Goals for the Rest of Shadowlands

I'm typically much better organized when it comes to having particular goals to achieve pushing towards the end of an expansion, or in many cases, already being planned for going into the next expansion.  Having just returned to the game after a pretty long break, I am not quite at my normal levels of preparation and planning.  

I was going back through some old blog posts and realized that my "Returning to Warcraft" blog post from last month was pretty close to being on the 13th anniversary of starting this blog.  That's a fairly long period of time to do anything like this.  With Blaugust coming up, I plan to write about my blogging history in the early weeks of that.

In World of Warcraft, I've pretty much been keeping to the same routine, working on Zereth Mortis and Korthia dailies and doing the calling and Maw invasion thing if they are factions where I still need reputation.  I've also been running wings 2 and 3 of LFR each week, trying to get more tier set gear.  

The leveling on the demon hunter is progressing well.  He's still working his way through Bastion and is around level 53.  I haven't had too much play time during the last week because of various real-life issues including work and out-of-town swim meets, so that has limited progress fairly significantly.

I did jump back into FFXIV briefly and finish up the Stormblood portion of the Hildibrand quest line.  If you enjoy funny stupid stuff, I still say that is one of the greatest things that has ever been done in a video game.  It always makes me laugh and smile.

There's a group line dance number at the end of the quest chain.  What more needs to be said?

Cheers,

Joar

Finished the Bastion Covenant Campaign, and Druid to 60

 I finished up the Bastion covenant campaign on my death knight yesterday, marking the last of the covenant campaigns that I had not yet completed.  I honestly thought there'd be something more compelling than just an achievement as a reward for that., given how Shadowlands seems to hand out mounts and pets like they're candy.

I also bought the remaining mounts that I didn't have for Night Fae on my warlock.  I need to go back to the other quartermasters and see if there are other mounts that I can buy as well.  I'm guessing there are.

The Bastion campaign was a good story.  I have a hunch that it was probably pretty similar to the Maldraxxus campaign, but since I did that one at least 15 months ago and have no memory of it, I found the whole thing pretty entertaining.  

On the druid, I once again finished all four covenant zone Threads of Fate without having hit level 60, so this time I picked the Torghast Thread of Fate and did a relatively quick Torghast run.  That did manage to get me the rest of the way to level 60.  Time-wise, I'm not sure it was any faster than a couple of random dungeons or running around knocking out a few world quests, but it was generally fine.

Contrary to my previous statements, I've now picked up the next alt on the list, my Demon Hunter, and have started leveling him as well, to take advantage of the xp buff that was just released.  I didn't apparently advance him at all after BofA, so I was able to elect the storyline option for him.  We'll see how that works out versus the Threads of Fate approach.  Based on the 10-hour leveling time with my druid, with a 50% xp buff in place, it should take 6 hours and 40 minutes with the next toon, so the evaluation will be whether the storyline is faster or slower than that.  

I've also continued to run the relevant two wings of Sepulcher each week on Joar in an attempt to get my four-piece set bonus, but I've been completely unsuccessful at that so far.  Beyond that, I'm just doing dailies and callings to get the last four reputations to exalted that aren't already complete - Maldraxxus, Revendreth, Korthia, and Zereth Mortis.  The first two are relatively close.  Death's Advance is about halfway into Revered and the Enlightened are about to ding Revered, so I'm pretty close in general.

That is about it for this week's update.

Cheers,

Joar

Updated Thoughts on Shadowlands Leveling

 Now that I have finished leveling my death knight, and am about 3/4 of the way to being done with my druid, I have some updated thoughts about the current state of the Shadowlands leveling process, especially concerning alts.  My initial feeling as I picked up the death knight after a 15-month break is that not much had improved from where I had left off.

Having now spent more time with it, both on the death knight and the druid, it does now feel a lot more smooth to me than I was initially thinking.  The time it takes to fill the bar for each area that you pick for Threads of Fate seems to move fairly quickly, particularly if you're also picking up the world quests in that zone and also running the dungeon quest from that zone once while you're there.  As has always been the case with WoW, sometimes the groups that you get are a complete dumpster fire, but probably sixty percent of them have been fine so far.

My only issue is that on both the death knight and the druid, I finished all four primary zone threads of fates and still had not hit max level.  In general, it was then just a matter of knocking out a world quest or two or running a random dungeon or two, and that seemed to do it, but it does feel like that is something that could be tweaked a little bit.  I have not tried doing either the Torghast or Battleground Threads of Fate, although I probably should.

I did use the Darkmoon Faire to max out the warlock's cooking skill, so now it's just fishing that he needs to finish up to have all of his professions maxed.  I haven't really done anything on any of my other main toons on professions and probably won't.  

I'm still making good progress on Joar on reputations.  I'm getting pretty close to Revered with the two new factions and am fairly close to Exalted on everyone else.  Once I get there, I'll need to decide how many fancy new mounts I want to buy.  

That's pretty much it for this week's update.

Cheers,

Joar

Death Knight to 60 and Working on Shadowland Reps

 I was able to get my death knight to level 60 last week and have started working on the druid.  I've always enjoyed playing a frost death knight but was disappointed that it seemed too squishy to level that way reasonably.  I tried a few times over the course from 50 to 60 but ended up switching back to Blood fairly quickly both times.  Death strike was just not keeping up with the amount of damage that I was taking.

I am now working the death knight through the Kyrian covenant campaign, which as I have gone back and checked, is the only one that I didn't finish before giving up the game.  The druid I am leveling as balance.  I was hoping to go back to just straight story campaign leveling with the druid, but apparently, I had already made that selection before I quit playing, and there is no way to change it back.

In addition to all of that, I've been doing all the dailies on my Warlock, working on getting the reputations for everyone up to exalted, finishing up the Korthia Chains of Domination campaign storyline, and have also run all of Sepulcher at least once in LFR.  I now have two pieces of tier gear, and will keep running the wings that drop tier until I'm able to get my four-piece bonus, and maybe a weapon upgrade.

Korthia zone

I am likely not going to do anything to advance the various Shadowlands professions.  My two professions on my warlock, Tailoring and Enchanting, are both maxed, but I don't really see the need to do that on the other four alts that I'll have sitting at max level.

It's enough to keep me fairly busy these days.  The only other game that I've still been dabbling in a bit is FFXIV, where I've continued to run ventures on my retainers and slowly working on leveling my Astrologian and Red Mage.

Cheers,

Joar

Flying in Shadowlands Fully Unlocked

This has probably always been the case late in an expansion, but it's hard to tell because I've never stopped playing early in an expansion before.  But getting fully caught up in Shadowlands really took very little time.  There is no question that the new zone in Zereth Mortis and the quests associated with it were designed to make that happen very quickly.  With fairly limited play time because of my IRL schedule, I was basically caught up within two weeks, have unlocked flying in both the Shadowlands and Zereth Mortis, and am geared enough that I've run about half of Sepulcher in LFR.  

I'm still playing as Destro, because I love the AOE abilities that it offers on the large trash pulls in Sepulcher, although I'm still not fully gear optimized for that.  I've finished the first two wings and also picked up my first tier piece.  I'm still working through the full Zereth Mortis storyline and knocking out the world quests there each day.  Having flying unlocked now will certainly help a lot with that.

Unlocking flying was surprisingly straightforward.  The only challenging part was getting through the 10 rares achievements.  With most folks having flying unlocked now, it required some degree of luck to have rares spawn nearby.  Otherwise, they were generally dead before I was able to get there.  It wasn't impossible, it just took some patience.

The only negative that I've seen so far is that with the newest patches, they seem to have taken an expansion that was already overloaded with too many currencies and game systems and added a few more.  Hopefully, they will learn to dial that back a bit in the next expansion.  

After I finish Sepulcher on Joar and the Zereth Mortis storyline, I may go back and finish leveling the two members of the original five that I never finished when Shadowlands was first released - my Death Knight and my Druid.  We'll see if either of those is any easier than it was then.

That's it for now.  

Cheers,

Joar

Returning to World of Warcraft

 After 15 months away, I've been logging in to World of Warcraft a bit lately.  There is actually a surprising amount of content that I have missed including the whole Korthia / Chains of Domination storyline and the new Zereth Mortis storyline.  The catch-up mechanics seem to be pretty good so far.  They've done a nice job of adding clips and little cut scenes to help you better understand how you got to where you are now.

From what I've seen so far, it feels like they're doing a decent job of trying to pull together and wrap up some plot strings that have been dangling out there for the last few expansions now, so hopefully things can start somewhat fresh with the next expansion (although I think we're still ignoring the giant sword sticking out of Silithius)

I've been trying to get into LFR for the raid that I missed, but there don't seem to be many people doing that, so I haven't had any luck so far.  I need to grab a bit more gear from Zereth Mortis world quests in order to be able to run the new LFR raid, but I'd like to see the old ones at some point.  

At this point, I'm only playing on my warlock, and have been sticking with Destruction so far.  It feels a bit squishier than I remember, but that may just be that I'm not quite geared enough yet.  I think I'm still outfitted mostly in the blues you needed to get access to Castle Nathria LFR, although I've been steadily upgrading those with rewards you get from the Zereth Mortis quests.  I am going back and running the Korthia campaign quests just to unlock flying, and then I'll look at how to unlock flying in Zereth Mortis.

FFXIV

As mentioned previously, I have gone back and started to work on leveling my Astrologian again.  That job is currently sitting at level 66.  And because I don't really like healing the level 50+ dungeons, I'm simultaneously working Red Mage through the daily leveling roulette.  I really just started that today.  

I still have been debating the housing situation, but I think I've decided that I'll be better off just grabbing an apartment somewhere instead.  Particularly given my tendency to spend time away from specific games.

That's the update for now.  I'll try to provide additional feedback on WoW Patch 9.2.5 in next week's update.

Cheers,

Joar

It Has Been A While

As the title of this blog post notes, it has been quite a while since my last blog post.  I recently changed to a new role at my IRL job, and have not had much time for playing or blog writing as I've been getting up to speed.  I have probably sacrificed more on the blog writing side since there are quite a few updates on the playing side since last I posted.

Guild Wars 2

This is probably where I made the most progress since my last blog post since I have now completely finished End of Dragons and so am completely current on content.  End of Dragons was, in my mind, the best Guild Wars 2 expansion yet.  I really enjoyed all of the zones and the storyline was really satisfying.  It brought everything together quite nicely.

It is interesting to me that both Guild Wars 2 and FFXIV seem to deliver increasingly better expansions while World of Warcraft tends to head in the opposite direction, probably since Pandaria.  

I've now been going back and working on completing the original Tyria maps since my current main, my necromancer, was actually a boosted character since I did the full play through the first time around on a ranger, who just didn't seem up to the task once I got to Heart of Thorns.  I also started fleshing out a Scourge build, but I haven't really started gearing up for that particular build yet.

Elder Scrolls Online

I also had fairly major accomplishments on this one as I managed to finish the Aldmeri Dominion storyline to get Caldwell Silver.  I've now started the third storyline, Ebonheart Pact, to work toward Caldwell Gold.  I also did the handful of intro quests for the new High Isles expansion, which should be a lot of fun when it arrives.   Expansions in ESO are less of a big deal than they are in some of the other games that I play as they tend to be less overall story content.  But that works fine given the amount of time that I'm spending on other games.

FFXIV

Last but not least, I recently dove back into FFXIV again, back to working on leveling my Astrologian.  I had taken so much time away from FFXIV recently that I was quite surprised to queue for the MSQ daily roulette and discover that it was now a four-man dungeon.  I still made it through just fine even though I hadn't healed on the AST in quite a while.

That is it for now.  I will try to post more often now that I'm getting a little bit more settled into the new job.

Cheers,

Joar

Approaching the End of Icebrood Saga

I've gotten pretty bad at writing and publishing regularly again.  It's not for lack of consistent play time as I have been making a fair amount of progress on both of the games that I've been playing regularly lately, which continue to be Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online.  I've still been trying to figure out why I've dropped Final Fantasy XIV.  Perhaps Endwalker felt like more of an end to the story that I was expecting.  Hopefully once the new patch content starts coming out, I'll feel a little bit more interest in getting re-engaged in whatever new stories they're looking to tell. 

I think I've also finally moved on from the intense commitment to lots of alts that really inspired this blog in the first place.  I feel like now I'm more interested in having a single character that I'm connected to and immersed with, focused on playing through the content and experiences on that particular character, but doing that across a variety of games instead of a variety of races and classes.  It also makes me debate picking up OG Joar and trying to get current on World of Warcraft, just with Joar.  But that also raises issues about a certain company filled with...checks Twitter for the perfect phrase..."cromulent shitcrustibles."

So here are the updates on the various games that I'm currently playing:

Guild Wars 2

I finished Living World Season 4, which was a story that I really enjoyed.  The zones were generally pretty great, although there were a few that were pretty challenging to navigate.  It did unlock the possibility of grabbing a Skyscale, although the time commitment and cost of doing that seems to be outside the scope of what I'm interested in doing at this point.  Maybe once I'm caught up on the content though.

I've now moved on to the Icebrood Saga, which is effectively Living World Season 5, even though it doesn't appear that way anywhere.  The early part very much gives me a "Scar from Lion King" kind of feel, but that might just be me.  I'm about halfway through that at this point, at which point I will be moving on to actual current content.

ESO

I'm still working through the Aldmeri Dominion storyline on this one on my Magicka Templar for Caldwell's Silver.  I'm in an area called Greenshade now, which has a pretty interesting storyline so far.  Tree spirits, undead armies, old enemies raised from the dead as shades.  All that kind of great stuff.  And talking cats, but not like FFXIV cats.

I've also been steadily leveling up my professions as I go, mostly through gathering, researching and deconstructing stuff that I get.  I'm not terribly far off from actually being able to make some useful stuff for my character at this point, which should be fun.  I think there are some craftable sets that are pretty decent for Magicka Templars that I will need to look at.

That's about all the updates for now.

Cheers,

Joar

On To Living World Season 4

Guild Wars 2

For this week's update, let's start with Guild Wars 2 first.  I'm continuing to progress through the story line with my Necromancer.  I managed to finish up the Path of Fire story line and have moved on to the Living World Season 4 stuff.  As part of the process, I managed to grab most of the hero points in the Path of Fire areas, and that got me enough to fully unlock a good Reaper build, that I'm now using.

It's definitely quite different than a normal Necromancer Minion build, but so far I'm liking it a lot.  It clearly hits a LOT harder, which helps when working through some of the new story content, particularly some of the harder boss fights.  I'm not normally a big fan of melee, but it feels like that's pretty much always the better option in GW2.

ESO

I really should play this game more than I do, as it fits much better with my playstyle and availability.  I've picked up my Magicka Templar again and am working my way through the Aldmeri Dominion story line in order to get Caldwell's Silver.  A new dungeon also released this week, which I haven't tried yet, but it seems like there are some pretty decent armor pieces in there that my character would be able to use, so I might try queueing for it if I get the chance.

I do need to update my gear a bit.  I haven't paid much attention to it once I got past CP 160 because I basically shred everything I come across anyway.  So I may try farming some dungeons to see if I can improve that at all. 

Spending More Time in Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2

I've gotten a little tired of running the MSQ roulettes every day, so I've jumped back in and am spending more time in Guild Wars 2.  I've still been running with my Necromancer, with a fairly straight minion build.  I haven't unlocked enough hero points to run a good Reaper build yet, although I should probably work on that.  I'm mostly focused on getting caught up on the story content at this point (although having a good Reaper build running would probably be helpful with that).

I managed to finish up Living World Season 3 yesterday, which I really enjoyed.  It definitely jumped around a bit, and some of the fights were pretty tough, but overall I thought it was well put together.  I'm now going to be starting on Path of Fire.

I had originally thought that since I had done the first episode of Path of Fire in order to get the raptor mount, that I'd be able to skip that now, but it doesn't look like that's the case.  It's possible that I did that piece on my Ranger instead of on the Necromancer though, which might explain that.  My plan for right now is to get caught up on the story and then work my way back through map completion, but I can't decide if it makes more sense to work on a little bit of map completion in order to get the hero points for a Reaper build.  My Necromancer was boosted after doing the original leveling slog on my Ranger, so really only has the hero points from Heart of Thorns.

FFXIV

In FFXIV, all the jobs are at 50 now, other than DRK, which is at 47, so not far off at all.  I've also started working on leveling my Astrologian, who is somewhere around 54 at this point.  While I've stepped away from FFXIV a little bit, I'm planning to at least finish getting the DRK to 50 for now, which shouldn't take more than one or two more runs.

That's about it for now. 

Cheers, 

Joar

Lots of Jobs Hitting 50

 I'm down to only having 5 jobs left to move up to level 50 - Paladin, Monk, Dragoon, Dark Knight and Blue Mage.  Then it will just be the slow one at a time grind that I talked about last week.

Things have been a bit busy in real life, so I've had pretty limited time for gaming, so it may be a while still before I get very far on this.  I just need to grind out those last 14 levels on Blue Mage, which really doesn't take all that long, but just need to dedicate a couple of hours to it.

As you can see from the above, I'm also pretty far along on White Mage at this point.  And after that, I'll just be following the leveling order that I set out last week.

On the Guild Wars 2 front, I've still been working my way through the Living World Season 3 story.  I'm about half way through at this point, and will be starting Path of Fire after that.  I already did the first part of Path of Fire to get the mount, so I've got a tiny bit of a head start on that one at least.

Cheers,

Joar