Beating Those L40s Blahs

Azshandra has been in that weird low-mid 40s zone for a while, where she's not really high enough level (or geared enough) to take on Uldaman or Zul Farrak, but too high to get anything meaningful out of Scarlet Monastery and Razorfen Downs.*

So, what's a Rogue to do?

Make some forays into The Hinterlands, and realize that you're really in over your head for most of the zone.

Felwood? Nah, I know better.

Feralas? Sure, but keep an eye on the levels, because they can spike pretty quickly. And hanging out with the Gordunni Ogres can be satisfying, although in Zone Chat the name "Gordunni Ogres" quickly morphed into the "Gonorrhea Ogres", and all manner of shenanigans broke out. (Sorry, no screenshots of that. I do have some scruples.)

Head into Dustwallow Marsh, where you're overpowered until suddenly you're underpowered? Okay, but keep an eye on your surroundings. And try not to get depressed about the creepy nature of the place, that simply screams "A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAST RULES HERE!"

Set your sights on Booty Bay where you discover that you're not really overpowered for the zone, but you really have to group up to tackle some of those Troll and Pirate mobs. They aren't elites, mind you, but that you'll end up with about 5-10 of them swarming you before you could even say "What the hell happened?"

Yeah, let's do Stranglethorn Vale, because at least the greenery is mood lifting.

And we could do some fishing, I suppose. There's that Nat Pagle guy, who wants these fish from all over. So yeah, I could hang out in Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace, and Feralas, enjoy the coast, kill some Nagas and Trolls, and fish for those rares Nat wants.

***

But come on. That's not what I've really been doing.

I got a bunch of All Hallow's Eve candy, and I've been having fun shape shifting when the people out and about in the world aren't expecting it.

Like the Pirate's Costume:

Hey, I know that outfit!

Back in prehistory when I attended the University of Dayton, I used to go with friends to the big outdoors Halloween party in the Oregon District**. Being the stereotypical poor college student, my costume frequently consisted of using a white bedsheet as a makeshift toga. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it weren't for the temperature at those parties: 40F/4.5C. A wee bit chilly to be wearing just a bedsheet, some gym shorts, and shoes. My solution to that was to take a few swigs of double strength rum and try to just ignore the cold.

But what I couldn't ignore were the stares.

Yes, I got a lot of stares of the "are you nuts?" variety. Even though I was reasonably fit at the time, I got a lot of "aren't you cold?" questions from people who wore costumes more appropriate for the weather. However, I was a distant second in my group, because one of the women we went with wore a costume exactly like the WoW Pirate's Costume:

It's kind of hard to have a nice pose
when there's a slain Naga behind you.

The only difference was that she didn't have much of a bare midriff, but like the WoW version her outfit was completely skin tight. And believe me, in the cold weather you noticed.

With a wicked grin on her face, she exclaimed, "We're getting all the looks because you're almost naked, and I've left nothing to the imagination!"

***

But the WoW Pirate Costume wasn't the only thing I got. There was the ghost --which didn't last long enough for me to get a screenshot-- and there was this:

GIANT... ORANGE... AZSHANDRA!!

It's not everyday you get to look down on a Tauren. And for a reference on just how gigantic Az had gotten, here's the pre- and post- growth Azshandra:

Night Elves are tall already....

But now Humans don't even reach
Az's navel.

Maybe I should have gone and danced on the Stormwind mailbox....

***

I still have a bunch of those candies left, so maybe I'll pull them out when people aren't expecting it. Like, say, January.

In the meantime, I'll be back to my normal self, doing some questing and fishing, and lending a hand when I happen to be in the area:

Dropping in to help out the
Night Watch in Duskwood.

*And, truth be told, I'm kind of sick of SM. Not Gnomeregan-level sick, but still tired of the tactical nature of SM. "Everybody over here, I'll pull them over, we'll DPS them down, and do the next pack." It's a marvel of tactical design, but when you're about halfway through you start to wonder just how much longer you've got until the end. And when you realize most of the gear isn't Leather....

**Yes, THAT Oregon District. And yes, I know exactly where the shooting happened.

Letting My Fear Flag Fly

The Warlock Follies continue unabated, starring me as a Warlock who'd prefer to be in a good match of Warsong Gulch right about now.

I experimented with just Fearing packs while attempting to use the Voidwalker to tank the one that I've left behind, and I've had mixed results. About 3/4 of the time the baddies that I cast Fear on ran right into another pack, and I went from having 2-3 enemies at at time to 5-7. That's pretty much in line with what I expected, particularly given the closed-in nature of some of these groups.

Given these results, maybe going Destruction is an option to try to quickly AoE down mobs. I'll have to think about that, although I'd prefer to run Battlegrounds with the Lock than, say, instances.

***

Speaking of instances, I've run Deadmines twice on Dominius. First time, things went fairly well up until the Healer dropped group. Second time, not so much.

Since I hadn't run any instances on Adelwulf back in the day, my Warlock experiences in an instance were limited to the effect that Warlocks have on group dynamics. Just like any player, good players enhance the effect of the group and do a great job of DPS-ing down mobs and bosses. But bad players have a greater effect than, say, your average DPS.

While a Mage, Rogue, or Druid can pull mobs like crazy if they don't watch their threat, the presence of the Demon companion adds a level of complexity that only the Hunter shares. I can't count the number of times over the years that I've experienced a wipe caused by a Hunter's pet or a Demon was set to "Aggressive" in an instance. And then when you factor in the Warlock's Howl of Terror or Fear abilities, well....

Yeah, I'm not the greatest fan of poorly played Warlocks in instances.*

So... Let's talk about some things that I need to improve on.

***

In the first Deadmines run, almost as soon as we started, the Healer started giving the Warrior tank grief.

First, about tank's lack of a shield. Second, about how he wasn't going to bail the tank out if he wasn't keeping up sufficient rage. And after a few pulls, he started grumbling about the tank's pulling technique.

These grumblings weren't whispers to the group leader (me**), but said out loud in party chat. I've been in runs where I get whispers from someone complaining about another person in the group, but nothing quite like this.

Nevertheless, we kept going and downed the first boss. I'd made a point of the following rotation when fighting, and it seemed to work well enough: DoT the pack, do a Life Tap to boost my mana, Drain Health to add some health back, then repeat the cycle. Instead of a Voidwalker, I opted for the Imp and kept him on Passive until I told him to attack specific targets. This is the "prior experience with Warlocks" working here.

Once that first boss was downed, we started forward, and I realized the Healer remained in place.

I called out for the group to hold up a sec, steeled myself for another set of complaints, and asked the Healer what was up.

He said nothing.

And then he DCed.

"Really?" the tank asked. "Was I doing that bad a job?"

"No," I replied. "You were holding threat well enough, and you weren't running around like crazy trying to pull the entire area."

I took stock of the situation, and started putting out requests in LFG, LookingForGroup, and in the instance chat for a replacement healer.

No dice.

We eventually had to drop group, because without a healer we weren't going to proceed.

***

The second Deadmines run was, well, different.

Unlike the previous run, I was struggling to keep up with everybody. Not as in running with everyone, but trying to keep the DoTs up and whatnot. I'd also run out of Soul Shards prior to the run, so I was trying to kill as many Defias in Moonbrook as I could to obtain them, make Cookies, and distribute them to the group I was putting together. (Again.) By the time the group was ready, I had even managed to get a Soulstone together, so I figured that if I needed extra shards, I could suck them out of mobs we'd run into.

But still, it felt like I wasn't pulling my weight in the fights, as I was at that level (L18) where you get boosts to some of your other abilities, but not a new ranking in the DoT capabilities. Being specced as Affliction, DoTs were kind of my thing. And not being L20, that meant I didn't have an AoE I could use in an emergency.*** Even beyond that, I felt I was missing something that I couldn't place my finger on.

At the same time, the Mage began running ahead, exclaiming "Look, I'm a tank!!" and aggroing the next mob, forcing the Druid tank to catch up and pull aggro back to keep the Mage from getting plastered.

Oh, this isn't going to end well, I thought.

Two bosses down, we headed into the Foundry, working our way down the ramp. This is the locale where those remote control units the Goblin Engineers drop can wreak havoc. At the base of the ramp, the Druid pulled, and we had another three enemy mob to deal with.

Then all hell broke loose.

I was busy dropping DoTs and when I focused on the main screen again****, we didn't have a mob of 3, but 8-10.

"WTF!" the tank called.

"Shit!"

"Ow!"

We wiped.

We all appeared back at the graveyard, and the tank asked me "Did you use ss back there?"

For a brief second, my mind went blank. Was he accusing me of pulling all those extra mobs? "It wasn't me," I responded. "I only hit the mob you pulled."

"..."

"And," I continued, "I keep the Imp on a tight leash so this sort of thing doesn't happen."

"... I meant soulstone."

Oh crap. I completely forgot to set the Soulstone on the Healer.

"OH," I finally replied. "I thought you were accusing me of aggroing the entire group back there. No, I forgot. Sorry about that."

We got back into the Deadmines and I made a point of creating a Soulstone and tagging the Healer with it, and then letting the tank know I did that.

Or I thought I set it up, until I realized that something wasn't right again, but I didn't have time to find out what it was because everybody was running forward.

Gah.

We finished the Foundry, and then the DPS Pally dinged. He then surged to the front, exclaiming "I'm the tank now!"


Not again.

This is how it went through the instance, up until we got to the ship. We fought through Smite, went up the ramp, turned right, and then the Pally jumped up onto the Wheel. Everybody else followed, except for me, because the mob he'd aggroed zeroed in on me as I was in the back, and as I was surrounded I couldn't do anything even if I ran.

The Healer jumped down to rez me, while the Pally tank was saying, "Hey, I thought you guys were skilled."

Given that in the number of times I've run Deadmines --both pre- and post-Cata-- I think I've only jumped onto the wheel as a viable strategy to bypass mobs maybe 2-3 times. And this was definitely the first time since roughly 2013 or so.

But still, it was incredibly humiliating, first forgetting to Soulstone, and now not remembering the wheel.

Ah, but things weren't done.

While I was trying to climb on the Wheel after I'd been rezzed, I aggroed that same damn pack again and jumped off the platform into the water to escape them, figuring that I'd lose them after jumping down.

Well, that didn't work, as the pack came down and zapped me from behind.

"You'd better go rez him," the Pally tank said to the (former) Druid Tank, who came down and rezzed me.

"You should have died up here so we could rez you from here."

"Right," I replied, just focusing on finishing this damn thing and being done with it.

Even if I'd have managed to get up on the Wheel that first time, it wouldn't have saved us any extra time as we still had to fight the same mobs because the Pally tank got cute and ran around, picking them up anyway for no reason other than "just because".

The rest of the instance proceeded without incident, but it wasn't until afterward that I realized that I hadn't actually clicked on the Healer before setting the Soulstone, so it was actually set to me. But since we didn't lose the Healer, I was actually spared that further humiliation.

***

About the best thing that came out of those two runs was that the Rogue in the second Deadmines run, who'd remained pretty much silent the entire run, whispered me at the end that he was going to be doing some dueling and asked if I wanted to come. I told him no thanks, as I had to get going to bed. While that was technically correct, I just wanted to log off and not think about Warlocks, Soulstones, and the Deadmines for a while.

For a person who'd actually played a Warlock before, I felt woefully unprepared for being in an instance as a Warlock. While I knew a lot about what not to do, what I should do was where I was lacking. Rotations are one thing, since you can figure out a mana efficient way of inflicting damage while being out in the field, but forgetting how to do a Soulstone? That's pretty basic --and critical-- stuff.

And the activity a Warlock has to balance is insanely high compared to a Rogue or Mage. Managing the demon, making sure that it is actually doing damage to the right toon, and keeping all the DoTs going means that a Lock's instance activity is actually harder than in the average Battleground, where the Lock is looking more to lay crowd control via Fear nearly as much as DoTs and AoEs. In a BG, a Lock can let their Demon just go do their thing with minimal supervision, but in an instance I was tempted more than once to simply dismiss that Imp so I could focus on the rest of what was going on.

I realize that this was good for me in the long run, as I needed this experience if I'm going to level Dominius up to L60. Better to learn these lessons now rather than at, say, L35-40. I'm not going to lie and say it was fun, however. It wasn't.





*And that's coming from a player who --the past several years, at least-- prefers to play Rogues. My brethren don't make my job any easier, as poorly played Rogues will forget that what they do in an instance affects the entire group, so if you get cute and try to sneak past mobs --accidentally aggroing them-- they all come after your companions if you decide to use Vanish to escape.

**I'm not kidding when I say that I frequently get assigned the job of pulling a group together. And if you knew me in real life, you'd laugh because I'm a big introvert.

***The first Warlock AoE is Rain of Fire, learned at L20.

****I was cycling through the entire pack, making sure I had DoTs up on each Goblin, so I was focusing on the enemy target icon and making sure the right DoTs were present.

One of These Days....

...I'd love to get together a Fire Mage and Destro Warlock only guild, and name it "Fear the Burn".

If a Troll-only Horde guild or an all-Trooper SWTOR guild can be created, then why not this?

Hey, if you see us in a PUG, you know what you're getting....

Lessons in Being Facerolled 101

Roll up a Lock, they said.

It'll be fun, they said.

Hey, you've got a built-in tank, they said.

It'll be facerolling, they said.

Such was my state of mind after puttering around a bit in Redridge the other night.

Unlike a Hunter, however, a Warlock is still a cloth armor wearer, and that does have an impact. Additionally, after questing in Westfall and Elwynn, my cloth wearing gear isn't all that Warlock friendly.* I've heard it said that Westfall and Elwynn are great zones for Rogues, and I believe it. Unlike Darkshore, a lot of the random drops that I've picked up are rogue friendly, and Deadmines itself is famous for having some good rogue gear there.

I was about to perform the Wetlands Fun Run and relocate to Darkshore when I figured that I should at least try Redridge Mountains and see what happens. Besides, getting to L20-22 means that he Wetlands should be easier than at, say, L18.**

So off to Redridge I went, to kill gnolls, Orcs, and spiders.

Or rather, to be killed by them.

Spiders aren't so much of a problem, since you can pick them off one by one, but Orcs and Gnolls love to congregate in packs around campfires, so the good ol' Voidwalker would have to stay upright while having 2 or 3 enemies wailing on them at once.

And, I discovered, the DOTs don't DPS down enemies fast enough to compensate for my liberal usage of Health Funnel, trying to keep my Voidwalker upright, and the corresponding loss of mana.

And using direct attacks such as Drain Soul and Shadow Bolt take what seems like forever to work.

So I became used to the corpse run back to Gnoll areas while I debated what to do.

Grouping is the most obvious answer, but when there isn't a group around (at, say, 5 AM), then you just have to pick off the Gnolls around the edges. And hope that when the Gnoll tries to run, they die quickly enough that they don't aggro another pack of Gnolls.

Oh, and one critical thing: run.

Run a lot, and use the Voidwalker's Sacrifice ability as much as possible.

This is the old WoW I remember, trying to level as a Clothie in early Wrath, not really knowing what I was doing, and deciding that running was a very viable option.

Do I mind? Well... It's not facerolling by any stretch of the imagination, but no, I don't mind. I just have to tailor my expectations to match reality.

And besides, I'll remember those Gnolls, when I need some fresh souls....




*When I've grouped, I've frequently lost the rolls on caster gear. I see my D&D rolling capabilities followed me to WoW Classic.

**I did make Wetlands Fun Run at L18 after all, and in spite of being chased by a Dragonmaw Orc who came from over the hills and chased me and my Voidwalker until I detonated the Voidwalker, giving me enough extra time to escape.

Happy All Hallow's Eve from PC

On the ship to Theramore.

"Greetings, fellow women!!

I too am woman!!

Let us speak of woman things, as I wish to do so!!" 

::long pause::

"I hear that Theramore is ruled by a woman! Do you find this empowering?" 


(EtA: For the record, this was not a planned shot. It just simply happened. And the woman dressed up like Whitemane was busy crafting, so I was lucky enough to get the screencap in between her crafting.)

When Rip Van Winkle Wakes Up....

Given that I game on an old Ivy Bridge Intel machine, a lot of modern PC tech* doesn't really register as how great of an improvement it really is. After all, when the graphics card died on the machine 3 years ago, I replaced it with what was then a fair-to-middling Raedeon RX470 card and got a decent boost in performance for a relatively cheap cost. But given that a lot of throughput on video games requires both a decent internet connection** and a decent processor/motherboard, I've forgotten just how much in some games the hard drive itself matters.

Typically hard drives have the greatest impact in loading times for a zone/mission/whatever, and once the locale is loaded it's all dependent on the processor/motherboard, the RAM, and the graphics card. A SSD speeds up those loading times tremendously, particularly if you've been gaming with a slower 5400 rpm mechanical drive. Still, some games have started putting SSDs in the "recommended specs" listings.

Such as WoW Classic.

From battle.net.
When the hell did this happen?

 But you know, this makes perfect sense to me.

When you're out in the game world, the game is constantly polling and loading graphics into memory. Sure, there's the network connection that lets the game know what the NPCs and PCs are doing, but there's also the background. And that has to be seamless.

In some games, such s SWTOR and LOTRO, I've noticed that loading times of graphics from the hard drive can have a huge impact on playability. If you play SWTOR on Alderaan and you take a flightpoint from one locale to another, you can watch the trees try to load quickly enough to keep up with the taxi. And frequently failing to keep up. In LOTRO, go to Bree and watch the game get overwhelmed with all of the activity + loading all the graphics*** for one of the most popular zones in the game.

Other MMOs, such as GW2 and ArcheAge, suffer to a lesser degree as it seems to only hit hard in areas of high populations, such as Lions Arch (GW2). (Insert random joke about how ArcheAge is so empty, there are no high populations, I suppose.) In ArcheAge, however, I've seen the greatest impact in the loading screens of the game itself. It frequently takes forever for the toon you're selecting to load draws on screen, and I'm frequently left scratching my head why this is the case when even Black Desert Online doesn't have that issue.

All of these experiences with MMOs have led me to believe that it's the mechanical drive itself that is the bottleneck on my machine. In older games in particular, my PC ought to be able to handle these MMOs with aplomb; the games don't stress the system quite as much as other games do, and I only play on 1080 resolution, not 1440 or 4k, so this machine ought to be "good enough". But with an old Seagate Barracuda as the main drive (and a recently added WD Black to move a lot of data and seldom used games to), I believe that an SSD would see huge improvements to the gameplay itself.

Blizz just happened to express those ideas to me first.****

***

I experienced the speeding up of loading times when I replaced the first two mini-Reds' mechanical drives on their laptops with SSDs. Admittedly I was putting those SSDs on 4 and 3 year old "okay but nothing to write home about" laptops, so the speed boost gave them a new lease on life. But it wasn't until my work laptop had its mechanical drive replaced that I noticed in daily use how much of an impact this drive has.

That daily use pretty much opened my eyes to the reality that yeah, SSDs do have a pretty big impact, and yeah, that'll show up in gaming.

Does that mean I'll replace the aging Barracuda with an SSD? Yes, but not immediately. (Budgets, you know.) But until then, I'm sure I'll survive. WoW Classic is playing better for me than it did when I played WoW in Mists, but that's also because I wasn't on the RX470 at the time. Did that card make a difference? Well, let me put it this way: I can now see the grasses waving as I run through them in WoW.




*Basically, anything newer than five years old, tech wise. The machine we have was state of the art back in 2012, if that's any reference.

**At least a connection that wouldn't get hogged by someone streaming on the same line. I can't tell you the number of times the oldest two mini-Reds would holler about the lag when their sister was doing homework with earbuds on, listening to videos on YouTube, until I finally got our home network upgraded to 20:2 mpbs.

***Particularly the high res graphics.

****Not to say that there aren't a lot of other newer games that have SSDs listed on the recommended specs, but I frequently don't play newer games --unless they're MMOs, I suppose-- so I never bother reading those games' specs. I think the most recent game I would have been potentially interested in playing would have been Anthem, but that proved to be such as disaster that I'm glad I waited until the "launch shakedown" was over to consider buying the game.

A Bottle of Pinot Noir, Please

One of the quirkier things you find around some MMOs are the shops that the average player doesn't use for buying things.

Of course, I could be talking about the armor vendor out in a mid to high level zone that only sells basic white gear, but my belief is that those are present just so that people can sell trash that they acquired out in the field without it looking too blatantly obvious.

No, what I mean are places like this:

Technically there is a quest for this place,
but it's a quest to get a free bottle of wine.

A Wine Merchant.

Believe me, I'd be in line to buy a bottle in real life, but the average MMO player doesn't really care about a Wine Merchant's shop in game. In modern game design, spaces like this would only exist simply for use at some point during the story, and not strictly for ambience. For example, I went hunting for something similar in Tatooine on SWTOR, and I didn't have much luck finding a shop strictly there for flavor's sake. There are the profession trainers, the class trainers, the vendors for said professions, the other standard vendors, and the cantina, but there isn't a shop just for something that doesn't directly affect the game in some manner.

For me, however, this is what helps to make some of these older MMOs come alive.

Maybe nobody frequents these places in a regular server, but for someone interested in Role Playing, these places fill out a livable world. I can easily see a player purchasing some wines at this place to enjoy an afternoon in a nice park in Stormwind, or even RP-ing by purchasing a case's worth of wine and making the trip to Astranaar to sell later. It's not a matter of profit and loss, but a matter of inhabiting another space for a while.

Maybe a little cheese to go with your
wine? I know where the oldest
mini-Red would be hanging out...

Or, until Pet Battles came along, non-combat pet collecting in WoW was very much a niche hobby.* You'd find a rare whelp out in the field as a loot drop, and you could have a companion while questing. Or you could visit the cockroach vendor in The Undercity or the Crazy Cat Lady outside Stormwind, and you could have a new friend who'd follow you around. The few times I hung around an RP server, having a pet was a great conversation starter.

It does seem that post 2009 or 2010, a lot of MMO devs stopped putting superfluous stores and vendors in their games. I was able to find some in LOTRO, but to surprise there as it is well known for it's RP-esque community, but very little in SWTOR and ESO. The lone exception of that era's MMOs is Guild Wars 2, which does have vendors and NPCs all over the place around the big cities, such as Lion's Arch.

Sure, he's a "Provisioner", but what you're not
seeing are all the other vendors surrounding
the square. He's kind of superfluous.

I can understand the desire to slim down interactive NPCs and just use the background graphics to fill in the blanks, but when you create this large space without NPCs to see or interact with, it just looks embarrassingly empty.**

Perhaps the rise of WoW Classic will also bring about an interest in these little quirky places that help to make a world out of a game.




*I used to collect pets on Quintalan back in the day, but the advent of Pet Battles kind of ruined it for me. Sure, there was the WoW Pokemon aspect to it that I didn't like very much, but it also meant that I couldn't simply collect pets just to collect them. If I'd have one out, people would want to challenge me to a Pet Battle, and that defeated the purpose the simple enjoyment of having a pet.

**I'm looking at you, Silvermoon City. I even wrote about this phenomenon back in... 2012??!! Yikes.