Started off last night with my usual daily routine: run a few dailies in BfA, then it was off to earn some sweet easy conquest. I queued up for Comp Stomp and was soon in the Arathi Basin from Classic. Credit where due-- it was fun, running from flag to flag kicking virtual Horde butt. The NPCs were 'as smart as the average Alliance group', so take that as you will. It would send stealthed druids and rogues to try to sneak cap flags-- players with lower health would get dogpiled. I probably spent more time counterspelled than I do in real battlegrounds. Their mage would ice block when appropriate and more than once their DK death gripped me into smackdown range. We won handily and I'll try to run this again tonight prior to raid time.
Immediately afterwards, I flapped over to Nagrand in the Outlands to help out a guildie who was trying to solo the Ring of Blood. Never hurts to help!
I then queued up for an epic battleground and that sent me to Wintergrasp-- which since its debut as a Zone in WotLK has been refactored into a 45 minute "defend your castle" from the enemy. I'm not the type of person who gives up on a battleground, even when things look really bad, but this one. We held out until the 15 minutes remaining mark and we got hammered hard with siege engines breaking through our walls in several points and almost all of our team on the far end of the map farming kills instead of defending. Typical really.
And yet, we won. It was ridiculously intense, with the last 6 minutes holding off wave after wave of siege weapons bearing down on our last doorway. There are times I love being wrong.
Once out, I got a whisper from our GM-- hey, wanna go on a transmog run? "Sure!" In a few moments, we and 8 other dps were storming through 25-man mythic Tomb of Sargeras from the Legion expansion. Funny enough, we wiped on the next to the last boss-- about nine times. Turns out there are still some things from older expansions you need more people and at least a healer for. Still, I came away with a nifty headpiece… until someone offered me 20k for it. Sold!
With a solid 90 minutes of playtime left, I queued up for the LFR in the hopes of getting a little more practice (even if it is on nerfed mechanics). While waiting for the queue, I went over to Mount Hyjal from Cataclysm and solo ran a Heroic 25 Firelands. Honestly, I forgot about my LFR queue. It popped JUST when the final boss, Ragnaros, was at 5%. Wow. Barely had time to loot before it was into BfA's raid. It was a short, painless experience that yielded no real good loot, but was pleasantly chaotic in that LFR "get 'em, Ray!" way.
As I logged out, I mused that my evening had unintentionally had me visiting nearly all of WoW's expansions in some fashion or another.
Can’t wait to see what the weekend brings!
07/25/19 - Myth Adventures
Wednesday nights are Mythical + dungeon runs. With everyone's desire to get better, gear we threw together teams to stop some mythics. By that I mean "the GM invited the raiders who were online to form up"-- which turned out to be just 4 of us but a tank outsourced from "The Booty Bay Explorers". Ok.. let's see how this goes.
After a bit of discussing, we decided to try the hardest key we had, which honestly wasn't that high level: Freehold (4). I flew over and in short order we summoned the rest of the party and dove in to the pirate-filled, parrot-dive-bombing, cluster that is Freehold. Time to dodge guano and catch a greased pig… quickly.
The thing about Mythics is there's a receptacle at the start of the dungeon for a keystone. Putting a key in it activates "hard mode". This resets the dungeon and starts a countdown. You have 30-something minutes to clear the whole dungeon. Not only the bosses, but also a set amount of trash as well (so no skipping everything, you filthy exploiter, you). Because clearing dungeons aren't stressful enough, right?
Our rent-a-tank? Total insanotank mode, which might be fine in many circumstances, but not here. All total, we took 12 deaths clearing the place due to massive overpulls, carrying mobs into narrow paths now covered with large patches of damaging floor, and such. Amazingly enough, I didn't account for any of the deaths with a LOT of well-timed blinking, ice blocks, and invisiblity.
You don't get boss loot-- only a piece or two when the dungeon is cleared. If you clear it in time, you get a higher level keystone. If you fail to beat the timer, but still clear the dungeon, you get a new keystone for a different dungeon at the same difficulty. If you bail on the dungeon, you get a replacement keystone for the same dungeon, but one rung lower.
Even with all the psychosis, we cleared the dungeon with over 9 minutes to spare. It hindsight it probably helped that we pulled nearly half the trash in like 2 bad pulls.
After receiving my gear down grades and a keystone to call my very own, we decide to use it… and off we go to THE MOTHERLODE! (3)
This goblin-themed dungeon requires a lot of situational awareness and careful pulling. We had neither and we didn't have it in spades. By the second boss, the death count was off the charts. We called it and quit the dungeon. The team apologized for the ruined keystone, but I assured them it was perfectly fine (and it was). Based on scaling, I won't be getting any sort of gear upgrade until mythic 7 or 8 and I knew we wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to that with what we had to work with.
Tonight I have nothing planned aside from a little light PvP. This week is "Comp Stomp"-- play a classic 10v10 Arathi Basin battle ground against… AI-controlled players! OK! Featuring the same intelligence that pilot the NPC teams on the hated Island Expedition, this lets you live out your fantasy of what it must feel like being the Horde crushing the Alliance over and over and over again in real battlegrounds.
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