Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Wild & Dead

   SO here is my special Project....I have done a podcast. Me and one other, Wildwynd, have started our own podcast about WOW and gamer interests. We call it the Wild & Dead Podcast. You can find it on iTunes and on the webpage that I have listed in the Podcast section of this website.
     I enjoyed making the podcast. Although I can say I was a little nervous about it. I know that this first episode was not the perfect, but I think we did alright. I do think that we could use some tips and constructive criticism. I also would like to invite any other podcasters that may read this to give us any tips they may have for us to help us make a better product.
      We would also like to have any podcast send us any bumpers or adds that we can to our podcast to promote their podcasts.
       So please give us a listen and tell us what you think. You can leave comments here or at the website or iTunes. Thank you all.
      Tune in next time for what next I may talk about.

Weekly Character Update

     Sorry about getting this out late. Today will have two Blogs. This one and one more. The second one I will put out this afternoon.

Airholen the Explorer
      So, the Quest for Gear continues. Tortos refuses to give me my boots or bow. I now have 6 Titan Runestones, so I am half way to completing this part of the quest and one more step closer to getting the 600 cloak. The Friendship efforts with the Tillers is still in progress. The last four are still being worked on. Otherwise their is no knew things to report.

Grell
      So Grell is now level 50. He is a Vice Admiral. The Ha'akona Advanced Warbird is his ship of choice. I have not completed the story line yet, I am currently on the Dominion portion. So I still need to progress through it all.

SO tune in later this afternoon where I will announce to you my special project.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Weekly Character Update

    Airholen the Explorer
                 So Airholen finally is moving along the Legendary Quest. I have the Capacitive Meta Gem in my hat now. Now I just need to collect the 12 Titan Runestone. Which only drop on the last six bosses in Throne of Thunder. I also still need to get the Bow and Boots from Tortos. He is in the second wing of Throne of Thunder. So I have three wings of LFR to do to collect the stuff for the gearing and quest completions. Airholen has pretty much stopped farming and doing anything else but LFR's Scenarios and Dungeons to get Valor to upgrade my current gear. That and doing the cooking needed to get Best friends with all of the Tillers. Currently have only 4 guys left to make happy.

     Grell
                  Grell has made it to SubAdmiral and has picked up the Ha'apax Advanced Warbird. It's nice to have and hopefully I will get the rest of the missions done by the 21st so that I can get the unique gear that the later missions provided at one time. This goes away again on the 21st. I have completed all of the Romulan specific missions and have now started on the shared storyline. I got the Ophidian Cane from the Devidians, and the Reman Science Officer. Currently working on the DS9 missions to get the Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer and the Orb from the Bajoran Prophets. After that comes the Borg missions and then the Breen and finally the Undine missions. Hopefully I can get through all of them in the 3 or so days I have left.

       All other characters are on hold at this time because I have had less time than usual for gaming. I have special little project in progress and once it is completed I will announce it here and on Twitter.

        Tune in next time to see what I have to say next!

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The Future of Hunting in Azeroth

    So the new PTR has been announced. And the Hotfixes were announced. And Hunters all across Azeroth have cried tears of pain and misery. And the nerfs hurt PVE and PVP and all of the specs. And here are my reason's why.
    Stampede lost all of it's utility. All of the special pet abilities will not work. So what does Stampede do now? Not much, the dps output will be on par with Dire Beast but will not give you any focus and has a long cooldown. Dire Beast beats it out hands down. And with Arcane getting a buff, it makes it better for a spamming button than Kill Command. So the level 87 ability becomes of little value and dropped off the active bar.
     Kill Command won't get used, due to these changes, except when you are raiding. It actually does less dps than Arcane Shot. It really doesn't make any sense to use it.
     My point is last night I ran Tortos and sucked. Last week I had an average of about 95k DPS. This week, I am using a significantly better weapon and averaged only about 76K DPS. An almost 20K drop in my output. And I should have gotten better since I went from the sha touched weapon to an iLevel 502 weapon. But, instead, I plummeted to bottom of the DPS pile.
      All of these changes came because PVPers complained about how the BM Hunter was considered OP. These changes gutted BM's from PVE and PVP. To the point that I feel the return of the hatred that was handed out to Hunters during Wrath. And hunters will be dropped from raids and dungeons and picked on just because that the Hunter can't push the DPS up enough from these nerfs.
      End result is that Hunters are getting nerfed out of the game. Everything that makes Beast Masters unique has been taken from them and now been relegated to being, at best, the bootlickers of all the other classes looking for the table scraps that will get throwned to us for pities sake.
      Now, I am not going to abandoned WOW or my Main, but it does mean that my enjoyment of the game is going to seriously suffer and I will not be able to bring myself to go back in and play my alts. It also going to generate more hurt feelings on the part of Hunters in LFR and drive hunters from LFR and from most Raids in general. If things don't change, Hunters will become a rare beast of laughable quality on Azeroth.

    Now, I know I am talking about my favorite class. If you have points you wish to pick out to me, drop me a comment. I welcome any all discussion about this. Tune in next time to see what I have to say next.
   

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Weekly Character Update

     So this week was interesting for my WOW and STO characters.

Airholen the Explorer
         So, I ran the Last Stand of the Zandalari raid. The last boss is the Council of Elders. This council I need to get the Bad JuJu trinket. I got it on the bonus roll. I also got my last Secret of the Empire. I went on to the next stage, which was to do a solo scenario to make some weapon. After dieing multiple times I finally killed that final sha and the Lightening Lance is made. So now I have to stick it into Nalak to temper it. I have already did Nalak this week so hopefully, after today's reset,  I will get a chance to go temper this lance and finish up the legendary quest for the epic meta gem. I also ran the LFR against Tortos and picked up Miracoran, the Vehement Chord bow from the normal drop. The bonus roll gave only gold. So now All I need is the boots and Bow to Drop from Tortos for me to be at best in Slot according to AMR. So LFR is only Tortos for me. I would love to to get those pieces this week and end my gear quest for Airholen and finally allow me to level Asmodea.

Asmodea
          All of my time has been dedicated to gearing Airholen or playing my STO Romulan Character level through the special events. So no time for her at all.

Airholen of Baldur's Gate
          Doing the professions things through the gateway only. No time otherwise.

Zombee, Danic and Sisteric
          Not done anything with these guys. They are sitting around while I level the Romulan character.

Grell
          So I have been running him hard. Ranked up from Centurion, Subcommander to Commander now. Picked up new ships, a Mogai Heavy Warbird, D'deridex Warbird Battle Cruiser, Tiercel Shuttle, and Kestrel Runabout. I also have picked up more BOF's. I now have 3 rare quality officers and the rest are uncommon. Except for Tovan Khev who is very rare quality. I also have my max 8 BOF's so if I get a new officer it will be to replace a guy that I have now. I also have started the questline that will get me the purple Reman science officer, and I have till the 21st to get Grell through all of the joined storylines to get the special rewards from those questlines. Once I have done that, I will be back to trying to get all of my officer's visited and leveled for the various rep systems that exist.

Tune in next time to see what I have to say next.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Flexing the Raid Muscle and other fun News

           So, Flex Raiding was announced. Been listening to various podcasts and their take on it. Al I can say is that I see their points, but I am not for this options.
           Flex Raiding is supposed to be geared for the Friends and Family guild crowd. In this it falls flat. Flex covers groups from 10 to 25 in size. It's reward is lower than 10 man and better than LFR. If you can get 10 toons together, why would you run flex? You get better gear out of 10 man. And if this is supposed to make it easier to raid, well it fails in that you still need 10 toons. Normal is all you need. And everyone keeps mentioning the scheduling of raiding, but if you really think about it, there is no mechanic BUILT into the game that requires you schedule your raid nights. So flex raiding isn't removing that issue either. SO what is flex doing? Only thing I see it doing is allowing people that can form groups larger than 10, but less than 25, to go do something. But as to their stated goal of catering to the mid range guilds, they failed horribly. This doesn't even help the small guilds at all. The guilds that can't form 10 man groups still have no help. The low Pop servers and unbalanced server get no help from this too. In the end, it's a waste of effort for what will be little gain and additional headaches for them as hardcore raiders use this as just another step in their progression raiding and will cause burnout to occur earlier.
             Now if they took this technology and created content that filled the void between 5 man heroic dungeons and 10 man normals that allowed for flexible numbers would be of service to more people. Especially if this gear was on par with LFR. It would get the social aspect back into the game. It sets people up for gear for 10 man's. And still leaves LFR as a viable option to gear up and see end game content.
              On other news, Hunters are going to get nerfs Wednesday, maybe. Why? Hunters, especially Beast Masters finally are considered as something worth having. We aren't the laughing stock any more. But the coming nerfs that WOW has stated hurt a bit. Pulling pet abilities from Stampede will remove the effectiveness of that ability, I use it in PVE to keep me alive. Removing the abilites so that they only do auto attacks will remove the survival options from the ability and that it's composition will not matter. So no thought will be put into it's composition and solely becomes just another button to press in your rotation for a little more DPS. With a cool down of 5 minutes, this bonus appears rarely more than once in most fights, so in the end it's a minor boost at best. They said they would try to make it up by buffing Arcane Shot by 15%. SO by making our focus sink do more damage is a fix? Come on. Can't you find a better way to fix this issue. I think that most people are upset with hunters in PVP. So maybe just upping the cool down to 10 minutes, to remove from PVP, and then allowing it to be reset by Readiness. This still gives two runs at Stampede within 10 minutes.
               So tune in next time to find out what next I may talk about.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Death of a Dinosaur and other interesting thoughts

      So, last night, I hoped on Airholen the Explorer and harvested my farm. I didn't plant anything new since I was planting purely for Asmodea. Asmodea has been on the backburner for so long that the resources have built up. The Guild Bank is filling up to much. So now the farm will not be used while I try to get Airholen fully geared so that I can move on to Asmodea. Once I harvested, I went to the Panda Hub and got my Mogu Runes. Then I joined up with a PUG that was forming to go take on Oondasta.
       I have never faced Oondasta before so I took the chance. In fact, this group went to do Nalak, Sha and Galleon. I got gold, dino bones and one piece of pvp gear. I did get the Oondasta kill achievement. But that's it. In the end it was a waste of time because all I got was stuff I can't use and gold,
       This has gotten me to thinking about my WOW time. WOW is taking less and less of my game time. For a game that I have spent so much time on prior to MoP, why would this be happening? Simple answer, I don't feel like I am achieving anything. I spend weeks doing certain bosses in LFR for the gear to max me out to only get gold. The bad luck protection was enacted three weeks ago and so far I don't feel protected at all, my luck is unchanging. No weapon, no boots and no trinket. I haven't been able to stay current with the legendary quest because those stupid secrets drop so rarely that I have practically forgotten about them. Or the quest line.
       So I wondered how I got get more out of WOW for me. What would it take to make me want to play WOW again? I don't PVP. I don't play the Auction House. I gear up but I don't raid. SO LFR has to be my way of doing things. But LFR is set up to frustrate those that wish to get gear. SO what other options do I have? None. I am a casual solo player with no real content for me to do that gives me a sense of accomplishment, reward or fulfillment. Cata allowed me to Gear out my main and then I could go on my alts and level them up. My Main I felt good about feeling accomplished with it and would go on him just to bask in that sense of being complete, gear wise. In fact, once I had the gear maxed out, it allowed me to the go do other portions of the content , like dailies, achievement hunting and skill grinding. For me, I was even taking time to hunt down the pets I wanted to have for my hunter. Having that time available to play my other characters allowed me to see more of the content as I did different things. It was the trying of the stuff with different characters that was fun. So I need Blizzard to slow down the patch cycles, speed up the gearing from lfr so that I can feel like I can take the time to see all of the content, Right now, I can't completely gear up before the next patch. I can't get that sense of accomplishment  I can't feel like I have time to get one character completed before I try another. And this lack of control over my own destiny that RNG is inflicting upon me has removed my enthusiasm from playing the game. And has driven me to play other MMO's so that I can feel like I am getting some where. And feel like I am making progress. WOW needs to return to this to me. It needs to give me a way to feel like I am accomplishing my goals. And I need to be in control of that effort. Not RNG.
        Am I off kilter? Let me know. I like to hear what people think about what I have to say. Good and Bad. Tune in next time to find out what I may talk about next.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Weekly Character Update

     Airholen the Explorer
             So got the pet from the Rebels in the Barrens. Farming the Golden Lotus stuff as much as possible. Ran all of the LFR's and got nothing but gold. Still need one more Secret of the Empire to advance the Legendary questline. So just mostly frustrated with the character progress in WOW this week. And it's not my fault. Stupid RNG.

     Asmodea
             So did nothing with her because Airholen is so dissappointing to me. Sorry Asmodea.

     Airholen of Baldur's Gate
             Continue running the professions through the Gateway. Otherwise he is taking a back seat to the STO Characters.

      Zombee, Danic and Sisteric
             Since there is a special event going on to rerun the old content and gain the special gear, Grell has been the focus of my STO efforts. These guys are just hanging out.

      Grell
              Made it to Level 14, Centurion. Got a new ship, Dhelen class warbird. New uniform and new bridge officers. He has allied with the Feds and progressing through the story line at a decent pace.


That's it for now. Tune in next time to find out what I have to say next.