Friday and Saturday was rife with disappointment. I gritted my teeth and finished the other BC Heroics (another trip to Arcratraz, plus the ones where there's 18 rifts to seal and the one with a bunch of orcs that isn't Hellfire Ramparts. God, I suck at remembering trivial things.) During all of this the only gear I won were pieces that would replace Azurite pieces, so 100% useless. But at the end, I got my Uldir loot chest… and get a crappy trinket significantly worse than what I currently had. Literally ANY other piece of gear would have been better. Que sera, sera.
Tried and failed to finish the 3rd wing of LFR. The game put me against the final boss as a replacement for someone who noped out of the first wipe. an hour and 4 more wipes later, the whole thing fell apart. The boss requires several situational awareness and an ability to coordinate you typically don't get in a LFR group. The main mechanic is orbs have to be fed to "The thing in the wall" and once a number of them have been fed, boss becomes vulnerable and beams kill adds. The problem is these orbs spawn alternately up ramps on opposite sides of the map and put slowing debuffs on the carriers so that by 10 seconds they are permanently rooted. Orbs can be handed off relay-style, but not for any real distance, so coordination is necessary. Meanwhile everyone ELSE needs to be ignoring the boss and clearing the many, many adds that are trying to kill the orb carriers while dodging balls of hurt that create more adds.
I'm sure this can be done by some LFR raids, but not mine. The best we got the boss down to was 26%. A little disappointed, I looked for other things to do.
I made good on my self-made promise to collect war resources with my WQing, which led into having enough laying around that I could unlock the next level of class hall-style research, if I had the pre-requisites done. This would require visiting five different islands for "adventures"-- short three man race-the-other-team-to-collect-resources outdoor dungeons that replaced Scenarios this expansion. There's only three different islands in rotation on any given week and I had only done one this week.
I don't like the Island Adventures at all. In theory, it should be up my alley: small group pve that rewards efficiency. As always, hell is other people. The mobs are too densely populated to skirt around reliably, too beefy for a mage to take down solo, and if you die, you will respawn at the beginning of the map. I'll spare the details, but when I spawn in we have maybe 15% to reach our side's collection goal and the other team (3 NPCs with "better AI" to act like players) was trailing far behind. I can only assume the previous 3rd man dropped out because of the particularly toxic death knight who "could solo this entire %$#%ing island without scrub help". Umm…sorry for zoning in? I ride my horse over to where the action is, and start killing and mining. For reasons unknown, I get called a "useless trash can", which is without a doubt the most hilarious thing I have ever been called in an MMO. I can only assume Mr. D. Knight has some personal things going on in his life and I hope he's able to come to terms with them.
Finishing the map let me start researching how to get more "doubloons" from Island Adventures and I'm now stalled from doing more research because I need more followers. I think I need reputation for that, so it was off to do something else.
Because I hate myself, I queued up for an Epic Battleground (the 40 man deals are now separate from the others). As an aside, apparently "Strand of the Ancients" got pulled this expansion, so Epic BGs are either Isle of Conquest or Alterac Valley. In the years since I last played the metas for playing these have changed. The best way to win AV now, for example, is to ignore absolutely everything, not fight any players, burn the towers at the end and kill the boss. The best way to win Isle of Conquest remains "transfer to Horde".
Isle of conquest has been around for 10 years and Alliance can never figure out to win it, so when I get thrown into it for the third time, I settle in for the argument as to whether docks or hangars are more important (the correct answer is 'hangars') and wait to charge forward to get wiped at mid ("The middle"). What followed was 20 minutes of the most WTFery I have ever seen in a IoC map.
Alliance takes mid, hangars, AND docks. That alone would be enough for the record books. DESPITE THIS, our vehicle drivers don't have a clue (some things are a constant) and get wrecked by defenses. Meanwhile, the Horde snag docks long enough to get -1- catapult to our empty keep and send their masses in. By the time we have their gate down to 60%, they have completely blown ours down and have started attacking the boss. A bunch of us head back to defend and Horde wipes against our boss at 22%. We back and forth and hold the courtyard for what seems ages. We lost mid and the hangars, but somehow hold onto the docks. We get routed from our base and have to hurry back to stop another attack on our boss and wipe them at 60%. By this point, we finally get their wall down and take on the boss.
And we won. Absolutely amazing.
To celebrate, I decided to finish off the third zone (Drustvar) I'd put off since hitting 120. It's the "tightly packed creepy woods covering hills" biome I hate (Gilneas on meth) and "witch-themed" to the point of being ridiculous. The ending of the zone's plotline was so telegraphed, you'd think Blizzard owed Samuel Morse royalties. Fortunately, I was already about 2/3rds through with it and the quests were more tedium than time-consuming. Finishing it unlocked a bevy of achievements, but more importantly, a new quest line that picks up the overarching Kul Tiras plotline that disappeared without a trace shortly after the beginning of the expansion.
As a spoiler-free aside, I really don't like the idea of Jaina Proudmoore being a "damsel in distress". It doesn't fit at all with the character I know and love, but here I am, doing some rescuing. So far this questline is a lot of back-and-forth between far-flung places and the World's Most Inconveniently Mapped Castle-Fortress with some 5-man dungeon delving thrown in for good measure. Fortunately, these can be run on 'normal', which I'm delightfully overgeared for (i340 baby!), so I don't have to worry too much about getting one shot when encountering new boss mechanics. I'll be doing more of this tonight and I'm a little excited to see where it goes.
I'm REALLY hoping this is all part of an unrevealed "master plan" by Jaina.
The Thanksgiving Event, Pilgrim's Bounty, is ongoing but I didn't see where anything had changed in the past billion years so it's going to be mostly ignored. You can get a 10% hour long rep bonus for playing the eating mini-game but honestly, I think it's mostly more trouble than it's worth. Translation: I will, of course, be doing it before I do my nightly WQ gauntlet to maximize rep. This is because in order to unlock master mount speeds (the first step towards flight this expansion), the two remaining things I have to do is "get revered with all the new factions" and "finish the war campaign"… which also requires reputation.
Finished the evening by advancing the story plotline to the point where I have to do another dungeon and it was too late to get involved with that.
ps. It seems as though at this rate, I may actually finish the expansion on Strev before my friend starts it. When he gets to that point, I've got Anyth the Huntress @ 107 and Onsunshine the Druid @ 110 who can run content on level-- and best of all, I have no clue on how to play either character anymore! It's comedy that writes itself.
pps. I logged on Anyth and discovered that her guild "woke up" and added a number of people in the past 48 hours. Amazing. Also, they didn't have anything in their bank worth taking.
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