especially with learning when to expect big incoming damage on the tank and big abilities from trash and what not. I’ve already done much of that learning but still get surprised by new knowledge at times.

It will also be good to get a better feel of the damage patterns and cooldowns of a Death Knight tank since with me not having played one since Wrath of the Lich King I don’t have that good of an idea of what abilities they have available and what they exactly can do to mitigate damage—I know they are extremely durable and probably the best choice for most higher end mythic+ content with exceptions in certain dungeons perhaps but beyond that not much. So that will certainly be a useful learning experience. I guess I really should have all tanks at max level to have a better idea to heal them.

Hm, maybe that’ll end up being my next project? It’s a bit more quiet with the expansion looming anyway even though mythic+ pushing is still really fun, so might be some time over to level. I’m not convinced I’m interested in playing all the tanks however with druids seeming the least interesting primarily due to being stuck in bear form and as such not being able to see the gear and consequently transmogs. The new artifact forms do counteract that a bit but I’m not sure quite enough for me—there’s just something about being able to create one’s own transmog set and the personalisation that comes through that. Monk tank doesn’t seem that appealing mechanics-weise either but I guess I need to actually try it first. I do have monk sitting around somewhere, so wouldn’t even need to level from level one which is nice.

Will have to give it some though, first things first I need to get this Death Knight to max level and next week looks a bit more promising for mythic+ so that might end up taking a while.

So my modem died on Monday which was a bit of a downer since it died too late to get it fixed the same day. It was kind of sudden, it was working fine and then suddenly connectivity problems and after a restart it was just completely broken. This put a bit of a damper on my ability to do mythic+ since I only had my mobile internet available and that proved very unreliable especially later into the evening—was working decently early on with just one disconnect in a couple of hours. Only did a couple of lower keys to help some friends get geared due to that, those went fine considering the circumstances.

Luckily on Tuesday I was able to get a replacement, though it did take a few hours of back and forth due to me not having the necessary documentation and later finding out that I could actually get a free replacement if I brought my old modem in which I naturally didn’t have with me since I had thought I’d just be buying a new one. So by now everything is working again which is nice, though I am slightly disappointed in the capablities of the new modem and might end up having a router behind it again and just using it as a “dumb” modem instead of the modem/router combo it is which feels unfortunate since it in theory should be able to do the things I want, it’s just the UI that’s too locked down.

Beyond that though, last week went pretty nicely with regards to mythic+ and we got some decent keys in though nothing spectacular—to be fair, I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular with those affixes, the pulls need to really sit for things to run well with fortified and teeming. And this week also started really nicely, with us almost clearing everything in one day even though we had buyers present—Argus ended up living still which surprised me since we had more than an hour time when going in so there must have been something going really wrong or maybe just many small mistakes. But as said overall the raid went really well, which is amusing since as said we had a buyer there, even two in the beginning. I guess that got people to play more properly and not expect them to be carried themselves.

It was really nice to see people raiding “properly” again.

So this past week—WoW wise at least—has been rather nice. We managed to reclear in decent if not good time—two days instead of the one day we managed two weeks ago. This was in nice contrast to last week where we actually ended up not clearing, primarily I suppose because people are quickly losing their motivation—also, our raid leader wasn’t present, but one person really shouldn’t make that difference. This might happen next week again, if we raid at all since the sign-ups are rather weak so far.

But beyond that, there has been a lot of decently successful mythic+ going on especially considering it’s a tyrannical week. We managed to play several high-ish keys and even do some improvements on previous keys which feels a bit surprising, though todays tries in Seat of the Triumvirate were unfortunately very unsuccessful. The first two the tank just couldn’t manage the first boss—I suppose I learned my lesson there in being pickier with which tank to pick—and in the third run we unfortunately had one player disconnect at the third boss which killed any chance of completing it. It was rather close and might even have been possible to do in time, which makes it extra unfortunate.

I’m hoping we can carry this momentum forward tomorrow and keep pushing keys, though next week I feel is rather less appealing than this one even with tyrannical gone since we’ll have: teeming, quaking and fortified. Teeming and fortified will make the trash annoying to deal with, especially in places like Maw of Souls or Halls of Valor which have bad trash to begin with and quaking can make some bosses much harder to play since it will keep breaking the Prydaz shield which is necessary to survive some big hits—examples being Lady Hatecoil in Eye of Azshara as well as General Xakal in the Arcway. Both of those bosses have big AoE hits that Prydaz can help with dealing, but unfortunately the quaking damage is more than the Prydaz shield meaning one will probably not have the shield up when the hit comes. Especially since quaking hits more often than Prydaz refreshes.

Which means it unfortunately looks like there might not be a significant amount of pushing going on until three resets from now, when we get fortified again along with bolstering and skittish. Sure, those both make trash take longer but they’re a lot better than what we have in between. I’m still looking forward to doing more mythic+ though. I’d also like to play some more Magicka—there’s been a distinct lack of that with Easter and what not, will have to see about remedying that as soon as possible maybe even tonight still depending on who’s online.

So last weekend we—along with most of Europe I believe—changed to summer time. Now while this is a change that would seem minor for me since I don’t have that many things in my life that are dependant on being somewhere at a specific time, it still has somehow managed to make me feel a bit more tired than before and caused me to sleep longer as a consequence—which feels slightly ironic, since I believe one of the purported benefits of summer time is that one has more daylight hours available. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll end up adapting soon enough, though the transition period is always annoying.

There is an ongoing effort to abolish summer time in the European Union which would be nice, but I think it will be a while until that goes through if at all. From what I remember the reception has been rather lukewarm so far, with no one opposing the change but not really giving it any direct support either which I find rather disappointing. Hopefully something ends up coming out of it before next year, so we don’t have to suffer through the change too many more times but knowing politics it’ll probably take longer than that.

Magicka is a good game. And so is Magicka 2.

So I got the chance to play through Magicka 2 through as well and it quite enjoyable. At the start I was skeptical about some of the changes, for example the magicks now having a small cooldown for all of them—as in, you can’t chain cast magicks as fast as you can tap them in. It is slightly alleviated by the new hotkey system, where you can bind four magicks to just a single key which then have their own cooldown and a smaller shared cooldown.

But with that, there were also several changes I found good. Among them, shield now lasting a lot longer but only working for spells not physical damage as well as mobs now clearly showing when they were resisting or weak to a certain element. This made the usage of different elements feel much less random and more considered. The mages also can stand a bit more damage and aren’t quite as squishy as in the first game, which also made it much more enjoyable to play along with much faster feeling combat in general. Animations also got an update and are much nicer in the sequel.

All of this added up to really nice and surprisingly different yet familiar game experience. But I think for me, just getting to play more Magicka with slightly nicer graphics would’ve been enough to think it was a good game so them managing to actually change some things that ended up being for the better—for I was sceptical of some of the changes, namely Magicks having a cooldown, at the start—I find rather impressive.

There were also some less interesting changes implemented though I think they might make a potential second playthrough more enjoyable—namely, the artifacts. These change some rules of the game, for example: either increasing or decreasing the damage of certain elements; changing the graphics style of the game; or simply adding more humor—haven’t tested that one yet, but it seems interesting. They do have one unfortunate property though, namely that they—along with alternative robes and the like—need to be collected through playing the game and finding secrets. While they certainly are optional and only there to add flair to the game, it feels a bit unfortunate that they need to be unlocked first since I really after the first playthrough couldn’t see any obviously interesting combination to do. I think increasing the damage of some elements would be the most interesting thing to do, since that would increase the chaos factor of playing with others but that remains to be tested since I can’t do it for all elements yet—though that might not be possible at all, since I believe there are fewer artifact slots than there are elements (5 and 8 respectively).

In conclusion, Magicka 2 is a good game, would recommend playing it through though the last boss is a bit frustrating.

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As an interesting sidenote, I ended up playing some more Magicka (the original) again since another friend of mine had gotten the game and it actually gave me a greater appreciation for Magicka 2 strangely enough—as in, I started to appreciate some of the changes Magicka 2 had made more after playing the original again since the second one just feels a bit better to play than the original. I’m not sure if this is mostly down to just the updated graphics or if there is something else to it as well, but playing the second one just feels a bit smoother somehow.

So if that isn’t an endorsement for the second part I don’t know what is.

In the recent Q&A, there was some talk of Blizzard considering removing the option for (Guild) Master Loot in current content raids with the release of Battle for Azeroth. And I’m still somewhat undecided on the matter though leaning towards it being a negative change.

On one hand, I can kind of see and agree with the argument being made—Master Loot was primarily used to allow people to complete their tier sets—but on the other hand Master Loot was used for more than just that. It also enables the guild to distribute gear according to need, based on for example secondary stats or usefulness of certain procs, these things being especially important for trinkets, rings and necklaces the moment.

Additionally, even with sets being gone, there will still be the Azerite bonuses on armor that will probably mean that different pieces are better for certain classes. To be fair, the Azerite pieces specifically will be a smaller problem since they can’t titanforge, but especially early on in the raid it might be still frustrating to see pieces that are an item level upgrade go to classes that might not choose to wear them due to the bonuses.

I also to a degree fail to see the benefit this change is supposed to bring. One might argue that on average it will be more fair, since everyone has an equal chance for loot but at the same time maybe that loot isn’t an upgrade and one still can’t give it away due to item level and that is simply frustrating as it’s the same as the boss having simply dropped gold. Maybe it reduces the administrative burden of leading raids a bit and the time required for loot, and even then I feel more time has generally gone to trading loot acquired through personal loot than has been neede for Master Loot.

So the whole situation at the moment just kind of feels like either an unecessary simplification or trying to reduce split runs which is only a concern for a very small number of guilds and then directly harms others.

I am hoping time proves me wrong on this one and it won’t be the end of the world even if not, but it still just feels kind of bad at the moment.

As mentioned I’ve been playing some Magicka recently and we finished the main campaign and one of the DLC campaigns: The Stars are Left.

Now it has been a really fun time and I’ll have to look into getting some of the other DLC campaigns, I believe there are still two or three to play along with Magicka 2 it seems, I wasn’t even aware that there was a second installment of the game out so now I’m looking forward to getting the chance to play that and see what it’s all about and what they’ve changed.

It has also been really fun to be playing in coop this time around, as I have had a few bashes at the Stars are Left DLC alone but those had ended mostly in frustration since I was so unused to playing the game again as my original playthrough was around the time the game came out I think, which is around 7 years ago now.

But what is Magicka?

Magicka—as the name might imply—is a spellcasting game where you play as a mage with eight base elements at your disposal, these being: Water, Life, Shield, Frost, Lightning, Arcane, Earth and Fire. You can activate one of these elements by pressing a hotkey and combine up to five of them and either throw them at the enemy—or yourself—as is or if the combination is a magick you know then you can cast that, usually casting the magick is the right move as they tend to be more powerfull but sometimes just throwing a big rock at the enemy is more effective. You also can’t use all magicks everywhere, for example you can’t conjure a lightning bolt indoors which limits its usability somewhat.

Some of the base elements also combine into other elements, water and frost combining into ice and fire and water combining into steam for example.

This basic system is really the beauty of the game, since there are so many combinations you can do and you’re encouraged to use many of them since enemies have different weaknesses. This is especially apparent later on in the game where actually using the wrong element against some enemies will heal them instead of damage them—the obvious example being undead being healed by arcane and damaged by life, which does make undead somewhat easy to deal with in this game.

For those looking for a challenge, the game is also rather hard when played alone as the monsters can kill you really quickly and you only have one extra life between checkpoints, this encourages a rather careful style of play.

Alternatively, play in coop with 1-3 other people and start getting hit by their errant spells as well, though luckily you do get the Revive magick from the start and it is rather easy to cast—don’t try it while wet though, trying to cast magick involving lightning while wet will just lead to you hurting yourself.

That does lead nicely into another aspect about the game though, namely status effects. Now these are also rather obvious, cast water on someone and they’ll be wet and be weakened against lightning and unable to use lightning in their spellcasting if they are a caster. Fire removes the wet status though it does cause some damage even then. Frost similarily slows one down or freezes even if one was already wet. Fire also removes the slow from frost. There is also a magick that removes all status effects from everything on the screen which can be useful at times—especially if one has thrown down a few too many mines.

Right, mines. As in the explody type, not the diggy type. They are made by combining either life or arcane with shield along with any other elements one wants and tend to be very useful when playing along as they knock back enemies which makes them easier to control. Shield and earth is another good way to control enemies as this creates walls, which while destroyable at least prevent the enemies from squishing you instantly. You can also create a wall with shield alone and at times that is necessary, but the stone walls tend to last a bit longer but are slower to cast. You can also combine the stone walls with fire or frost to burn or slow your enemies, making them even more useful.

Should I play Magicka?

If you like either hard games (single player) or very fun coop games (multiplayer) and spellcasting, then yes. Magicka is just simply a fun game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and just allows you to have tons of fun with spellcasting. It can be frustratingly hard at times but coop with its revives alleviates that a lot and the silly teamkills that can happen are consequently more funny than frustrating—as long as one isn’t playing with a griefer, but I suppose that wouldn’t be fun in any game.

Magicka even seems to be -70% at the moment on Steam until the end of the week, so I suppose it would be a decent time to buy as well. It seems to be slightly cheaper on the Paradox website if one wants to buy the game along with all the DLC though, so that might be worth checking out as well.

Oh, there are also actually arena PVP and challenge modes in the game, but I’ve focused on the campaign/adventure mode since that’s what interests me and what I’ve played and is probably where one should start with the game anyway.

Sometimes there are quiet times, like the past week. Not much has really been going on apart from the usual raids and some mythic+. And while that has been slightly disappointing at times—mostly because I keep wanting to do more mythic+ and do better there—it’s actually gone as one should have expected. The affixes aren’t exactly conducive to doing higher keys, especially within the constraints of our setup since we don’t really have any classes that excel at dealing with orbs.

In good news however, some of the disappointment has also come from increased interest and consequently participation of a few guildies in the runs. They have indicated a more regular interest in doing higher keys, which would allow for a team that plays better together instead of the constant reliance on random people that are hard to evaluate before the run begins. Now I did mention disappointment, and that has partially come from some level of inexperience showed by them at times, but inexperience is quite simply fixed by experience so that will come with time. Setup wise, I actually think we should be decently off for most affixes even if it is very unconventional. Though Hyrja might pose some problems, but when doesn’t she?

This is actually making me a bit more excited for the coming weeks—well, not the next, the affixes are even worse and I don’t think there will be any higher keys done then—since we get to refine the team and I actually get to know some more people from the guild better.

Quiet times however, are also perfect for taking a poke at some other games and me and a guildie did that yesterday with Magicka. I have played the game through before, but it remains really fun even though it was a particularily deadly time yesterday for some reason—as in, I kept dying. There did seem to be a surprising amount of lag at times, as in enemies walking through my mines and the mines just despawning without doing damage which might have contributed to some of my deaths—though luckily in coop you have a resurrection spell that is rather easy to cast.

The game really is meant for the chaos of multiplayer and not the slow methodical play of single player. Maybe I’ll end up doing a similar retrospective on Magicka as I did on Terraria, though I feel Magicka requires less explaining than Terraria—the fun is a bit more obvious: crazy, destructive magical coop. Fair warning though, it’s really important who one plays with. If one likes constantly goofing around and killing their teammates and that frustrates the other player, it probably won’t be a fun experience.

It is really fun in single player as well, though the game is much harder when played alone for two reasons:

1. In single player, you are the target of all enemy abilities making you that much more likely to die
2. As mentioned, in multiplayer other players can ressurect you. In single player, you have a spirit that will ressurect you once between save points, otherwise you get sent back to the save point.

In single player you do avoid your coop partners accidentally killing you though, which does make it slightly easier to stay alive but is in no way a compensation for the benefits having other players there brings. The two modes quite simply require very different playstyles, single player more focused on shields and walls and in multiplayer one can have a bit more fun as well as more time to cast things.

All in all, I was already about to ask if we could continue playing, but the guildie isn’t online yet so I guess that will have to wait a bit… Well, good things are worth waiting for. And there seem to be many good things to wait for, there was a Q&A announced for Thursday, Magicka as noted, hopefully more successful mythic+ with a more regular group of cool people—from what I can tell my guildies are pretty cool—and finally Battle for Azeroth a bit further into the future. No confirmed release date yet, wonder if we get one on Thursday? Would seem a bit early but one never knows.

They say time flies when you’re having fun and the last few weeks have gone by rather quickly. As mentioned briefly, Argus is down. Now this is a few weeks ago and I have my kill by now as well along with my trial being over in the guild apparently. That was a bit of a surprise, since I just kind of ended up being promoted without any feedback or discussion or the like but nice nonetheless.

The Argus fight in itself was fairly trivial at this point though I did do a few silly mistakes. There’s only really one difficult part in the last phase if one gets the wrong debuff, aside from that it seems to be basically: stay with the group unless you have bomb/debuff in which case out of the group. Sure there is a bit more nuance than that and Argus isn’t an easy boss, but it still felt fairly straightforward—which gives me much better understanding for some of the people in the guild who are kind of done with the boss since I’m guessing they were rather tired of wiping on other people’s mistakes. Though that is something that happens with every difficult boss and we actually managed the kill with relatively few wipes, 225 or so.

Now I’m just curious to see how they continue with the setups, since I believe only three healers need anything from Argus if they decide to keep taking four healers along or go with three from now on for farm as well.

When it comes to downing bosses, there has obviously been some other “progress” for me as well since the last boss I mentioned progressing on was Kin’garoth. So far the Coven of Shivarra still stands for me, but Kin’garoth, Varimathras and Aggramar have been downed—along with Argus as mentioned. The Kin’garoth fight was about as straightforward as it felt in progress, it’s still error prone with the bombs but other than that straightforward.

Varimathras is almost the same as heroic, just that one has an escort when one goes out with the Necrotic Embrace and there’s a need for keeping proper distances due to this. Also there’s an add that needs to be focused quickly. The fight remains a pure mechanics check, similar to the Maiden in Tomb of Sargeras.

Aggramar, well, just felt like more damage. Sure the big cleave needs to be soaked as two camps as it applies a debuff increasing the damage taken from it, and there spawn some more adds. But the intermissions remain the only difficult phase healerwise and beyond that it’s just add control. Which is fragile yes, and takes time to learn but doesn’t apply to me as a healer much. Though I did get to help a bit with kicking the adds back, which was fun.

Aside from raids, I have also gotten into doing some mythic+ a bit more regularily again which has been really nice. It feels good to be pushing for higher keys again and being challenged—though this week hasn’t gone quite according to plan with more depletions than I’d have thought. But no matter, it has been too much fun anyway to care too much about that. I think I’m slowly managing to get rid of the stress to perform I have been feeling at times which has prevented me from enjoying aspects of the game I tend to enjoy the most.

With that said, I’m actually hoping I manage to play the key I have still, though time is quickly running out and finding decent people for a key this late might be a challenge. But should still be manageable, if not then not the end of the world either.

Overall, good times at the moment. I’m really looking forward to actually participating in progress when Battle for Azeroth comes out, hopefully there will be many opportunities for that.

So recently I have actually been playing something other than World of Warcraft at times—namely Terraria. It has been a surprising amount of fun really, I mean I’ve played Terraria before and gotten to the start of hardmode¹ but not really much farther than that. This time I and a guildie actually played through the game on expert² managing to kill all of the bosses though I believe there are still a few events we haven’t seen but doing those would be mostly for completionisms sake as we don’t really need the rewards provided anymore.

So what is Terraria?

Basically 2D Minecraft with bosses to kill and RPG elements in the form of loot, gear and spells and a tiny bit of one might say leveling. Now let’s break that down a bit.

Why do I say 2D Minecraft? Well, the most recongisable feature of Minecraft is being able to mine and gather things and use those things for crafting and this is a central feature of Terraria as well, but Terraria is a 2D game where Minecraft is 3D. This is the central progression system in Terraria, as getting better materials feeds into the RPG element of loot, gear and power progression. The better the gear, the more one survives and the more damage one deals.

However, these materials are not only found through mining or the like, it also requires killing mobs and bosses—especially bosses for the more powerful things. Sometimes the bosses drop straight out equipment, other times crafting materials which are used to craft the more powerful equipment.

So in essence, the goal of the game is to mine some ore, smelt some bars, get a decent set of starter armour and weapons and take down some bosses in order to get better equipment to take down the harder bosses or maybe just harder monsters out in the world. Or just being able to mine the better ores, there’s also a progression of pickaxes enabling one to mine better ore.

Why is this game actually really awesome?

It combines the whole creation aspect of crafting not only gear but structures into the RPG mechanics really well, to the point where for most of the bosses one actually creates custom built arenas in order to have a better chance of defeating them. Sometimes these arenas are really simple, take for example the Wall of Flesh—a big wall of flesh that moves from one side of the map towards the other and one does not want to get stuck inside of it. So the arena is really simple, just a long straight path along one can run and shoot at the boss as the terrain in Hell where the boss resides is usually dangerous—due to lava—or simply otherwise hard to navigate due to housing.

Other bosses, like the Moon Lord or the Destroyer are better defeated by building a small cage barely big enough to fit the player where one sits and shoots at the boss from, giving protection from some of the bosses attacks but far from all as they tend to go through walls.

And lastly, there are the simple big cages with platforms³ allowing one to better dodge the bosses abilities, especially useful against something like Skeletron. These usually have solid walls to allow player spells to bounce around inside the arena so that they may hit the boss several times.

This ability to mould the world along with the wide selection of weapons and spells makes the game really diverse when going from start to finish. One is also forced to keep changing weapons and spells as one progresses, meaning one has to adapt to a slightly altered playstyle. This is most evident with spells, since spells usually have very different effects meaning one really gets to change how one casts as the game goes on.

As the game progresses one also gets nice utility items like grappling hooks which allow one to much more easily move around the caverns of the world and wings improving one’s mobility even more. Both are also rather essential to kill many bosses, since dodging without these accessories becomes difficult if not impossible.

Closing words

All in all, the game is a really enjoyable experience with lots of diverse weapons and I’m kind of sad that it’s over. Now I suppose I need to find something else to do along mythic+ and raids, especially since we’ll probably slowly be raiding less with progress being over. Right, that’s a thing, Argus is down! Not for me, but for the guild, I’m looking forward to taking my own poke at the boss when the time comes.

Classic servers were announced a long while ago at BlizzCon along with the Battle for Azeroth announcment. But I think that slowly my thoughts on them are starting to crystallize as someone who played on a private Classic server.

In the end I’ll probably check Legion out as well, though as usual it’ll probably be mostly to see the leveling experience and checking out the dungeons a few times. Sure, maybe I’ll poke my head in to LFR as well, but eh, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting. Might as well watch some of the livestreams for that.

Me, 2015

How little I knew at the time.

Are Classic servers a good idea?

I think so, yes. There’s clearly quite a lot of pent up demand from them considering how much the community has been clamoring for them for a long time. Also considering that new private Classic servers keep popping up as old ones get closed clearly shows it’s something people are willing to work on to keep alive and something people want to play.

They also provide an outlet for people who love World of Warcraft and want to keep playing it, but have gotten tired of the current content or mechanics. Being able to play the original form might very well re-ignite their love for the game—looking at the quote above, that’s certainly what it did for me. Playing Classic on Nostalrius was what made me have another proper go at Warlords of Draenor and actually try to like it and learn the new mechanics. Here we are a couple of years later with Legion accounting for something like half of my /played on my main that I’ve had since Classic.

Sure that’s also down to Legion being a really good expansion and the people I’ve met while playing, but without Nostalrius and being able to play something I know I love I’m not sure I’d given Legion (and Warlords) the same chance.

What could go wrong?

The implementation. This is something Blizzard is extremely aware off, but it might still go wrong. The question is: what, if anything, do you change? Now with StarCraft: Remastered, they changed a few things: the lobby system for multiplayer (from what I know) is now integrated with the new Battle.net, Battle.net friends are now to a degree accessible in-game through whispers and the like, and finally the big obvious thing: the graphics.

Now the graphics along with better resolution support were the obvious change that people wanted with SC:R and that’s what they got and from what I know people are quite happy with that. With WoW however, the situation might be different since we have already gotten new textures and character models with expansions and they are not universally loved and would quite significantly alter the feel of the game. Resolution support is already up to par from what I know, since WoW is a 3D game anyway so resolution restrictions aren’t a thing in the same extent as with a sprite-based game. I personally would hope for updated textures in higher resolution with no model changes.

Another innocent seeming change might be Battle.net integration, I mean who wouldn’t want to be able to talk to their friends? At the same time, that was unavailable in Classic and actually really encouraged server communities. And if we have Battle.net, do we get cross-server group support? While it is a really nice feature to have, it does erode the importance of the server and the reputation one can build there. So seemingly innocent changes can come with big consequences for the feel of the game which makes the whole thing something of a mine-field which is probably why it has taken Blizzard so long to start working on this. I would like Battle.net integration in order to be able to keep chatting with people who aren’t necessarily playing on a Classic server but any cross-realm features beyond that I don’t think fit.

Then we come to the less innocent changes, like LFD and LFR. Both of those seem like a somewhat obvious “no way” to me, but at the same time they might be something people expect. And what about the LFG-tool, does that belong in the same category? It’s a lot more convenient than spamming chat channels but it also doesn’t allow for the same kind of spontaneous activity. Most of my dungeon runs in Classic came from chilling in a city and seeing some group going somewhere looking for more and me just deciding to join. That doesn’t really happen with the LFG-tool in the same way as I have to actively open the tool and decide what I’m looking for (the category if nothing else). I don’t really see a place for any of these tools on a Classic server, but we’ll see what Blizzard comes up with along with the community.

Am I going to play on a Classic server?

Now for the real question. I think the short of it is: no. That comes with some caveats however—am I going to at least try a Classic server? Yes, almost definitely. However I do not see myself playing on a Classic server long term at the moment as playing two MMOs at the same is just a huge time investment and I have kind of done most of the things I wanted to achieve in Classic.

Sure, there are things I never did that would be nice to achieve—like clearing the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas—however the path to those things would include doing all of the content I’ve done which would require regular raiding which depends on a guild. And I’m really enjoying only having three raid-days at the moment, introducing another guild with more raid-days is not really something I’m planning on. Now if the Classic servers get released at the end-lull of Battle for Azeroth where I only have one day a week of farm left, that might change. But I highly doubt Classic servers would take priority over the current expansion servers for me which would make it difficulty to do the content I’m interested in and enjoy.

Unless maybe I decide I hate the current direction of the game and decide to go back to something old and familiar again, but I hope I have grown past that and that I can be a bit less stubborn these days. Sometimes being stubborn is good, but when it’s preventing one from enjoying something one wants to enjoy it’s not very helpful.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to seeing how Classic servers turn out and at least taking them for a spin—I’ll let future-me be the final judge and keep an open mind for now.

The first week of raiding with the new guild has come and gone, though there wasn’t all that much raiding in it for me. I participated in the farm up to and including Kin’garoth, meaning one new official kill for me. After that however, I got to sit out. Not necessarily surprising since they would have been new bosses for me and presumably they wanted to finish the farm quickly in order to get back to progressing on Argus—but nonetheless slightly disappointing. In good news they seemed to like my play so the decision wasn’t motivated by bad performance. I was out for the rest of the week as well which was to be expected with Argus progress going on and us running only three healers. Which meant that for the rest of the reset I was mostly following the progress through either streams, Teamspeak or both. And now it seems that will continue for this reset since we have extended the ID. I’m hoping they kill the boss soon since it sounds like some people in the raid are getting very frustrated with the progress.

In other news I suppose, slowly getting back into doing some mythic+ with one guildie, so far no more of a steady group than that and not many intersting keys but it has been fun. I think I might just end up reorienting my expectations regarding mythic+ since lately I’m feeling my desire to play higher keys is preventing me from actually enjoying the keys I am doing as much as I should. This I think goes for raiding as well, I’ve taken on an undue amount of stress from a desire to perform and participate that has led to great frustration with not being able to and that is frankly unecessary. So I’ll keep working towards my goals but try to readjust my attitude regarding the present since I think I’ve done the old mistake of comparing myself to others to much and becoming disappointed with what I have even though it is pretty great and when I am doing stuff I’m enjoying it greatly. So now just to look forward to some more mythic+ hopefully in the near future again and enjoy the sounds of raiding if not the experience of raiding.

Speaking of things that are great, I came to a surprising conclusion lately: I am actually really enjoying being Horde. I had rather expected to miss being a Night Elf a lot but aside from the few moments where I really want to Shadowmeld I’m actually really enjoying playing a Blood Elf. Maybe it’s just the variation after all these years, but it has been oddly enjoyable. I’m still learning proper use of the Blood Elf racial for mythic+ though that is slightly difficult running which such uncoordinated groups. Since it has a long cooldown using it at the right moment is rather critical, but when it gets followed up by a stun or another player using a silence the effect that it has is somewhat diminished. But that will come with time I’m sure, though I’m not so sure how much more time there is since there was some indication in a recent Q&A about the racial potentially being a bit too powerful which could mean changes. That’s for the future though, for now I’m enjoying where I am and actually looking forward to getting started with Battle for Azeroth when the time comes, I think I’ve found a good place to do that if they’ll have me.

Today, I transfered. New server, new faction, new guild. I have a lot of things to get used to. Haven’t really had the time to do anything with the guild yet—the next raid is on Sunday but I have no idea if they’ll be taking me. Not too many sign-ups so far, but I have no idea about peoples’ roles. In addition to that, I need to start reading up on some bosses as they are a bit farther in progress than the previous guild—which was the whole point: finding a guild who does progress at a more reasonable pace. But it does mean there is a whole lot of learning that needs to be one in a short amount of time.

The biggest thing to get used to though will definitely be the new faction: Horde. I have at times been Horde before, my first character was an Orc even. But I’ve always felt most at home with the Night Elves, which are Alliance. I did opt to stay an elf—this time of the Blood variety—which should hopefully lessen the blow, even though the two races are quite distinct. Unfortunately the Allied Races aren’t available yet, as the Nightborn might have made a good compromise though even that wouldn’t have allowed me to keep Shadowmeld, which is easily one of my favourite racial abilities. Shadowmeld is just so damnably useful, it can be used in mythic+ for trash to sneak a ressurect, to reset a boss when one is the last person alive or just to drop out of combat in the world when the “combat bug” rears its head again. At the same time—for pure performance in progress and utility in mythic+—the Blood Elven racial Arcane Torrent is probably more useful in more situations. But I care more about aesthetics and feel than pure performance, and in those categories there’s nothing that competes with Night Elves for me—Nightborne would just be crude imitations as the feel of the races are extremely different.

Beyond that, I am also leaving someone rather dear behind in my old guild and while we still will be able to chat not having our mains on the same faction will be a blow—he does have alts on Horde but it’s just not the same, especially after playing in the same guild for so long. The virtual closeness can be surprisingly important, especially since he physical closeness isn’t there due to distance.

In good news, I’m not alone on Horde. Two good friends of mine had already transferred over, their guild searches having led them to Horde guilds as well. Hopefully that makes the transition a bit easier, being able to play more with them again.

Good if strange times ahead, we’ll see where this year leads me. The beginning of last year started me on this path and it was the best decision I’ve made in a while, both personally and in the gaming space. Hopefully it continues being as awesome as it has been so far even if the rough times have been very rough.

So Wednesday came the patch, and with it a few cool things like the remade leveling experience—though even that seems to be somewhat broken. Like the rest of the game. There were several bugs introduced into Legion dungeons and raids, among them the spy event in Court of Stars sometimes just kind of leading to the mob standing there, not moving. The beams on Hasabel in Antorus are also broken, sometimes the graphic stays on the floor. In addition to that, Antorus seems to suffer from lag and FPS problems in general, which has led to very poor performance in our raid so far. We ended up canceling the raid about halfway through on Wednesday and it took several tries for us to kill Hasabel. The lag problems seem to have slightly improved, the general performance problems remain. Seems like this week will be mostly wasted from a raiding perspective—sadly—though there is another extended maintenance coming on Saturday. Hopefully the situation improves with that and we get at least one proper raid day.

There was also some talk about potentially having an extra raid day on Monday, will have to see what comes of that. On one hand, it would hopefully be a chance to get some more progress done and maybe even kill Kin’garoth finally. At the same time, having Monday “free” and not having to think about raiding and being able to concentrate on mythic+ instead might also be rather nice. But if there’s progress to be done I’m eager to be there.

In better news, it seems I have found a new guild. The guild is Horde which is good as that means I’ll be able to play with a few good friends of mine again—though it pains me to not be a Night Elf anymore. Hopefully that will mean more progressing and less frustration while raiding, just need to make sure I can keep up. That’s always the most stressful thing with joining a new guild for me—trying to prove oneself, both to oneself and to the guild. What it will definitely mean though is me being able to do mythic+ since I now have a few good reliable damage dealers available again and hopefully a few new ones through the guild. It will be really nice to get to do mythic+ again, though there has been a bit more mythic+ activity in recent times, sadly not so much of the interesting variety of actually properly pushing keys and more just upgrading a key or two a few times and then stopping before anything interesting appears.

There is still a small questionmark with all of this however, as I have an application to another guild open still and I’m not quite sure what I’d do if both guilds end up being interested. The guild I’m currently headed to has the nicer raid days but also slightly worse—or rather, slower—progress. Part of that might be in the raid days as the other guild does raid a bit more.

It’s a decision I might not have to make and I’m currently somewhat unsure which way I’m leaning. I do think I might stay with the current option because of the raid times. At the moment three raid days rather than four and something along the lines of 40% less hours just seems to compelling. The progress difference also seems really small with that difference in mind. Though the group impacts how enjoyable the raids are a lot more than the amount of time invested, it’s still a rather big consideration. It’s also rather impossible to figure out ahead of time how well one will end up liking one group or the other, so the times end up weighing a lot more. But I’ll get to that decision when and if it ends up being necessary.

So we did do some more Kin’garoth progress this week, but no extra raid-day. And it went decently I suppose, though slightly disappointed I can’t be talking about killing him. To be fair, I was part of the problem there, for some reason played rather terribly that day even though I don’t believe I directly caused any wipes, just unecessary deaths on my own part. Still we managed to get to 30% which is definite progress and already in the zone where the fight “starts for real”. But there still isn’t much more to the fight, it’s just that there’s more damage coming in and more orbs to dodge. So the fight is a bit more interesting than I thought, but still feels rather simplistic.

There was a slight error in my earlier post however, namely which buff the boss becomes depends on which add is killed last, just that our ordering was that sometime after the 50% mark we got the empowered bombs. Doesn’t really change any of my feelings regarding the fight, since it’s the order we played in that I was evaluating, but important to correct false statements.

Now with regards to searching for a new guild, I’ve added a few people and sent one application in. We’ll see how those leads pan out, they all seem like good guilds so hopefully one of them ends up interested and interesting. I’ll keep up a passive search for new guilds of interest looking for healers, see where that leads as well. At least I’ll be aware of my options. When that doesn’t end up working out I’ll be faced with a hard decision since I might end up considering just taking another pause which I don’t really want to do but going on as is doesn’t really feel motivating either—hopefully I don’t have to think about that, there’s time still.

Also it seems patch 7.3.5 will be releasing this week, which I suppose will mean a new Mythic+ seasons with the change to how Combat Resurrection works. Unfortunate timing in that sense, haven’t really done any mythic+ this season, at least nothing of note. Understandable with looking for a guild and so on and the season will probably be the shortest yet in that case, but still annoys me slightly.

Won’t even be able to take advantage of the leveling changes really, since I’ll probably be mostly interested in leveling one of the new allied races rather than one of the “old” races but those aren’t coming with the patch—probably with the Battle for Azeroth pre-patch for those who have preordered. Maybe I’ll end up leveling something anyway just to try the changes, but nothing really comes to mind at the moment that I don’t already have at a somewhat high level.

With Imonar down last reset and getting through the reclear this week we managed to get a few tries in on Kin’garoth. So far the fight seems rather trivial, with an element of being a movement check. So the fight for the most part remains as is from heroic; with orbs to dodge, adds to kill, a beam to dodge and not standing in the tanks to avoid being one-shot by the tank mechanic.

There is one thing that changes however, after killing the first set of adds, the orbs apply a debuff that increases the damage taken from them. As the orbs will start spawning faster than one can clear them, this will lead to there being an increasing amount of orbs going around the circle which will make moving to the adds and spreading out for their abilities harder. I believe this may end up being our biggest challenge, as movement seems to be a big problem in the guild—Imonar intermissions being the perfect example from earlier. Though I suppose this kind of soft enrage is the primary difficulty in the fight along with the damage requirements it imposes.

Our tries so far were quite promising, though we only got to 45% and the boss gets harder as the fight goes along. In that try as well we had several dead to bombs that were exploded in the wrong place, so there is still a significant amount of learning to do.

Still, I’m hoping we manage to kill the boss this week. Firstly it could prove useful for the guildsearch and secondly it feels like it would be a decent morale booster since some of our progress and farm hasn’t been going quite as well as expected, with some problems even in a heroic reclear. Seems the kill might bring a bit more motivation in, hopefully along with the motivation to stay focused on farm bosses as well so that we keep clearing them quickly. We’ll see at the end of the week, I wonder if we’ll try a extra raidday?

Finally, after a few too many wipes—91 to be precise, Imonar is down! The fight ended up being pretty much as predicted, which the biggest difficulty being the intermissions. Phase four also ended up providing one wipe, with one raid member failing to run out of the group and getting instantly dispelled. This led to the whole group sleeping when AoE shots came, killing most healers and damage dealers. Was an unfortunate moment, but soon after that the tries started getting quite a lot better. Both the kill try and the try before were very good, the first time progress became very clear to see. If memory serves those were the also the only times we actually made it into the last phase, which for me confirms my feeling of the boss being rather simple. Luckily it would seem we are slowly starting to get to the somewhat interesting bosses, though that will have to wait until next reset.

Beyond that though, there’s not that many interesting changes that appear with the mythic difficulty, it’s mostly just the same abilities as heroic with more phases and more abilities at the same time. Phase three combines the sleep debuff from heroic with the mines that spawn on players. Phase four is those two with the addition of the ships firing on two random players and some more random AoE. The last phase is again the mines, sleep combined with the tank debuff stacking infinitely. Most of these abilities don’t change the fight much, the biggest problem is simply playing the intermissions cleanly and not losing players there as the last phase is a rather decent DPS check due to the stacking debuff as raid damage keeps increasing with higher stacks.

With that, the question remains if I want to stay in a guild that struggles which such a simple boss, since it seems Argus will end up providing a real challenge at the end of the dungeon which makes it seem unlikely we will down him within a reasonable time frame, if at all before the next expansion. Probably, since there’s so much time still. But still, it’s slightly annoying staying in progress mode for so long since people just decide not to play properly from time to time. The last tries on Imonar showed that people knew how to do the fight, everyone just needed to decide to actually play the mechanics. That is a rather frustrating situation to be in. Will have to see what I end up doing, but the temptation to go asking around is definitely growing. Which frustrates me, since that will mean skipping progress and leaving a guild. Neither of those things I like doing, though there are some alleviating factors I suppose. For, the bosses seeming so simple makes me feel less bad about missing progress on them. Secondly, even being in a guild is no guarantee actually being in the raid for the progress, so it’s something I might end up missing anyway.

Though then again, at the moment there are no guilds that truly appeal to me strongly, there’s one or two I might consider so maybe truly the smart move is to just see if there’s interest on their part or perhaps wait a bit longer. But waiting might mean I end up missing the whole of progress, which would be very unfortunate. Hopefully I still have some time to think with Argus being difficult to kill. Time will tell, in the meantime I’ll have to decide what to do. Will be interesting to see the consequences, regardless of my decision.

I posted about me looking for a guild a while back, and while I technically found a guild it did not quite meet the goals I had set out when looking for a guild with regards to the level of progress. Now, we’ve been at it for a few resets and the progress is somewhere between expected and slightly disappointing (I had been hoping we’d manage to kill Imonar today for example, sadly wasn’t even close. Though there was definite progress). Which all would speak for sending out more applications.

At the same time, I’ve taken something of a liking to the guild I’m in. That combined with most actually interesting prospects requiring a realm and faction change which comes at a somewhat big cost, makes me reconsider.

Then again, I’m not really in the position to do much mythic+ in this guild, as there aren’t many people of the required skill level (it seems at least) to get a group together. Or maybe the interest just isn’t there, but most of the keys I see in the top list for the week are not quite high enough. There are a couple of exeptions, but not enough or not of the correct classes.

This all puts me in a somewhat awkward position where I don’t quite know what to do and in a sense time is running out. Since not doing anything will lead me to just staying in the guild, as the prospects will dry up with time. New opportunities will come I’m sure, maybe something promising might be showing up tomorrow even as I’m hopefully joining a friend of mine for a quick heroic run. Now just staying because of not being able to decide probably isn’t a bad thing either, I do like the guild (or the people in it rather). The worry is more how that will affect my motivation long term, if the progress keeps being not quite what I hoped combined with a lack of mythic+. Might very well lead to boredom which would be rather unfortunate.

Time will tell, maybe I’ll just add a few people on Battle.net and chat a bit, go from there.

Before Christmas we had one last progress raid and we got to poke at Imonar a bit. While we sadly didn’t get that far, there was one thing that slightly surprised me about the fight even though it probably should’ve been obvious from heroic already, namely the intermission. It’s a surprising pain as a healer, as it doesn’t really afford for any time to keep healing since you kind of need to just run through yet the group is taking decent damage from all the explosions going on (we at least opted to trigger several of the mines in order to allow people to get through, with the tanks doing the triggering).

That will be an interesting phase to get to learn and so far seems to be the biggest challenge of the fight, though as noted we didn’t get far, only to the beginning of the third phase. Optimizing movement in general seems to be a theme in this raid, it’s also quite present in Antoran High Command with the mines there, Eonar seems to be nothing but movement and barely any healing, there’s a rather decent amount of movement to be done on the dogs already if one has the fire debuff.

Looking forward at future bosses as well, Kin’garoth continues the theme with a rather spread out raid and both the orbs and beam to dodge. Varimathras has some movement sure, but it seems to be rather trivial and from what I know does not coincide with any damage spikes so shouldn’t really present any problems. The Shivarra seem to be more about positioning than movement specifically. Aggramar might also be interesting in that aspect, as the intermissions already do a decent amount of damage on heroic while also having things one needs to dodge, making it difficult to reliably use cooldowns (as a Priest at least).

I guess the raid might have more promise than I thought, but that might be down to the guild I’m in as well though to be fair, Christmas and New Years probably have something to do with our slow progress, getting only two proper raid days in in the last couple of weeks. Hopefully we keep progressing well and I get to be part of that progress, much less fun to come in on already killed bosses.

The couple first weeks of Antorus progression are now behind me and the raid still feels rather simple. The new mechanics introduced by the mythic difficulty so far have been trivial though to be fair we are not that far into the raid yet with only five bosses down.

There are some bosses I’m still looking forward to though, namely Kin’garoth, Varimathras and Circle of Shivarra. They all had potential on heroic already and will be interesting to see them with more proper damage and healing tuning. Of course, Argus will be interesting as well from what one can gather from the top guilds, but seems it will be a while until we reach that point. Hopefully not too long. At the very least I can end the week somewhat content after how badly last week went, which is already a very good thing. Here’s hoping we keep up the pace next week and one can happily enjoy the holidays.

Week one of Antorus has come and gone and with it the first impressions of the new raid. Only on heroic so far as mythic isn’t out yet, but still.

So far the raid hasn’t offered many real challenges, with probably the most noteworthy fight being the Coven of Shivarra. That boss fight has the potential for some really nasty overlaps on heroic causing problems and almost instant wipes. I’m really looking forward to seeing it on mythic.

Apart from that though, with the exception of Aggramar where people had problems grasping the strategy and priority targets for some reason, most of the fights there were very straightforward. The majority of the fights even being finished in just one try.

There are several fights that show potential for mythic though. Antoran High Command is already slightly stressful on heroic and might be the first problem for some guilds going into mythic. I also think Varimathras, Aggramar and Argus have the potential to become bigger challenges when going into mythic, as the first two at least do already have some significant mechanics on heroic to think about which will likely be even more critical on mythic.

So with that I’m really looking foward to the coming reset, will be interesting to start seeing some of the bosses on mythic difficulty and what the first actual stumbling block ends up being for me. Though first I need to settle on a guild, that matter is still slightly open.

So the last week or so has been rather annoying as I ended up leaving the guild I was in and have been looking for a new one. Sadly, the search has gone rather terribly so far, though I have a few leads still. I’m really hoping one of those pans out, as it would be rather sad to miss out on the early progress in Antorus since that’s usually the most fun time. Unfortunately that’s looking rather likely, since the pool of guilds that are of interest is rapidly shrinking.

And I have no idea what I’ll end up doing if I don’t find a guild, I still want to keep playing the game but if I’m not able to raid at a reasonable level that doesn’t really make much sense any more. But time will tell.

This post is acutally quite late as we already killed him on Wednesday, however I figured it was still worth making. So indeed, Kil’jaeden finally down after some 300+ wipes and now we finally get a small breather before Antorus comes out. Well, kind of, since we are hopefully re-killing Kil’jaeden before Antorus comes out to give the people that didn’t have the chance to be there an opportunity to get the achievement. I will be sorely disappointed if we don’t manage that.

As for the fight itself, well there’s not really much for me to add. Sure, I hadn’t played the second intermission yet at the time of the last post, but that one went over so quickly there’s hardly anything to say about it and phase three was really a mechanics check for one to two players who were responsible for the orbs or looking for safe spots from the obelisks. For the rest, it was just a DPS and HPS race. That’s not to say the phase is trivial, it is however quite a lot simpler than phase two and we really didn’t have a lot of wipes in phase three once we started to consistently get there.

All in all, it’s a fight that seems to mostly test patience due to the length. Sure, there are timing challenges with the orbs especially for slower classes that don’t have means of ignoring the mechanic, but those are somewhat easy to overcome with practice. I am still rather content with the fight, though it’s not exactly my favourite and I do also have to say, as we were more consistenly getting into phase three the fight actually came a lot easier to bear since it started feeling like the fight was progressing rather quickly. This due to there almost always being something happening that needed ones attention, if not now then in a few seconds. That did definitely add some intensity to the fight later on. It is by far not as punishing as something like Maiden, which is probably a good thing as it allows for more training to be done each try.

Blizzcon came and went and with it the announcment of a new expansion for World of Warcraft, Battle for Azeroth. And again they are talking about focusing on the fight between the Horde and the Alliance, this time with actual new game mechanics to emphasize that fight, specifically Warfronts and Island Expeditions though the latter don’t have quite as heavy an emphasis but still involve doing that exploration while fighting against a team from the opposite faction.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to think about that. For me, the constant conflicts between the Alliance and the Horde have been the most frustrating part of the story, probably because I quite like both factions and seeing them kill each other off doesn’t sit quite right with me. Especially the conflicts between certain races, like the Night Elves and Tauren seem to make little sense other than the allies they have and the support they want to give them.

At the same time I understand that it’s something that’s been core to the franchise for a longer time and refocusing on it makes sense, especially considering the PVP objectives we had in Legion already and the story between Genn and Sylvanas. But it’s still really frustraing to see Teldrassil burning, though I guess that was the point of it, to actually try to create some feeling of anger against the other faction.

Though I believe in the end the expansion through its raids will end up focusing on common enemies anyway, so I’m not sure how big a focus the conflict will be in the end. I have a feeling it’ll end up beeing a similar to Mists of Pandaria, in the sense that we began with faction conflict and ended up with a common enemy, even if he at the beginning of the expansion was the leader of one of the factions. I just hope they don’t end up using Sylvanas for that purpose, though that feels doubtful, more likely something like the Old Gods, since we are already seeing signs of their involvement. Though Old Gods being involved of course opens up the opportunity for some corruption arc, but hopefully not feels like we’ve seen enough of those.

With that said, I am really looking forward to this new expansion. They seem to be removing the legendary system and replacing it with the new artifact neck basically, since it’ll allow you to “spec” three pieces of gear which seems to offer similar customization to the legendaries. The progression on the new artifact neck is also character wide instead of spec specific, which really helps with off-specs especially in time like the current where one wants to get to a certain level in order to prepare for an upcoming raid. The raids also look really interesting, which in the end is the primarly reason I’m playing the game. With those and mythic+, probably my favourite addition to the game ever, staying in the game and even getting expanded, I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy the upcoming expansion. Only time will tell for sure.

I’m still not happy about Teldrassil though.

The last few weeks of raiding have been mostly filled with progress on Kil’jaeden. And slowly I am getting slightly frustrated and strangely enough, bored, with this boss. The fight requires a decent amount of attention though not quite on the levels of Mistress or Maid however everything just happens over such a long span of time that actually getting to the part we’re progressing on is gettign frustrating.

That all is slightly strange, because at the start when almost nothing was happening as we were progressing phase one, I was actually quite enjoying the boss. Now slowly however, phase one and the intermission are becoming frustrating slogs while waiting for the interesting part to arrive. It kind of reminds me of the healer challenge: the beginning is by no means trivial, but at some point quite easily doable once one knows how it goes, however having to keep redoing it to get to progress gets really frustrating at some point. That’s the thing I’m currently experienceing with Kil’jaeden, frustration at having to keep redoing the “boring” parts and consequently at times making simple mistakes.

A perfect example of this was once getting hit by one of the orbs from the adds in phase one due quite simply forgetting to even think about dodging because I was so ready for the phase to be over.

I realize these things are a part of raiding and a part of what makes these bosses difficult to execute properly, an endurance check in a sense. However being in the middle of progress on such a boss can be frustrating at times.

Seeing past that though, I think I actually enjoy the fight. I’m not overly keen on the knockback orbs spawning in the middle essentially being a timing check for one dispeller in the raid, but in general the knockback mechanic can be quite fun and gives opportunities to make life saving Leaps of Faith which I appreciate. Phase two is also quite interesting, though the healer adds feel slightly frustrating as I feel I can’t properly contribute there. Maybe worth looking into Apotheosis which should give a significant increase in burst heal for those adds, though we seem to be handling the adds rather well for the most part so probably not necessary.

Right now though, I’m just hoping that we actually manage to kill the boss in time, since it seems Antorus is arriving on the 29th and that’s not a whole lot of time for us. Sure, it’s still three weeks that we’re probably extending the ID, but even then it might end up being tight. All of that also assumes I don’t get benched, would naturally very much like to be there for the kill. I’m sure it’ll end up being fine, but it’s a bit of extra pressure that I didn’t need. Especially considering it makes the deadline for getting 75 traits apparent.

On Monday we finally managed to down Avatar after surprisingly few tries. Believe I personally have around 230, which seems to be quite on the low end for that boss. In the end as noted, the boss is quite simple. Sure the DPS and HPS requirements are somewhat tough, and phase one as a healer especially. But in the end, somewhat like Maiden, the kill ended up coming as a surprise. We went down into phase two around 32% and just decided to play it to see how it goes. A few minutes later, the boss was down. It was all surprisingly clean and boring almost. Maybe a place or two where it looked somewhat dangerous.

I also ended up getting some loot which was nice.

And after Avatar, we ended up having some time to poke at Kil’jaeden. Which was surprisingly fun even though we were only wiping in phase one before the first intermission. I find it strange, because on heroic I don’t really find the fight that interesting. Maybe that opinion will change as we get into more phases and get some of the more annoying overlaps, but so far it was rather fun. Could also have been the hype coming in from the Avatar kill as I honestly wasn’t expecting us to kill Avatar that day yet. So now I’m unexpectedly actually looking forward to doing progress again, which wasn’t so strongly the case on Avatar, and that feels great. Especially things like the additional healer adds will be interesting to have to deal with in a fight that already seems kind of hectic with all the flying around.

But until that, it seems we need to clear the raid again, as we’ll be going back to farm. Which I find kind of good as I’m sure there are still several people that need equipment (especially tier pieces) from both Maiden and Avatar. On the other hand, I kind of want to just go do progress on Kil’jaeden. But yes, more gear probably means smoother progress, so that will be nice since it seemed we might have had some damage problems already with getting into phase two quickly enough. But I guess we’ll see how that all goes in a week or two again, not sure how quick our re-clear will be.

Regardless, definitely looking forward to raiding more than I was last week which is a very good thing.

So we’ve gotten a lot more progress made on Avatar thanks to extending the raid lock. Honestly I’m not quite sure if it was the right move but I do want to kill Kil’jaeden before Antorus comes out so in that sense I suppose it could be helpful. And in theory at least, we should have the gear to be able to kill both bosses so it should be fine from that perspective. Leaving out the farm bosses does feel sligthly bad though, especiall considering we have only killed Maiden once. Feels like an odd compromise.

The fight itself though seems surprisingly simple at its core with some of the combinations becoming punishing rather than any of the core mechanics being difficult to handle. For example, the beam soaking is easy enough on its own, it can become a pain with the daggers flying around and the AoE from Ubound Chaos. Phase two as well, it’s mostly just managing soaks (like on Kil’jaeden) as well as not standing in the AoE. Sure there’s a quite decent chunk of incoming damage and the damage requirement for DDs isn’t exactly light either but there just isn’t much going on (though there is a decent amount of movement required, which makes finding moments to heal challenging at times). All of that did mean that the first day we practiced Avatar felt like such a chore. It was just unusually boring and uninteresting, though strangely that feeling was gone the second day. It might’ve just been the expectation of going in to do farm bosses and then ending up with progress that affected my mentality so much.

Don’t take all of the above to mean it’s an easy fight though, it’s not. As said, there’s lots of unopportune movement involved both in phase one and two, which means healing can be a pain (since usually having to heal coincides with having to move shortly before or after). Both phases are also very spread out (well, phase two only in the beginning) which while sure, reduces the amount of people I have to look after as a healer also increase the responsibility I have towards each of those individuals. Moving at the wrong time is much more likely to lead to deaths or close calls. I’m also quite curious how we end up managing with mana and cooldowns once we start coming to phase two “for real”, since so far we had full mana and all cooldowns ready while practicing which of course won’t be the case for the actual kill and both phases are rather big mana sponges.

Aside from the healer requirements, it’s all also a rather tight DPS check from what I can see, which will prove to be intersting. We have had a few wipes due to insufficient DPS on the Maiden, though usually something had gone wrong earlier in those tries. It’s interesting actually, Avatar doesn’t punish mistakes as instantly and brutally as Maiden (of Vigilance, that is) but they are still very detrimental. One soaker death? Well if a beam soaker, kind of OK though does mean all the other soakers receive more stacks. Dark Mark soaker? Well, we need to figure out something on the fly quickly or it’s just a wipe when they come, since that’s assigned to individuals that can handle the mechanic alone and we don’t exactly have many extras. Or hope we still have a battle ress, though those go out rather quickly at the moment (it is progress after all).

In the end, I’m actually rather looking forward to see more progress on Avatar. Sure, the boss isn’t actually the most exciting but it is still quite a challenge. And we do have to kill Avatar in order to get to Kil’jaeden, which I’m also looking forward to (though I’m not sure how much I’ll actually end up liking that fight, so far not actually one of my favourites).

So we finally managed to kill the Maiden yesterday! It felt like it was a bit too long time coming, which made finally managing it feel rather nice. At the same time, the kill was also rather anticlimactic because of how the fight works. Since it’s only the two phases rotating the whole time, there’s no real escalation built into the fight, it only requires concentration and clean play the whole time. While yes, having 20 people make close to zero mistakes during a whole encounter is challenging and that’s what led us to having so many wipes as well, it means the encounter is rather monotone. I didn’t realize we were killing the boss until a few seconds before she was down, which is strange because usually one can see the escalation in incoming damage or the like as the encounter goes on, a perfect example being Mistress Sassz’ine or the Desolate Host. Both become much more dangerous as far as incoming damage is concerned and that adds a certain tension.

It is kind of nice with a more I guess relaxing fight in there, though at the same time the almost zero tolerance for failure does introduce tension into the fight. Will be interesting to see how the rekill goes, assuming we don’t extend the ID.

In other news, killing the Maiden meant we got to poke at Avatar a bit. We just practiced phase two, and that fight seems like it will be messy. Theoretically we’ve now played through the whole phase two, though we definitely need to do it better if we actually want to end up downing the boss. Damage looked okay considering we’ll be in execute range in reality but there were a few too many avoidable deaths and failed soaks. Something I’m sure a few more tries will fix. Of phase one I still have no idea though it seems it’ll be something of a pain, since once more tons of movement and trying to keep people healed up in that time. Especially with the different sources of damage that actually require us healers to keep people topped so they don’t get one-shot by mechanics while also dealing with movement. At the same time, I think that promises an interesting fight, so hope to be progressing there next reset again (and not spending the whole reset on rekills).

But in the meantime, some rejoicing that the Maiden is finally dead and we got some progress done!

With patch 7.3 Blizzard released a new dungeon that unlocked a couple weeks ago called Seat of the Triumvirate. I haven’t had the chance to spend too much time in there with it being so new, but have managed a couple of runs in there, one on tyrannical and fortified each. And while neither run went particularily well I have to say Blizzard has created a rather fun dungeon with the exception of a couple mechanics, specifically the third boss and the trash before the second one.

To expand on that, the trash before the second boss in and of itself isn’t so annoying, rather the randomly spawning extra trash is. It hasn’t really caused problems so far because it died really fast but it just feels like an completely unecessary addition that only contributes frustration not challenge, in a similar vein to Quaking activating out of combat. Even on a +16 with fortified the trash was trivial enough to not pose any real extra challenge. Which on one hand I think is good, otherwise the somewhat random nature of it would be even more frustrating, but it also means it serves no real purpose (though to be fair, it perhaps adds a bit of flair).

Now the third boss on the other hand, is something I think tuning will fix. But at the moment the timing between the tentacles spawning (which actually need to be handled since they deal such significant damage to the party otherwise) and the two adds spawning that need to be nuked down is just brutal especially if the party includes even one class with weaker burst damage. So far I think both times when we actually ended up killing the boss the tentacles bugged out and fewer than four spawned, leading to the timing being much more forgiving.

Other than those two specific instances though, the dungeon is actually really good. Now there were a couple of packs that were rather brutal with teeming (especially since we didn’t quite know how to handle them yet), but for the most part the trash was quite good. Hit rather hard but nothing kiting couldn’t solve. And stealthed trash is something that’s a bit fun to see again, can’t really remember the last dungeon that was in (well Hellfire Citadel I guess, but that isn’t a dungeon). Sure it can be frustrating when it pops up at the wrong time, but it didn’t seem to exhibit any one-shot tendencies so far, so as long as that is avoided I think it’s good.

And the bosses, well they are all rather good, mostly relying on just playing the mechanics properly. I do however foresee the first boss becoming a problem at some point since the room gets filled so quickly. The soft enrage on him seems to be rather brutal. That can be alleviated somewhat by clearing more parts of the room though I fear that is too time-intesive with the trash that’s in there. The other exception as said being the third boss, where I think something like 5 seconds more time would make a world of difference.

Overall though, I’m actually looking forward to getting more tries in on the dungeon to learn it better, something I couldn’t say as strongly about Cathedral at the time. Sure I wanted to learn that dungeon as well, but it always felt like the successes and failures there were more down just to failed tuning of damage than any actual fails on the mechanics. So good job Blizzard.

So I haven’t written much about recent raiding efforts and lots has happened (well it’s also been over a year). In that time I’ve ended up changing guilds twice and have progressed through all heroic content while it was current and am currently progressing in mythic Tomb. Specifically, we recently killed Mistress Sassz’ine and are now on Maiden of Vigilance.

Now of the two I would definitely argue Mistress is the more interesting fight, with lots going all almost the whole time. Phase three gets especially intense and getting the kill in the end was quite sweet. She seems to be a somewhat annoying boss for us to rekill however, since people seem to have forgotten how to play phase one and two which presents certain problems considering the fight is still a DPS check.

The Maiden on the other hand is a ball of funny frustration. The fight in itself is quite simple, almost the same as heroic with one small addition: the orbs (from phase two) now randomly spawn on a player of the opposite colour, with a small AoE effect on the ground and delay. Also, a bomb exploding in the raid is an instant wipe. This means that as people are learning the fight, while the wipes can be quite funny at times (the whole raid instantly explodes) it’s also quite frustrating because one keeps dying to the mistakes of others. The fragility of it all led to us having around 50 wipes on Maiden with most of them without seeing phase two. Which somehow gives me the feeling we might be spending a long time on Maiden.

However, it’s been really good to get into some proper progress raiding again and the guild I’m in is quite lovely (silly mistakes aside). Hopefully I and the guild have a long and bright future ahead of us, as I rather hate changing guilds. Now just to make sure we manage to clear Tomb before Antorus arrives, would be good to have the content cleared again before the next comes out. It’s been way too long since last.

Blizzard recently made some pretty big changes to how mythic+ works, both in the way of loot and how the keys themselves handle. The big points being:

• Beating the key quickly no longer rewards more loot, rather higher level keys (15+) have a chance at giving more loot. Completing the key in time also provides one extra piece of loot.
• Keys no longer get depleted, rather downgraded. If you don’t complete the dungeon in time, you get a new random key one level lower. If you don’t complete it at all, you get the same key one level lower.

Now I did not exactly like these changes, to be more precise the change that downgraded keys. In theory, this sounds like a great change: you always have a chance at loot when completing a mythic+ dunegon. For me however, since I’m mostly doing them for the challenge or to get a high key as possible done, it adds a lot of stress to always do a 100% tries for the keys in order to not downgrade them. A depleted key could always be redone and then upgraded once one knew the instance better, not so much when it’s a new random dungeon. It also greatly adds to the frustration of learning the dungeon and affix combo every week, since not getting things right there mean downgraded keys.

The loot change on the other hand has actually worked in my favour since I already tried to do higher level keys and not 3-chesting lower level ones. Though for those who were participating in that, I can understand the frustration.

Now these changes overall were quite odd, in that they seem to punish the people that were actively doing mythic+ content and mostly benefitting the people who weren’t overly interested in it in the first place. Presumably this was an attempt to get more people into doing mythic+, but at the same time the requirements for joining mythic+ groups seem to be more extreme than ever and there seem to be fewer groups up.

Now then, how do the changes feel after a month or so of living with them? Well, still kind of terrible and a downgrade from the old system. I would strongly prefer the option of depleting a key rather than downgrading it, especially since sometimes downgrading is down to one bad pull or an unlucky combo from some mobs. It’s really frustrating at that point to be put, essentially, two dungeons behind from where one was before; especially if one was running a dungeon one was interested in pushing/doing well in at the moment as one then again is at the mercy of luck to get that key again.

The loot change on the other hand, I like but seems to be the more controversial one.

In the end though, the changes aren’t the end of the world. Even the key downgrading at times has proven useful (e.g. Cathedral keystones…) but even at those times it has been somewhat bittersweet as it might have been useful to be able to try it again.

So the prepatch arrived a few days ago and I have had some time to do raids and dungeons with the changed talents and spells. So far it has been rather excellent, which has been a slight surprise. So far the removal of Spirit has not been a bother, though admittedly the content has also been made easier so the true test will come with the Legion dungeons and raids. I actually think healing has been more enjoyable now, the flow with Holy Words and reducing their cooldown is quite satisfying though it can lead to moments of slight frustration when there has not been a sufficient need to use other healing spells and a burst of damage comes in. Managing that though, is probably the idea behind the whole thing.

As for the removed spells, I have not ended up missing them. Mana has been fine, so Mindbender being gone has not been a problem. I had gotten used to throwing down Lightwells, but never did feel like they did a whole lot and not having to think about them has been kind of nice; though I do catch myself going “Oh, remember to cast Lightwell! Oh, right…” at times, especially during pulls. The place where I actually notice the removed spells the most is when doing quick Heroic dungeons, as I had gotten into the habit of doing light DPS with Mindbender and Shadow Word: Pain, both of which are gone. Feels especially odd to be without a DoT during the rare times when I end up killing mobs though. Holy Nova is also something of a bother when compared to Mind Sear, though that is more rarely used.

Concerning raiding, we managed normal HFC quite quickly as is to be expected, we mostly went in there to explore the potential for improved Warforged (Titanforged?) loot. Heroic on the other hand, did not go quite as well, probably because people are still familiarizing themselves with their new spells. One of our Shadow priests seemed to have particular difficulties, admittedly the playstyle is quite different to the old Clarity of Power style. Raiding has continued to be highly enjoyable however and the reduced health and damage on the mobs and bosses oddly has not felt overly extreme. Perhaps the changes in player power really did warrant those changes as well.

The new transmogrification system is worth mentioning as well I suppose, though I have not had a real reason to use it yet. Though it did allow me to finally get rid of the glow from my weapon enchantment without bothering a enchanter, which was nice. The change with head, cloak and shoulders being hidden through transmogrification rather than interface options is something of a drawback however, though admittedly I rarely changed those options anyway. It might end up being more problematic for roleplayers, as I understand they used those options to indicate taking ones helmet on or off. The addition of being able to hide ones shoulder armor was nice though.

Speaking of small annoyances, there is a small bug that seems to have persisted from the PTR: sometimes flying mounts seem to “land” for a split second while flying around far from the ground. I am not sure if the movement speed is actually modified by this, or if the bug is merely affects the visuals/sound, but it is a small new annoyance that has been introduced. Hopefully something that will be adressed soon, one would hope regressions would be somewhat easier to fix.

Overall though, I have been enjoying the patch greatly so far and look forward to Legion with greater interest. I suppose one might call that a success on Blizzard’s part.

It’s been a while, and I’ve been playing WoW again and actually had quite a bit of fun. I leveled a warrior because I felt like tanking a bit again and during that process ended up finding a guild which I’ve been raiding with on my priest since (priest because there wasn’t a need for tanks).

And it’s all been quite excellent, the guild is fun, Hellfire Citadel has been fun to explore properly instead of in LFR. Even got some Heroic mode HFC done, which has been great fun.

Sadly, there’s been a bit of a lack of people in the recent weeks and we’ve ended up having to PUG some people. Hopefully either the prepatch or Legion launch ends up solving this problem, as I really enjoy raiding with the people in this guild. It might also be as simple as summertime being a less active gaming time for people though. The coming weeks will tell I suppose.

I’ve also gotten some mythic dungeoning in with the guild and PUGs at times and those have been quite enjoyable as well even if the groups tend to be rather overgeared.

Overall, I’ve just been enjoying my time with WoW again which has been great. Hopefully the Legion changes end up not being detrimental to that enjoyment, though I think I’m more prepared to take things as they come this time around. Might have to go exploring on the beta a bit to get a better idea of have the changes end up impacting the feel of the game. It’s a tad of a pity to see Cascade removed, I’ve actually ended up enjoying that spell quite a bit, almost as much as Prayer of Mending.

If all goes well I look forward to many more raids with this guild!

So quite a bit has happened since my last post, most notably the closing of Nostalrius where I had played. Admittedly, I did not end up playing much more since my last post, primarily due to the concern of something like closing down happening. And while Nostalrius was well managed I do still have a preference to play on the official servers even though the game in some aspects feels inferior.

I’ve ended up examining my prospects as far as it comes to joining a guild and while it is yet to be finalised will probably be joining a casual-ish raiding guild on my priest that is about to start in Hellfire Citadel Heroic, so far having downed one boss. If nothing else, it should give me a better feel on how I enjoy the current state of healing, considering I’ve yet to do any “proper” content since the revamp in Cataclysm though the signs haven’t been all that good, though the changes coming in Legion to Holy priests do seem promising. Mostly though, I’m just looking forward to getting some proper raiding in.

Pristine Realms

Now, the response provided by Blizzard on the backlash caused by the closing of Nostalrius and consequent community demand for official Classic realms did also provide an interesting though lamented idea for recapturing some of the things players at least alledgedly miss, namely community. That idea was Pristine Realms. Specifically, these would be realms where certain “quality of life” features would be disabled:

• LFD/LFR
• Heirlooms
• Character boosts, transfers
• Cross realm zones
• Recruit-a-Friend bonuses

Personally, I’m not too sure how to feel. It does remove several things I feel are problematic, however content would still be obsoleted at a unecessary pace due to catch-up mechanics like PvP gear or Tanaan/Timeless Isle and badges before them. Even as I say that, I have been leveling a warrior and quite enjoying being able to level at a quick pace through dungeons (at least until Warlords of Draenor content, at which point one is force out into the world to gear up grumbles), which wouldn’t be possible without LFD. So these features certainly aren’t without merit and I’m not sure if such realms would generate sufficient interest for them to stay playable without the cross-realm features. In the end, I’d be very tempted to participate, though having to give up my characters would be a somewhat difficult thing to bear. Another thing preventing me from enjoying unofficial servers as well.

Legion

On the matter of Legion’s current state, I’m not sure I have too much to say. I do look forward to the changes coming to Holy priests, specifically the new Word spells. Especially having a properly strong single target heal again is appealing. How I feel about the removal of Spirit as a stat I’m not so sure yet, on one hand it should keep regeneration from getting out of hand at the end of expansions necessitating more bursty damage yet it’s been a stat I’ve enjoyed being able to increase the most (less so with the changes in Cataclysm admittedly).

There was also a recent worry over the proposed changes to respeccing, namely: characters have a primary spec, changing from it costs an increasing amount of gold (up to 62g, a curious number) but changing back to the primary spec can be done for free. This functionality would be available anywhere, and dual-spec would be leaving us. Personally, I’ve generally been very attached to the spec I choose to play on a give character and am consequently not overly concerned over this change. At current gold rates, this also seems like a quite minor gold sink. To be fair, it is an extra cost incurred during raiding, as changing specs for specific bosses or even for clearing trash has become popular. It remains to be seen if this change would discourage such a change, potentially serving Blizzards goal of empowering class and spec fantasy by encouraging players to stay in spec. It’s an odd change in that it probably primarily hits the top and bottom end of raiders, as the top cares the most about optimisation while the bottom end probably needs the flexibility provided by hybrids the most. I’ll be watching with interest how this ends up playing out.

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In the end, there’s a lot of wait and see here with how Legion changes end up playing out and how I enjoy the (potential) guild I join. Hopefully it all ends well and there’s some enjoyable gaming on the horizon. For now, it remains to be seen.

So I did end up freezing my subscription again and it’ll run out on the 26th though I doubt I’ll be logging in before that. In the end what solidified it for me was dabblinga bit with a private Vanilla server again and noticing how much more fun the game felt even with all its flaws. It’s odd noticing how years of further development haven’t really successfully added all that much that would motivate me to play and rather conversely succeeded in taking some of those motivating factors away.

Anyway, I had played on this server before back in spring with a few friends, I rolled a priest (obviously). But then summer came and as usual put a bit of a damper on my gaming and I didn’t end up returning immediately during fall. Now though I’ve made somewhat of a more casual comeback, playing a bit at a time every few days and it’s been quite fun. A bit of questing and a Sunken Temple run is all I’ve managed so far, though now it’s looking like I’ll have to start doing some more serious dungeoneering as quests are starting to seem somewhat scarce. Though that’s probably a wise move anyways, as the dungeons are starting to drop gear that’ll be relevant at 60 anyway so I can gear and level up simultaneously.

As of yet I’ve no ambitions when it comes to raiding, mostly due to not being sure how much time I’m willing and able to dedicate to scheduled gaming. Hopefully I’ll have time for something, the server does seem to have a rather active raiding community so finding a guild shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Especially considering healers are usually in demand, though I’m not overly familiar with the class distribution on this server.

In the end I’ll probably check Legion out as well, though as usual it’ll probably be mostly to see the leveling experience and checking out the dungeons a few times. Sure, maybe I’ll poke my head in to LFR as well, but eh, it doesn’t really seem all that interesting. Might as well watch some of the livestreams for that.

Things have been rather slow lately. After BRF, I haven’t really participated in raids which is a tad unfortunate. This is partially because as far as I can tell, there haven’t really been further raids organised in the guild or they’ve been unfortunately too late for my schedule.

However, I’ve not been completely idle, there has been some running of LFR which has lead to somewhat upgraded rings on both the priest & druid (still the 690 variant though). And that brings me nicely to this: I’ve been playing my priest again somewhat and it’s been quite nice. In the end, priest is probably the class I do enjoy the most, even if I don’t think the changes along the years have been all that kind. It’s been nice bringing some “old-style” healing into the LFR’s I participate in, though my insistence not to waste mana usually doesn’t translate overly well to the meters (unless one decides to look at overhealing). It is quite silly though how many healers LFR requires, considering at least at this point at least one if not two are probably doing pretty much nothing, at least in the “older” raids. I’ve not into HFC that much, at least the LFR variant of it seems the least interesting of the currently available raids. I’m sure it’s a much better experience on a proper difficulty level.

Besides that, I’ve been poking a bit at leveling a warrior, though that’s still early stages and not going overly quickly. I should probably just respec Protection and run dungeons, would probably keep me more interested. Though I do generally find I don’t overly enjoy tanking at the level-cap and DPS is right out, so I’m not quite sure where I’m going with the warrior leveling.

Outside of the game though, I’ve been following Kugnen’s Project Sixty with some interest. It seems like a valiant effort in recreating a somewhat sped up Vanilla Progression and seems somewhat successful in that effort. From what I’ve seen through his streams, it does look like a good time. I’d rather play on one of the larger private server’s though, if one was looking for an authentic experience. That of course isn’t available in this case, as Kungen can’t really go on a private server while being a partnered streamer, so.

Besides that though, WoW wise, it’s been very quiet for me. I’m not overly enthusiastic about attempting to join a guild at the moment as I’ve other commitments and without one there isn’t all that much in the game that I can currently do that would be of interest. I did take a very half-hearted stab at getting Draenor flying, however the dailies involved in order to acquire the reputation required just felt very uninteresting and that stopped that plan.

What we currently know of Legion however, especially the Holy Priest changes, do look rather good. Hopefully I’ll have a better opportunity at that time to participate in raiding! Until then though, I might end up freezing my sub (again), we’ll see what the rest of the year brings.

Yesterday, some raiding did actually manage to happen, kind of. A Blackrock Foundry normal run was started, sadly only five people from the guild showed up. This time however, the raid leader decided to PUG the rest of the group so it wouldn’t be a completely wasted effort and we (well, I) did get to experience the raid! Well, as said, kind of. While I stayed for the whole raid and we did clear all of it, at the end it was only me with one other guild member. So it ended up being mostly a PUG raid. Which, while they were fine folk & made the run go smooth, isn’t quite the same experience as progressing through an instance with a guild. Admittedly, there isn’t much progressing to be had in BRF considering even yesterday most if not all of the raid overgeared the instance. I did manage to pick up a couple of marginal upgrades however, so that was nice.

Still, today’s Hellfire Citadel run did not end up happening. There had only been four signups I think and the event creator didn’t even end up showing online, probably can be attributed to the low signups. So the state of raiding remains somewhat dire and considerations for joining a raiding guild continue. I’m not sure if this is a good or bad time in the expansion lifecycle to do that, however. On one hand, one gets to know the guild a bit during farm and it’s probably easier to find a guild while everyone’s farming because players probably fall out due to boredom. On the other hand, I’ve little interest in the farming part myself as well, nor do I have the gear to get into any of the guilds doing the actually interesting content.

So challenges remain, however I did get to do BRF! Yay! Even if it was in a PUG that overgeared the instance.

There’s been little progress since my last update. No further raids have happened so far, though there is one scheduled for tonight though only with two people signed up. I’ve made decent progress on the Talon Queen title, needing only ~3000 more reputation & I’ll be getting around 2000 from tomorrow’s Heroic Skyreach. As the dungeon event is ending, I’ll probably end up grinding the rest of the reputation out in the world as I haven’t bothered putting together a group for the Mythic variant of Skyreach yet and probably won’t end up doing that before the event is over.

I would be interested in starting to do some Mythic dungeons though and did attempt Skyreach once with a guild group after one of the failed raid attempts. It seemed like they could be a lot of fun, as there seems to be a bit of challenge left especially as we went in with the bare minimum of item level recommended. Sadly, we did not seem to have sufficient DPS at the time and the group disbanded after a few wipes on the first boss, though the trash went rather well. It seems it would be preferrable to find DPS in the 20,000+ range, which somehow doesn’t seem overly common as observed in guild runs & LFG Heroics. Obviously anecdotal, but still.

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I have had a tad of time to think about what I want from raiding though and it seems to be simply to get to raid “properly”, i.e. not in LFR & not PUG. I’ve noticed I don’t really care for the gearing aspect all that much, as it seems much of the prestige at least I associate with it is gone. So simply getting to experience the raids (hopefully starting with Highmaul as I haven’t raided at all this expansion) would be awesome. This is probably also why I’ve been so lukewarm on many of the more recent expansions, the simple matter that I haven’t really been raiding in them. Sure, I disagee with some of the changes Blizzard has made in them as well, but not participating in the content that gives me most enjoyment in the game is more probably the root cause.

This, however makes my situation somewhat awkward. As I’m not overly eager at finding new guilds & the attempts at getting raids together in my current guild fail, seeing what way to proceed becomes somewhat difficult. I’m hoping I can simply stay with the current guild as it does seem to have some rather nice people in it, though if raiding doesn’t start happening I sadly won’t be able to. Finding a new guild might be hard because I’d actually like to go back and clear the “old” raids, though that might happen in some sort of alt run. Finding a guild at this stage of the expansion when you’re not overly geared however isn’t all that simple. Most guilds seem to be expecting HFC experience & gear, neither of which I have. Joining a newly founded guild might simply leave me in the same situation I’m now, waiting for there to be sufficient raiders.

So matters are not as simple as they might seem, sadly.

The last couple of weeks have gone by rather quickly, it seems. Much of that time seems to have gone with WoW, which for the time being seems to have captured my interest again which has been rather fun. As noted previously, I had started leveling a druid and managed to get to 100 almost a week ago now, last Friday morning. Leveling was one hell of a ride, I chose to do it primarily through dungeons though that stopped once I reached WoD levels, partially due to the item level restrictions for entering dungeons and partially due to long queue times. This lead to the final ten levels being somewhat tedious as I strongly prefer group content and had experienced the zones twice previously.

The dungeon leveling prior to that was a blast, however. I ended up especially enjoying the Cataclysm dungeons as they seemed to have retained some of the danger Blizzard had introduced in them. So while this did lead to some wipes as a consequence of people not knowing mechanics at times, the feeling of actually having to do something or risk wiping did add to the enjoyment of the run. Revisiting the old TBC dungeons was a good time as well as it meant getting to run my favorite dungeon, Caverns of Time: Escape from Durnholde (also know as Old Hillsbrad Foothills). This gave me an opportunity to reflect ony why I enjoy the dungeon so much and I think I came to a conclusion. It’s probably because I enjoy the pace the dungeon sets, while still allowing for more variation than dungeons like The Black Morass or Violet Hold which are more of running from portal to portal in the same small space. Incidentally, I also quite enjoy the Culling of Stratholme, which also fits into this paced dungeon theme. Though naturally the damage output of the group still has some effect on how quickly the dungeon goes.

But in the end, level 100 was hit and gearing started. I decided to do something somewhat silly and gear through PvP even though I’m primarily a PvE player myself, as there was a Battleground bonus even running conveniently after I had reached max level. This allowed me to gear in time for the scheduled raid time on Sunday, which was rather nice. The gearing path isn’t as bad as one might think, as PvP gear no longer has any PvP specific stats (like resilience) on it and the itemisation was decent in most respects. It also allowed for a rather big leap in item level, which seems to be the primary measure of gears usefulness these days (though properly itemised lower item level pieces might still be better than their higher item level counterparts, which didn’t end up being relevant for me as the gap in item level was so great).

Sadly the raid did not end up occurring, however we did manage an improptu run on on Monday instead. This ended up being normal Highmaul, which was fun as I hadn’t had the chance to properly experience the instance. We ended up taking down the couple first bosses and sadly had to call it at Brackenspore after a couple of wipes as some members of the raid had to leave and we were unable to find replacements. Sadly the continuation raid yesterday did not happen either, but there’s a raid scheduled for tonight that hopefully ends up happening. It seems it’ll either be Highmaul or Blackrock Foundry, both of which would be interesting to experience and finish at some point even if the gear doesn’t seem overly necessary after my PvP gearing. Highmaul in particular seems to have no gear of interest, but it’s fun doing some raiding nontheless!

All in all it’s been a fun experience so far, though I am starting to notice I’m slightly running out of steam. I don’t really feel I have overly many interesting goals outside of raiding now that I’ve geared up somewhat and don’t need to level anymore. Sure, I’m working on a couple of mounts (specifically the Flametalon of Alysrazor & Reins of the Raven Lord) however those are once a week/day engagements even if I do the attempts on several characters. I’m also trying to get my Arakkoa Outcasts reputation to exalted for the title Talon Queen, however that as well is somewhat rate limited now that the dungeon event for reputation is on as there is only one heroic per day I can do that gives reputation with them. I’ll probably end up either continuing farming the mobs that grant the reptutation (though I’d rather just do more dungeons) or running the dungeon on Mythic 2-3 times for the remaining reputation. Still, none of these things end up being tasks one can dedicate oneself to, excepting the reputation farm though I’m opting for the more fun albeit slower route of doing it through dungeons (slower not in a time spent but time lapsed sense).

Maybe I’ll have to end up leveling yet another character? Though I do fear I’d only end up in the same situation once again! Another alternative may end up being seeking a more raiding focused guild, though that may be a somewhat difficult task as I fear I might have somewhat particular preferences. I suppose time will tell how I end up continuing!

I started leveling a Druid, and so far it’s been progressing quite well. I’ve managed to get all the way to 64, been doing dungeoning since I hit 15 and unlocked the dungeon finder. It’s been a blast so far, somehow managing to capture quite a lot of what I used to like about healing, though I’ve been able to completly ignore mana management as mana seems to be rather limitless at lower levels. I’m starting to notice at least some lowering of my current mana in certain pulls now though!

I’m kind of hoping that mana remains somewhat of a non-issue though, not completly but being more dependant on your casting style rather than a reliance on managing cooldowns which just seems utterly uninteresting. Based on what I’ve seen, Druids don’t seem to get a mana regeneration cooldown though, so that’s a good sign things will continue in a interesting manner!

It’s also been great revisiting the old dungeons, even with their changes in Cataclysm. I hadn’t even had the opportunity to do all of them since the changes, so seeing what’s happened has been interesting. The changes have been for the better for the most part I’d say, though part of the charm (and simultaneosly frustration) of the old designs may have been lost. Though the new layouts & helper objectives certainly make for a much smoother PUG experience, which is rather nice while trying to level through them.

Another fun part of the leveling has been meeting a bunch of people, though often only in solemn silence. It’s still been nice to see how well players often are able to understand each other while playing through the dungeons and repeated runs with the same group are nice because one has a better feel for both how quickly things die as well as the damage patterns of the tank which makes healing much smoother. Still, there were a few memorable personas, most strongly the group I ended up doing a spontaneous Emperor run with. We’d all been thrown into Detention Block of BRD together and after completing that part of the dungeon we still had a bonus objective left so we took a roundabout route and cleared that out. Afterwards, the tank just continued clearing and most of the group (⁴⁄₅) decided to stick around and we ended up clearing the whole dungeon. It was one of those nice moments of “let’s just do this” where no words ended up being needed everyone just went with the flow. Was also really nice seeing that was possible and not blocked of by Blizzard for some obscure reason, such as is the case with the two different parts of Stratholme.

A second memorable encounter ended up being with a gnome warrior I came across who came to fill in for our tank who had to leave (incidentally, also a gnome warrior). I ended up doing a couple other runs with her and while most of our communication consisted of /cheering at each other at the end of runs once we’d queued up again, doing dungeons with her was a pleasure as she had the most well measured pulls of any tank I can remember through this leveling experience. She also had a good measure of the mobs in the encounter as a consequence, meaning random damage to other group members was minimised which makes for a nicer healing experience and a smoother run in general (DPS can have more confidence in their job when not worried about dying).

All in all, it’s been a good experience so far and I hope this holds up even once I get to the Draenor dungeons. More interesting to see is how raid healing feels, as that’s where the core of the game is for me. Hopefully all ends well and this character actually gets far enough to see that content!

So, I ended up playing World of Warcraft again after taking a break (again) about a month or two into the current expansion (Warlords of Draenor). I had decided to take the break because I didn’t have anything to do that interested me at the time and ended up returning because I got the inspiration to start leveling some more classes to see if I could find something that I could see myself playing a bit more.

The first (and only so far) class I’ve started leveling up so far is a mage and it’s been quite fun so far. I’ve ended up getting to level 92, however with the leveling motivation & speed slowing significantly since hitting Warlord’s content. I find this quite interesting, as before I had rated Warlord’s as probably the best leveling experience so far, being so focused on story. This may however be its downfall, as I’ve already played two characters through the story, doing so another time with the very rigid quest layout isn’t overly motivating at this time.

Still, I would like to get the mage to 100 before I decied what class to level next, though I’m having some difficulty deciding what that class should be. I have some interest in leveling another pure DPS class, probably a warlock, however I’m already struggling to handle the instance queue times on the mage when I do decide to do them, so I don’t think I could handle it again. I might end up leveling another tank, though that runs into the problem of difficulties with getting back into raiding which is my main interest with the game, despite my current obsession with leveling.

The final option would be to level another healer, which is where I’m leaning currently, though I’m having a hard time choosing which class. I’ve grown somewhat disillusioned with my current main, a Holy priest, primarily because the healing style has changed so much from the one I enjoyed. I might just end up trying Disc, though having been a Holy player for so long & it being what made my truly enjoy the game back in the day, I’m having a somewhat hard time “betraying” “my” spec. The other alternatives are probably either a shaman or a monk, both with some drawbacks however (can’t be a Night Elf shaman, not sure I like the extra resource in Chi with the monk).

Still though with the healers, I’m not sure how well I would like the modern very spammy feeling healing style, though that was certainly applicable to the classes I’m considering at the time I most enjoyed priest healing (though admittedly monks didn’t exist yet). So all in all, I’m still in search for what would be my current best fit within the game, if there even is one that’s good enough for me to continue playing once I start reaching raiding again. Though then the challenge of finding a guild I would like to raid with begins, which might prove somewhat difficult.