Off-topic, but …
RIFT is going free-to-play:
From here on out, if you want to talk to me (and I don’t see why you would), talk to me in-game, or don’t. I don’t really give a shit because I’m done with the Dope.
A flounce in a WoW thread? Never thought I’d see the day.
On female armor:
[quote=“Mister_Rik, post:764, topic:632256”]
On female armor:
[/QUOTE]Perfection.
I ran the introductory quest sequence (as Horde) on my main last night. Fun, somewhat frustrating in spots, and quite lucrative to a non-raider like me.
Lore spoilers, so I’ll spoiler-tag this.
The first scenario (break a Zandalari and Frostmane siege of Ironforge) was odd. And hard, coming into it cold. First, you’re playing the scenario as an Alliance member, so expect to be transmogged into a human equivalent if your race isn’t represented in the alliance. Second, this doesn’t look like a scenario you’re supposed to just power through. You get a special attack that I guess you’re really supposed to use. Otherwise, you get overwhelmed. I died at least three times. Other party members likewise. We actually beat the last boss by resurrection-zerging him. I really hope that’s not the design of the thing.
Interesting lore developments on the Alliance side from this part of the chain. Varian Wrynn makes an offer to the Council of the Three Hammers: the assistance of Stormwind forces to break the developing Ice Troll siege of Ironforge, in exchange for the greater participation of Ironforge forces in the inevitable war against the Horde. Surprisingly, the Bronzebeards and the Wildhammers decline, both fearing that the Dark Irons will take advantage of their absence from Ironforge to overthrow the Council and take over completely. However, the Dark Irons accept the offer. Moira cites a desire to demonstrate their loyalty to the Alliance as motivation. I’m skeptical. We shall see.
The next scenario (rescue a Horde excavation site and help them complete their research) was a lot easier. Not very controversial, and easier fights. The non-fighting objectives (collect crates of artifacts or something like that) were easy to do assuming you cleared a bit, and even if the party members choose to split up and cover the whole map to do it, no one should have much trouble killing the little packs of mobs guarding the things.
More interesting lore developments. For instance, we’ve seen Hellscream screwing all the non-Orc nations of the Horde except the Goblins. If you’re gonna have a Horde revolution, you have to have some participation from every Horde faction.
In this scenario. the excavation (in the middle of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, for crying out loud) is manned by Goblins under contract to find a buried source of Sha power. Well, they find it all right (with the assistance of the scenario party)… but the Kokrons short-pay the Goblins (the relevant quote is “The Warchief doesn’t compensate the dead.”)
The best way to make the goblins your enemy is to violate a contract and screw them out of their payoff.
The racism of Garrosh and the Kokrons really comes to the front, too. Garrosh’s Horde is looking more and more like the Old Horde.
The other lore development is confirmation that the Mogu started out as Titanic constructs. (Well, maybe that was evident in raid content I’ve never seen.)
Anyway. Another step in the chain, IMHO.
After this, you get to do some quests to fend off a Kokron attack on Sen’jin village and then counterattack to capture Razor Hill. After that, you’re in the Battlefield Barrens grind. That was a lot of fun.
And a side quest from Chen Stormstout sends you back to Kunlai Summit, to help an old sage get up Mount Neverest. Trivial quest, and you get rewarded ilvl 503 epic boots. :eek: Felt a little like charity, but I’m not proud.
Cute lore payoff, though. Turns out the old sage is actually an apparition of Shaohao, the great Pandaren emperor. After he makes his grand appearance, he lectures you about the one Sha we haven’t seen yet: Pride, his downfall. He takes credit for calling down the mist to hide Pandaria; in his pride, he figured Pandaria was better off without the rest of the world, and they’d do just fine suppressing the other Sha we’ve already seen.
And then a plea to stop warring with each other, which he perceives as a battle from wounded pride as much as anything. Very preachy, but that’s probably how the rest of the Pandaria storyline will probably shape up.
A good fun evening. I can’t do it justice here.
I enjoyed them too. The only part I was confused about was that I thought I was supposed to get a title upon completion. I saw a bunch of the Alliance players getting the “Hordebreaker” title as they turned in the last quest, but I never got the Horde equivalent (Darkspear Champion or something similar) even though I did all the quests.
This expansion really makes me wish I had a max-level Hordie. I’m working on one, but he’s currently navigating the hell that is Outland.
Still waiting for Moira to backstab us. Or be backstabbed. That whole scenario just makes me think that every once in a while Blizzard goes ‘oh shit, we haven’t done anything with race lately, hurry, make some BS so we can pretend we love all the races!’. We’re up for a water raid tier soon, seeing as we had Firelands, Northrend was a giant ice raid, and Cata had air and earth themed raids. Plus people are still pissed about losing their Neptulon raid.
Also, if you’re working on a Test of Valor and had over 3000 VP before the requirements were nerfed from 6000 to 3000 in this patch, go and do something that rewards you more Valor. Wrathion seems not to want to talk to you if you don’t trigger a VP refresh.
I signed on with my Human DK yesterday evening and was able to complete the first two scenarios of the quest chain gnoitall describes. However, the third quest in the alliance chain appears to be bugged.
Basically for the third quest you’re tasked with operating a robot kitten via a console in order to steal 4 sets of documents from the docks in Durotar. However, even though the console had the little ‘spinning gears’ icon above it, no one could seem to figure out how to make it work. Clicking on it - either left or right mouse button - did absolutely nothing.
Several of us were standing around going “Can you make it work?” “Nope” “I can’t either”, etc. I finally gave up and logged out. Hopefully there will be a hotfix to correct this soon.
that came out during the second scenario:
[spoiler]The source of “mogu power” the Kokron have found is actually the imprisoned remnants of Y’shaarj the Old One. This ties the Sha, Y’shaarj, the mantids, and the mogu (as the footsoldiers of the Titans) all together.
It also explains, beyond mere bad temper, racism, or expansionism, the continual warfare between the mantid and the mogu: they were both cannon fodder for opposing sides of the Titan/Old Gods war[/spoiler]
Mogu and Mantid 5.3 blah blah spoilers:
[spoiler]I’m trying to give a shit about them in relation to the Old Gods and Titans, but I just can’t. This whole xpac just feels like another pointless layer of fantasy-style complexity so that Blizzard doesn’t have to deal with endgame. Can I get some resolution on the Sargeras and Azshara thing first? How about Sargeras going rogue? Do we need to throw another Old God layer on when we’ve had the Twilight Cult forever? We have an Old God on Kalimdor (C’thun), an Old God on Northrend (Yogg-Saron), a not-quite-known Old God (N’Zoth) and now an Old God on Pandaria. Could we just have had Y’shaarj on the Eastern Kingdoms?
Blizzard, is it too much to ask to reduce your plotlines and one-off characters? I feel like instead of getting one detailed, focused, well thought out story I’m getting 100 half-assed, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants plotlines.
[/spoiler]
Did you have problems with The Silmarillion? Layering on more complexity and uncovering old deep connections is exactly how Middle-Earth developed. I can’t fault Blizzard for following a winning High Fantasy model.
As it was presented, yes. The Silmarillion drove me nuts because we’d be in the middle of someone’s story, then switch to another race’s story and progress a few decades, then jump back to the first story where it left off so we were going back in time.
But your comparison does make sense. Warcraft III felt so much more like LotR, with a story you followed from start to finish, switching character focus periodically, whereas WoW is a bunch of stories cobbled together happening in so many different places and time periods.
I want to “powerlevel” (hah) my baby Alliance char (lvl 86 nelf mage) to 90 and see these quests from the Alliance side, but I’m afraid I’ll be completely wtfpwnd in the scenarios unless I luck into very strong party mates.
For instance, when I ran “The Dark Heart of Pandaria” on my main, the DK I random’ed with pulled over 100kdps, so I didn’t have to do too much during the final fight. It was pretty much “Pulling… ok, done.”
When running it with my spriest the next night, I ran it with other peoples alts as well (second night of the patch was apparently “alts night”) and no one pulled more than 50kps, so I actually got to see (and experience) some of the more painful aspects of that fight. If my new-minted 90 were running with a couple of other new-minted 90s, that would be guaranteed wipe city.
Darkspear Revolutionary. You should have gotten the achiev and the title (“Darkspear Revolutionary <charactername>”) after completing the entire quest chain through the initial “gather 15 of each” intro quest in “Battlefield Barrens”, plus doing the “Path of the Last Emperor” quest.
(Yeah, that “help the old guy up the mountain” quest that awards a welfare epic also counts towards this achievement. Maybe you hadn’t done it yet? After I completed that quest is when I got my achiev.)
And a clarification: you have to also complete the first instance of the weekly quest. In addition to the “turn in 15 of each” “Battlefield: Barrens” one-shot quest, you have to complete the first instance of the “turn in 150 of each” weekly version of “Battlefield: Barrens”.
Yep, just discovered that (just now!) I turned in the weekly quest and there was the title. Thanks!
Random tldr WoW story…
I quit raiding this week. Such a relief! I played from release through BC, raiding 16-20 hrs/wk for most of it, then quit WoW for 4 years. I started playing again just before MoP, and did not intend to raid beyond LFR and missed content tourism. I joined a totally casual guild with no raid team running.
Soon enough somebody started a 10man, 2 nights, 3 hours. Hey why not? That’s not much raiding, and I’ve done all the LFRs. Then guild leader passed the guild to somebody else who went a little bit harder, but he got more done. So hey, raid on! Second guild leader merges with another even more successful and serious guild for 25man runs, 3 nights, 4 hours. At that point I knew I was in too far. But the first night, we tore through half of ToT, then all but Lei Shen on the second night. So hey why not another two raids to finish, right? …
three weeks later…:smack::smack:
We wiped like 65 times on Lei Shen. On our last pull after four hours at it on Monday night, we finally got him. (and I scored a trinket on a roll!)
Meanwhile IRL this month … sleepy and grumpy half the time, eating dinner at the computer, hurry home and get ready to park it for hours. Man, FUCK raiding. SOO glad we scored that late kill or my stubborn ass would have been sucked into another week or more. Tuesday I logged in and explained the above to the raid leaders, who were cool with it. Stayed in the guild. Will probly let my subscription lapse in a month or so though. If I need to game that much, there are some pretty decent free(ish) options these days.
Obligatory link to another random WoW story I posted years ago.
Heh. Part of why I’ve never even been interested in raiding.
I’ve never minded raiding, but I’ve never been heavily focused on it either. I’ve never searched around looking for guilds focused on raiding or anything like that.
If I’m in the mood, I’ll click on the Raid Finder. If the wait’s not too bad (say, 10 minutes or less) I’ll wait for it, otherwise I usually leave the queue and go do something else.
That’s why I like the new 3-man scenarios. They’re fun, they usually don’t take too long to get into a group (or to run), and they’re pretty low-pressure.
That’s also why I don’t PvP either. I know my limits.