Tag Archives: World of Warcraft

Forecast: Blizzard

For some indescribable reason I decided to further my vacation from my consoles for a while longer and dove headfirst into Diablo 3, mostly due to all of the hype surrounding the new 2.0 patch and the (then) upcoming Reaper of Souls expansion pack. First: good news, everyone! My concern in Lightsabers and Labyrinths was unfounded and Diablo 3 does in fact hold up quite well in the atmosphere department. The setting still feels very much like the grim world of Sanctuary from Diablo and Diablo 2 and even then some and the music is still great and perfectly atmospheric. The graphics, while a tiny bit cartoony compared to the previous games, actually feel ike a perfectly logical evolution of the previous style and overall look great. I had other concerns too such as hearing that they packed in much more backstory and dialog (including from your character!) than in previous games. I was somehow picturing a bunch of cheesy in-game cutscenes which would probably change the feel of the game quite a bit. Instead most of the dialog is delivered using something akin to ye olde “audio logs” and the follower interaction and plot related cutscenes that are there are mostly delivered in fairly unobtrusive ways too.

“I feel like Conan most of the time I’m playing my Barbarian. Fuck yes!”

Gameplay wise, I rolled a Barbarian and played through on normal difficulty – Barbarians being one of the simplest yet funnest classes from Diablo 2 I figured it would be a good starter character to try out and I was definitely right. If anything I could have stood to bump up the difficulty a bit. I feel like it bears stating that yes, this playthrough took place entirely AFTER the 2.0 patch which included a lot of the refinements of the earlier console ports of Diablo 3 including the apparently greatly improved loot system so I have no first hand account of how things used to be. All I can say is that what is there now works quite. I felt like loot drops were aplenty and upgrades came fairly often, at least in the first few acts of my adventure. Perhaps some of the best praise I can give Diablo 3 is that despite just playing through all of Torchlight and the last act or so of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, I not only managed to avoid getting burnt-out on the simple and repetitive ARPG gameplay but even somehow wound up totally addicted like I was playing Diablo 2 back in 2000 all over again.

I might as well mention the expansion since I bought it and played it inline with the original campaign and it’s still somewhat new on the shelves as of this update: it’s largely more of the same. The new zones, monsters, and events are awesome, the story, journals, items, and powers fit perfectly in with the core game, etc. etc. Really, the bulk of the biggest changes in the game outside of new content were those patched in (to everyone, expansion or not) with patch 2.0. The other big change is “adventure mode” which I’ve only briefly dabbled in so far. Regardless, it certainly seems like a better way to grind out levels and new gear than playing through the campaign for the 30th time. I think my only real surprise with Reaper of Souls is that it’s not just a straight continuation of the plot like they did with Diablo 2’s Lord of Destruction expansion. Instead it’s a new story entirely. That is, while continuing where the plot of the core game left off, it’s not just “and then a bigger, more badass demon showed up and you had to kill him too!” kind of thing. The only problem with this is that the stakes will always have to be extraordinarily high given your character’s story and the fact that you already managed to save the world from total annihilation in utterly epic fashion the first time around. Hey, if they can keep that expansion cycle up more power to them!

“Someone call an exterminator?”

Overall I found Diablo 3 a total fucking joy to play through – capturing what I loved about Diablo and Diablo 2, refining some of those systems, and giving a slightly deeper look at the world of Sanctuary and its lore. Sure, the story arch feels a bit of a rehash of Diablo 2 in some ways and the game is still a simple blend of remorseless clicking and inventory management, but Diablo 3 delivers exactly what caused me to be captivated by the genre in the first place and does it with the usual top notch Blizzard polish. I’ll definitely be heading back through the campaign with another class against at some point in the future, probably multiple points even. I’m ecstatic.

Blizzard also updated their… err, updater? Okay, their “launcher” recently to serve as a single launch (gah, I did it again!) point for all of their newer Battle.net games and on that list is there new free-to-play collectible trading card game “Hearthstone”. Hearthstone plays like a simplified version of the old WoW TCG which itself was highly inspired by Magic: The Gathering and its ilk. I’ve heard great things about Hearthstone from friends and on some of the podcasts I subscribe to and, being the sucker that I am for mounts in World of Warcraft, seeing the little advertisement for a special mount for trying Hearthstone out was all the extra push I needed to give it a whirl. A whirl turned into a couple of whirls and then more whirls and now hours and hours of whirls. Man, this game is fun!

“Hot troll on troll action.”

I’ve never been a TCG/CCG guy – I tried Magic out when it first hit in the 90s but it just always felt slightly too complicated to me for what it was trying to do. I also had a love/hate relationship with the whole collectibility part of it. Hearthstone, by streamlining the rules so much, really nullifies most of those complaints. The game is really fast and really easy to pick up on. Sure, there is still a “he with the most cash wins” aspect to it but I feel like the streamlining means that even the most rare (err, “epic”) cards aren’t too crazily overpowered. That, and Blizzard has the free-to-play mechanic fairly fine tuned so far so that you can pretty consistently unlock new cards without ever dropping a dime of real money. Add that addictive gameplay to some Warcraft aesthetics and some good old Blizzard polish and man, this game is rad! Given the repetitive nature of something like this I doubt I’ll play it too much more besides trying to master a coupe of more “classes” but so far I’ve really enjoyed my time with it.

Blizzard has definitely still got it.

“…and I log in to immediately start grinding fucking archaeology again. Ugh!”

As an aside, yes I know I probably shouldn’t care too much about World of Warcraft mounts given that I don’t actually play World of Warcraft anymore but… *sigh* once an addict, always an addict! I loaded up my level 50 something goblin hunter the other day and played through a whole zone and actually enjoyed myself once again. I suppose I’m getting hyped back up for the new Warlords of Draenor expansion coming later this year. I truthfully barely have enough energy for the game left in me to remain interested enough to buy this expansion. I almost didn’t buy Mists of Pandaria as it was back then. The new character models and the free level up to 90, as shallow as those offerings are, help sway me. The bigger thing is probably just having to personally come to terms with what I get out of the series nowadays – a few months of hardcore addiction before I put it back on the shelf until the next expansion, and honestly that’s totally fine with me.

Braid Your Pitts

I haven’t posted in nearly 4 months. Shameful, I know. I have been gaming a bit though, for sure. In fact one of the main reasons for my lack of updates in the last 6 or 7 months was climbing back onto the vile World of Warcraft bandwagon. I haven’t mentioned it much on here because I’ve been about ready to quit again, once I completed the last of several goals I’d been working on. After that I planned on writing an entry all about my return and what I had accomplished with my time. Unfortunately that last goal has turned out to be a total pain in my ass – expect that post if I finally do meet my goal but I’ve all but stopped again as it is so that seems unlikely.

“Braid is goddamn pretty.”

I got around to playing Braid on XBLA. I actually played through the demo at around the time of its launch and honestly most of my critical analysis of the awesome, creative puzzle mechanics is probably back there somewhere since I was pretty blown away by them originally. Even blasting past that topic, I loved the art style and absolutely adored the music. Despite how mind-bendingly difficult some of the puzzles might seem to some players (personally, most came to me easily, though I did definitely struggle hard with a few of them) it’s still very worth checking out. Notice how I skipped talking about the narrative? 😉 Seriously though, I actually enjoyed it at first and like what they’re were going for though the end came out of nowhere and didn’t really do much for me. In the end though, it didn’t seem crucial to the experience – how much did the story in any of the Super Mario games (and the comparison here is appropriate given all of the obviously influence and callbacks) ever matter?

I finally finished my run through of Fallout 3 + all of the DLC. I got pretty much all of the achievements I could get in one play through and had a blast. My insanely sporadic playtimes made me come to some odd conclusions about my gaming habits as of late: I’m getting too old for this shit. Seriously, I seem to only want to jump into most games (basically anything I’m either not insanely addicted to, or anything that isn’t extremely “pick up and play” friendly) when I have a couple of hours or more free in one sitting, and even then I have to be “in the mood” which I’m often not after a long day at work or whatever. If it is going to take me a year to finish a decent sized RPG for now on I suppose I’m going to have to stop spending as much time and money on this hobby as right now it’s just a little out of whack.

“We’re going vault hopping tonight, baby!”

Back to the game though. Obviously I loved Fallout 3 – I mentioned that in my last update about it. How could I not? I loved the original Fallout games and I love the Elder Scrolls series so… yeah? I’m not going to get into a big, detailed review of it or anything but I did want to mention one unexpected surprise: The Pitt DLC campaign. Whaaa? Although I know it often gets praise as being one of the better DLC add-ons for Fallout 3 I don’t remember hearing anything about the whole moral dilemma you’re faced with in it. Hell, maybe I did and simply forgot all about it since then, but in any case… spoilers in the next two paragraphs!

So, the basic setup for The Pitt (I’ll try to keep it fairly general) is that you’re contacted by a runaway slave who wants you to infiltrate the city which is overrun by an oppressive, ruthless group of slavers who force their slaves into working in their factories while they reap the benefits. They also all have some horrible radiation sickness and the leader of the slavers is apparently hording the cure for his very own. Seems straight forward enough and when you arrive as sure enough, sick slaves everywhere and the people in power are stacking the bad karma deck without question. Once you finally infiltrate the slavers and confront the leader, however, you learn that all isn’t as it appeared – the cure is actually a baby and the ex-slave who talked you into the whole thing in the first place is actually an ex-slaver who was forced out after a failed coup attempt looking for revenge. Seems like the situation is getting greyer. Still, why would I want to leave the baby in the hands of these assholes? Plus, who cares if the other guy is an ex-slaver himself, he clearly wasn’t lying about this place being packed with slaves and this sickness killing everyone. I stole the baby and vaporized the leader of the slavers, and most of the rest of them while I was at it.

“Fireworks are always better when they’re made out of your enemies.”

The plot thickens. Audiotapes reveal that the leader of the slavers was an Paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel who got stranded there after cleansing the ruins of the city long ago. Hm, well that still doesn’t mean he wasn’t an asshole, I suppose. Left there alone, he built up his gang and the settlement himself including bringing the factories back online. He regretted the slave labor but viewed it as a necessary evil and even planned to eventually set them all free. Hmm. He was also the father of the baby in question and, it’s revealed, seemed to genuinely care for the kid. He also viewed his research into the cure in a philanthropic way – he didn’t seem to be hording the cure at all, it simply wasn’t finished. *gulp* I might have made a bad decision but… well, at least the slaves are free, right? So then I get back to the people I was working for to discover the guy acting like a total fascist asshole himself and implying that the baby was now in much worse hands. It also only took me about 2 seconds to notice that the slave labor still appeared to be in full effect around the settlement – maybe the people in the chains had changed, but still… what exactly have I done here?!

This is one of the most interesting moral dilemmas I’ve run into in a game in recent memory. Most fascinating was probably the fact that I really wasn’t ever asked to make any clear cut, black and white choice on the matter. Sure, I was forced to pick a side but it was before I had all of the intel. Even after all of the cards were on the table it was still a pretty nebulous situation with no obvious right choice… and the fact of the matter is, not unlike after the big reveal in Bioshock, I felt totally played after it was over. Nice!

“These guys, yet again…”

What else? Oh yes, I bought and played Halo 4. I’ve talked about the Halo series on here a lot in the past so I’ll skip the background and the in-depth analysis and just say that 343 Studios did a fine job. It still feels very much like a proper Halo game yet makes necessarily measured steps into new directions. I enjoyed the new multiplayer advancement (for example) though so far I prefer Firefight over Spartan Ops. Most of all, I just enjoyed returning to a universe that I’ve always really enjoyed. As far as that goes though, I might have enjoyed watching Forward Unto Dawn more than playing the actual Halo 4 campaign. *shrug*

Next up is a play through of the original Saints Row, if I can manage to slog through the grind. Oh, and I also started a new blog which I’ve been filling full of random non game related stuff – mostly related to music and just general expressive bullshit. I’ll link to it eventually when I have more content. Hell, maybe I’ll even merge it into this one and make it a little less gaming focused. Stay tuned!

Dragon Hunting

Seriously, who doesn’t want to ride around on the back of a dragon? They’re also waaaay cooler than your standard wyverns and gryphons even as the young drakes we get stuck with as mounts. While most of the cooler dragon mounts in the game come as rare drops and/or rewards associated with running heroic instances and raids, there are a few that are relatively easy to obtain on your own if you’re more of a solo player as I tend to be.

“Killing Vyragosa 50 fucking times is an unofficial but all too important part of acquiring a TLPD.”

First off we have a couple of proto-drakes. I really dig the way proto-drakes look – very vicious and rugged and their clumsy, primitive walking and flying animations are quite cool as well. You tend to see a lot less people on proto-drakes than normal drakes – I don’t know if this is rarity, a mattered of popularity, or that the rarer normal drakes and other flying mounts are a bit more difficult to acquire and therefore have an elitist appeal to them, but I like that about them as well.

To start us out what should, in theory, be the easiest of them is the “Time-lost Proto Drake”. A yellow and brown proto-drake with a cyan mouth. To get this mount all you have to do is track down and kill the level 80 rare spawn version of the same creature that flies around The Storm Peaks. The mount has a 100% chance to drop. Easy money? Not so much. The Time-lost Proto Drake is infamously difficult to track down due to its incredibly low spawn rates. Thankfully lot of research has been conducted relating to the TLPD’s flight paths, spawn rates, and the like but even armed with this information expect to spend weeks or even months camping out in the frigid mountains of The Storm Peaks for your chance to own this mount.

“Time lost indeed.”

My own personal quest to acquire this mount took me well over a month, although relatively little of that time was dedicated to 24 hour camping until towards the end. The Time-lost Proto Drake is essentially a rare spawn of a rare spawn – it’s more common variation being the rare blue dragon Vyragosa which I personally killed dozens of times before ever seeing even a hint of the TLPD’s existence. Because of all of the competition on my particular server (your mileage may vary) I found that sticking to one of the 4 confirmed spawn points was the best way to guarantee your chance to see and get first dibs on the creature. You’ll want to use an add-on such as “NPCScan” as well as do some reading at Ponderance’s TLPD Resource site.

The other proto-drake worth mentioning here is the Green Proto-Drake. The Green Proto-Drake has an attractive green and purple coloration with a fiery orange mouth – it’s quite striking, really. Additionally it is much easier to acquire than the TLPD though it can still be a bit painful. Make your way to the Sholazar Basin and visit the Oracles to kick off a fairly painless 8 day reputation grind to get to Revered and then purchase a Mysterious Egg from the Oracles Quartermaster for a few gold. The egg will hatch in your inventory after 3 days (recently lowered from a much more annoying 7 day timer) which will then produce a number of random prizes. Many of these prizes are companions, including the cool and potentially valuable Proto-Drake Whelp, and one, the rarest one of all, of course, is our mount.

“An… eggquisite… purchase.”

You’ll need a little luck to get the Green Proto-drake without purchasing more than a few eggs though if your luck isn’t so great you might end up with a veritable zoo worth of companions before ever getting the mount, but at least it doesn’t take much gold or work even if it does sometimes require a bit of patience. I believe my Green Proto-drake reins dropped after around 5 eggs though I’ve heard stories of it taking people months. My opinion? Worth it!

Finally we have an actual dragon as opposed to a proto-dragon, and an attractive one at that. The Red Drake mount can be acquired for a hefty sum of 1600gp by those who reach Exalted with the Wyrmrest Accord faction. Reaching Exalted reputation will require almost a month’s worth of running a few daily quests though if you don’t mind running dungeons you can also purchase a tabard once you reach Friendly that will give you Wyrmrest reputation gains in level 80 Northrend dungeons, speeding the process along fairly dramatically. Maybe it’s just me but I consider red dragons to be fairly iconic *flashbacks of the old Basic Dungeons & Dragons box set* and despite being relatively easy to obtain this is probably one of the better looking of the available drake mount colorations in my opinion – I prefer this one to the more commonly seen Bronze Drake mount. Normal drakes are also impressively large with massive wingspans compared to proto-drakes and other flying mounts. Everyone should definitely have at least one in their collections.

“I need a Wyrm Rest after grinding for this thing. *rimshot*”

Even though this is the “Northrend Edition” more or less I should give an honorable mention to Outland’s Nether Drake mounts. These bad boys can be obtained by reaching Exalted with Netherwing faction. This takes just over two weeks of running a fairly intense course of dailies and other quests but, time aside, should be a breeze at 80 or 85. You do require epic flight to complete this grind, however, making it fairly costly and unappealing for casual players who might not want to make the investment. I’ve never actually completed this reputation climb myself though it is a near future goal of mine.

Other honorable mentions:

The Bronze Drake is a 100% drop from beating a relatively easy boss in a heroic level 80 instance within a certain time frame. Although it was originally fairly challenging, these days not so much, particularly after Cataclysm. I’d think a group of 85s could farm this mount out very easily. The awesome looking Violet Proto-drake only requires you to complete every holiday achievement, most of which are soloable and quite easy to boot. “Only” however, doesn’t really take into account that we’re talking about taking an entire year to acquire. Still, if you’re patient enough…

That’s it for now. I may make another post in the future regarding the awesome new Elemental variety of drake mounts added to Cataclysm, of which some do indeed fall into the category of being relatively easy to obtain.