HIatus

A long long time has passed. I've not been idle. But still...

I waited for 7.2, getting all my 12 chars up to to 110. A major achievement.
Then, 7.2 came out and I proceeded to empower all my 110 characters through the new campaign. The idea is/was to get all the class mounts. Another major achievement LOL.
Of course I quickly got flying in ... omg I already forgot the name of the new zone. Lost Isles ? Echo Isles ?
Meanwhile I was finally able to get all professions to 800. Another major achievement.
But I did not succeed getting Mythic+ runs with the guild or alone... I got so bored I couldn't help myself. I did some Kara Heroics and that was about it.
Ah, meanwhile, I got the Hidden Artifacts for my warlock, by getting 30 (down from 110) dung. runs, some 1K PVP kills and 200 WQs done. Another achievement (not a major one kkk).
But then...somewhere through the progress of 7.2, before the Tomb of Sargeras opened (dunno if it is open by now) I got more and more bored...and I quit.

Yes. I quit. Well, I've quit a few times so this is just another one. But it felt really nice. NO MORE WOW.

Quickly, I went back to Guild Wars 2, update my HoT adventure status to current, and then, started to play solo games again.

Dreamfall Chapters !

YAY. I love it. During the process I had to to a major machine reinstall, but didn't loose saved games on some other games like Witcher, so I'll get back to it to finish it, after Dreamfall Chapters are over.

I'm liking Steam very much. Achievements, forums, a sense of community. Not bad at all.

Then there's Layers of Fear. I just got acquainted with their expansion, "Herança". I finished the game last year with my daughter and some friends, we had a terrific time together in the living room, a 55" TV, a DOKO streaming from my PC, 1080p... and lots of fear and screams. AHAHAH. Amazing.

LOTRO...I uninstalled it. I wanted to keep playing with my RL friends but all quit so...
RIFT; same thing.

This week I (re)installed Sierra's Kinq's Quest revamped series. My anti-demential alarm tells me I already played the chapter 1 and finished it, but since I forgot it, might as well play it again, Sam.

Legionnaire

Woo, so Legion came out. And yes, of course (/giggle), I was attracted to it. I was able to lvl three characters to lvl 110, my warlock, paladin and rogue.

Of course, the idea is to level them all up, and Class Halls help a lot, once you get to lvl 101 and you get "XP missions". That's been my path to most of the other characters, just do the artifact and class hall missions, since they are fun, and not repetitive (there's 12 of them !).

I really really hope I won't have to level all their reps to friendly to open world WQs.

Meanwhile... Blizzcon was out, legacy servers did not came up as a topic, and unsurprisingly, the Nostalrius team made public that they will make source code public (Elysium server gets it first).

Good for them, can't wait to look at it !

As to gameplay itself, my two mains on Silvermoon (yes, moved Net to Silvermoon, since Haunted Heavens friends stopped playing, even May, the GM stopped playing. So it made no sense for me to stay and just say "good moaning" and "nn guild".

On Silvermoon, my guild Quie is alive, it allow us to at least go Mythic-5, I'm now attuned to Kara. Unfortunately, atm, not enough for raiding, but as a healer, Moonprince has ofc a spot for raids, and I was able to finish 10-man Normal Emerald Nightmare. It's also the server where I created my DH, currently at lvl 104, Shareth..ia. Damn, Shareth name was taken :(

Net completed the Pathfinder achievement, meaning, I'm now ready to fly in 7.2. Until then...I'll have to lvl PVP to 50 (35 atm) and then...do Kara, may be. Not much else to do that is completely new, after I get all reps to exalted.

On Aggra, my other alts are commanded by my 110 rogue, which I'll use for ganking mostly, and they are being leveled by class hall XP missions.

My rogue in Stormwind killind Mathias Shaw...with Mathias Shaw. WTF !? :)

The good part is all those alts have class hall and artifact missions. That's what I'll probably be doing the most, having diversified fun.

RIFT, I stopped playing, my RL pals kind of gave up, one of them got to 64 and I was hoping I'd get some help to do 65 quests in the new patch, but alas...no.

LOTRO...same, now pals to play with, and quests get kinda boring. Damn.

GW2, after I got my legendary crafted, the pleasure of playing considerably decreased, and I was a few months afk. Now I returned to watchout for new Living Season episodes and I got an entire new area, a volcano-like island down south. We'll see how it goes.

All champs 850 equiv. "Ready for Gold Making" !

Glory of the Late Draenor Hero

Two months later, a few single player games like The Witcher, Layers of Fear or the Vanishing of Ethan Carter and a new episode of Guild Wars2, I resubbed WoW to play the legion pre-patch events.

Silly events, just like those in vanilla for TBC or others I played, but at least, not bugged, and easy/fast to complete.

And then I remembered three things I missed from Dreanor.

1 - The Pandaren Hide from Ashran.

2 - The Garrison bosses and a few Platinum modes

3 - The Glory of Dreanor Hero, 6 hard achievements in UBRS and Skyreach !!!

Glory is done thanks to a great group and a vice-leader that leaded way better than I did :) . Damn kids are so more mentally agile these days...or may be it's me getting old and messed up.

The Platinum modes are done, but cba farming possible hipothetical garrison bosses. It's a thing for later on, may be I'll get lucky with LF custom.

The Pandaren...that's a pain, thanks to the IDIOTIC decison of creating mandatory raids for Ashran. Fortunately there's a "LeaveParty" script command that sometimes work and leaves you raidless but still in Ashran. Unfortunately it's only sometimes like that. The proble with the mandatory raids is that you farm pandas, you kill pandas, you LOOT pandas, and then...some idiot miles away needs on my loot and gets it because of my poor luck. Happened twice already.

Then there's the problem of having one panda in the whole Ashran, if we're lucky, one panda in 40 enemies.

But wait , there's mercenary mode, and you can get a panda hide in mercenary mode.

Unfortunately...MERCENARY MODE isn't working, only for some realms, it seems. Once in a while I see a mercenary, but on my servers I can never ever join a mercenary raid.

I dont want to spend 50 bucks to buy Legion for my 2nd account only to get a free horde 100 panda only to...kill it and get a hide.

Oh well... two weeks to Legion, a bunch of Demon Hunters all around. Been killing them like flies LOL.

PS: Got a MSI GTX 1060 and couldn't be happier. Yes it was more expensive than the RX480. But the AMD card was way worse than I expected, performancewise, heatwise, wattwise. 

The Witcher

After an inner debate of wether I wanted to proceed on a MMORPG that felt like a solo, or do some real solo casual gaming, I decided for the latter.

Bloody Nvidia is charging 500€ for the 5TFLOP GTX 1070...no way Josay ! and my ageing HD 5770 can't cope with the 2016 titles that well.

While I wait for my 200 USD RX 480 AMD, announced for June 29th, I decided to start with The Witcher I, then II, then III...while installing one more just for some family fun. LAYERS OF FEAR !

I also installed Dragon Age, Talos Principle, Homesick, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

So. The Witcher. The Prologue wasn't that captivating, but Chapter I was.

It took me a bit of time to learn how to combat, loot, and stuff, but things are now on track.

Chapter 1, a lot of quests to do in the outskirts of Vizima. It went ok. Kind of. I'm too soft at heart, so I'll just talk about the ladies. 

First is Triss, of course, the witcher and sorceress. Looks like it's love at first and last sight from Geralt, our main character.

Then there's Shani, a friend that Geralt lost memory of, and one we take to Vizima for the next chapter.

There's also Abigail, the nice witch in the card that I got because I kind of responded to her affection. Looks there'd be more girls, like one I saved from bandits and stuff, but I guess I didn't spot the "cupid" timing. Oh well, there's always Chapter 2.

I also tried it with an inn maid, but it didn't work out at all, she called me a pervert, and left :-)

Dead on arrival

Oh man, my WoW ironman girl died at 85 in Pandaria. I had just arrived at the 85 zone, did the first quests and then... lost focus, after requiring a Shadowmeld, I did not wait the necessary 2 mins, and made the same mistake, then panicked, did not think through those 10-15 secs my panic lasted, and then...surrounded by a pack of mobs that kept dazing me...RIP.

Needless to say, I don't feel like restarting. Besides it all, I did break several records, and would set them if I would get to 100.

- First Ironman on Silvermoon

- First European non-hunter.

Boy that hurts. Even if I would start again, I would not be ready before the pre-Legion patch, where they make a lot of changes and the challenge, as it is nowadays, ends.

So...got to 85, it was a HELL of an adventure.

Uninstalled everything, deleted all my challenge episodes, and I'm now officially in grief.

Gonna play some Dragon Age or another solo game for a while. Dreamfall, may be.

To true legendaries and vanilla WoW

Three things happened the last days (well 4, I got my ear dizziness up and rocking, damn thing's worsening).

The first one, Shaniron, my 65 iroman died, after a power down event at home, because someone decided turn on a water heating cup when washing machines were on and ofc when I was killing a mob in Terokkar. Damn damn damn, I'm up to 63 with my fresh new Shaniron but man, was I angry.

The second one, a happier happening, I finally crafted my Guild Wars 2 legendary, [The Bifrost] ! Took me, I'd say, two years or so, but greatly gratifying, because it allowed me to see the entire content of the seasons, bosses, fights, zones, etc. Thank God for a great GW2 Community and Open Community , where people go together to do insanely hard things you couldn't manage on your own or in a small group.

The third one... it seems there was a Vanilla WoW private server that was incredibly populated, just like the old days of 2005-2007 I loved and it was closed because of a Blizzard lawsuit, cease and desist typical, like they do with every threat when things start to go "too" popular. It happened, e.g. with Glider, the botting software.

Nostarius, the server, had about 1 million accounts, with 150k people logging daily. On a single, lagless, ultra-pop'ed vanilla 1.X server. Amazing achievement, ran by 30 volunteers, not profit-based.

Of course, it's a fairy tale, because Blizzard has a thing called business, and so, it was only just a matter of time before this would happen.

Still, it shows how WRONG Blizzard has gone with their path for WoW. Garrisons were an absolute joke, this xpac (so bad I did forget the name.. no legion, not mop, not cata..well this one, the current 6.2.x, omg I did forget about its name!!) was horrible.

It is horrible because the sense of community has gone away, helped by the dwindling subscribers. This is no longer a game for groups of players. It's a casual game for loners to sometimes join and do some basic things, not caring about each other, to just get things done and begone with it.

And that's the thing Blizzard didn't understand, why 1 million of (probably ex-) their subscribers went rogue, for a vanilla server (notice, not a private xpac server!!!) with NO LFG, where legendaries (that's the GW2 reference) are hard to obtain and NOT everyone has them, where mobs hit so hard you have to use all your abilities to put a pack down, but where people feel they are actually having FUN with each other.

That's also the reason why I'm doing the ironman challenge. I need to feel I'm having FUN, doing something hard. Like e.g. a 5-UBRS in 2005.

And that's the thing I've been getting from GW2, while getting money and mats to craft my precursor and then my legendary, over two years. FUN.

Ironing is hard (II)

I'm still alive ! And I'm lvl 60, starting in OUTLAND !

Wee, a few tries later, Shaniron, my nth attempt at the Ironman challenge, finally launched like a ROCKET. I crossed the 28 death mark level of my 2nd monk, then I crossed the 33 death mark level of my 3rd monk and then...I never stopped. Until now, that is.

I'm the first guy on EU-Silvermoon to be registered on the wowchallenges site and properly do Ironman to lvl 60 !

http://wowchallenges.com/index.php?Show=IronMan

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/silvermoon/Shaniron/simple

Asmongold is at lvl 75.

There are only 11 ironmen registered in the whole world !

And... am I going to become one of this rare class ? Pray that I do. 

I'm feeling that Outland is hard, Hellfire, with all its underground mobs, a Fel Reaver, packed spots, mines, and all that stuff. But at least I'm flying, something that I kind of missed in Azeroth.

I'll stop now for a few days, my account despawned after 30 days and I want rest XP, which I hope will continue for 10 days. 1 bar every 1/3 days gets blue,  so 20 bars = 1 level = 6.66 days. If I remember correctly, the rest XP goes up to 1.5 levels so that means 10 days rest.

I need a rest. Lvl 60 and I'm exhausted ;-)

PS: Blizzard, don't hurry with that silly Legion prepatch and its changes, namely, the "AUTOMATIC" specialization that will ruin the ironman challenges for everyone. Take yout time.