Thursday 21 February 2019

WoW Casual Player Agenda take 2

I tried my last plan and it was way too cluttered. Trying to chase down all those different tasks and jobs simply takes too much time.

I present a new plan for anyone who is spread across several alts:

- one mythic dungeon a week (ideally 2 levels higher than last week's).

- 4 islands quest on main character. (It might make sense to do it on each alt as it's quite rewarding but frankly I don't really like the gameplay).

- LFR pickup raids on new 120 alts eligible to do them. (Not because they're efficient, just because they're rather fun). Uldir requires ilvl 320 rewards 340. BfD requires ilvl 350 rewards 370.

- world boss and one-off quest for Darkshore Warfront on each alt. Arathi requires ilvl 320 rewards 370. Darkshore requires ilvl 335 rewards 400.

- heroic lfg dungeons on new alts as and when. Requires ilvl 325 rewards 355.

- invasions where they also count towards emissary quests (eg Talanji's emissary with Nazmir invasion).

- other emissary quests.

- daily world quests offering specifically interesting rewards like recipes and pet charms.

- alts.


So in short it's:

Emissaries (preferably with invasions concurrently)

One set of 4 Island expeditions

One mythic+ per character

Darkshore ilvl 400 tasks.

Leveling Alts

Bunch of stuff when an alt is new 120.

Saturday 16 February 2019

WoW: Casual player agenda

Now that I'm not raiding I have the chance to reassess my priorities and figure out a new agenda.

My priorities are now:

- keep routine daily and weekly opportunities on cooldown so I get a good stream of items, gold, artifact power and war resources.

- unlock certain features that are desireable and that are gated behind quest chains.

- tourist the raids in LFR, preferably with a character that will benefit from the gear (340 Uldir, 355 BFD)

- stock auctionhouses

- level alts

This breaks down to:

Weekly prep:

Get weekly quest for the bonus event  across all alts if appropriate.

Use contract.

Buy reroll tokens if desired

Clear bags, scrapping/vendoring or disenchanting items.

Check gear enchants

First things

Restart mission tables across all alts

Run naval expeditions on main until I've got the heirloom rings

Check warfronts across all alts, running them if the quest or world boss is up.

Emissary quests/invasions.

Try to time emissary quests to the invasions so I'm doing them both at once. I'll write more on this on a future blog post but the idea is to see what the schedule is for the invasions and then try to do your, say, Zandalari quests by running a Zandalari invasion so that you finish both by doing the same 4 quests.

(All) Random world boss if up.

Pet charm world quests

(Alts) check item improvements from world quests for the first few weeks after dinging 120.

Concurrent queued activities

Some activities we have to queue for so it makes sense to get these done while doing solo content like the world quests. By priority:

- (Main): pet battles if pet battle bonus event is up.

- (Main): Battlegrounds till 5000 conquest points

- (Alts): Heroic dungeons if 355 gear still needed and the once/day extra payout is available

- (Alts): LFR

Island Expeditions

I've found I often forget if I leave these until late in the week so I like to get them done sooner. No reason not to do them across all alts now that the 5000gp treasure map is a possible reward.

Seasonal events

- Darkmoon Faire quests in the first week of the month. I don't do all of these but some of them are just great, especially the 5 profession skill points.

- Other seasonal events I'll assess based on the expected payout probably from selling pets at the opposite time of year. I'm not bothering with the current Love Fool event.

Auction house

- Weds afternoon and Sat afternoon are my preferred times to relist all my items across my multiple servers. I list for 48 hours so my auctions have all expired when I do this.

Quest chains:

- get 5th mission companion on each alt.

- unlock the BfA pathfinder achievement on main

Alt levelling

My system is log on, queue for a dungeon while working through solo quests, take the dungeon with its once a day bonus then reach a natural stopping point in my questing and hearth. Then log on to the next alt and repeat.

Alt levelling is quite a gold sink as they generally need upgraded heirlooms. I'm mostly focusing on just upgrading the ones that give bonus exp as any old weapon will do.




Tuesday 12 February 2019

WoW: when raiding gets overwhelming

I haven't enjoyed the direction Wow raiding has gone over the years.

In Vanilla raiding was mostly a gear-check. If your raw numbers couldn't crack the boss fight you couldn't beat it. Progress depended on people farming resistance gear and so forth and of course on keeping your players.

Over time and in response to the most vocal raiders this has morphed into a mechanics check. If people stand in the fire you can't kill the boss. The content is gated by the most incompetent person and players have tended not to be gentle with such people.

Over more time this morphed into more and more complex mechanics checks. All bosses have multiple threats and you now have to dodge the fire patches while avoiding the big rolling balls of death while interrupting the Big Spell of Doom on cooldown while dot dot dot.

What players are doing is they're getting ahead on the mechanics on the PTR or by having alts in other raiding guilds so that they can cope. If you're a slow learner regarding such physical tests (and I am) you will stand out as players increasingly adapt so that they're not last. Boss kills depend on mechanics, in fact many bosses can't be killed unless pretty much the whole raid has the mechanics down pat.

I started raiding this time round while my mother was seriously ill in hospital and I had to do a lot of caring and admin tasks for her. She died on 31st January.

I had to stop raiding, there was so much going on in my head that the pastime simply wasn't a leisure activity for me, something to unwind, it was a demanding and difficult activity that I was doing really badly at.

Clearly those circumstances are exceptional but even in normal circumstances raiding has been led to a place which is less than fun for most players.

It's not this particular raid. Battle For Dazar'Alor is one of the best raids I've ever seen and the storyline is fantastic. Fighting in the streets of my home city is amazing, very immersive.

An additional complication is Mythic+. I should have got into Mythic+ months ago but I've been lazy and it's difficult and challenging. As a result the natural method of farming gear outside raids also required me to do homework learning mechanics which I had no capacity for on top of learning the raid mechanics from videos.

I also looked into pvp but that also requires a very specific playstyle, talent spec, addon setup and so on.

So basically I found myself in a place where I didn't want to spend much thought or focus on my game yet the end game options all demanded it.

So after raiding for about 3 nights I've now left my raid guild and am mooching around doing daily quests, AH and alts.

Sometimes the game is just too difficult for the amount of focus one is able to give it.