Disreputable
I haven't been playing quite so much Battle for Azeroth as I expected I would; my paultry reputation gains shown above will show that. When I decided to switch to my paladin, I levelled her by focusing on the main storyline quests in each zone, and she hit 120 shortly before unlocking Kul Tourist. Unfortunately, that left her a bit behind on reputation, and with a seemingly never-ending supply of side-quests dotted all over the map. I've been completing them here-and-there as I wander about doing world quests, but there's still a lot left over.
I ran through the alliance quests up in the Arathi Highlands warfront, which rewarded me a pair of 7th Legionnaire's Armguards, and then did the week's world boss, Warbringer Yenajz, who kindly dropped a Band of Intense Gravitation, so my gear's not doing bad considering I haven't done much at all this week. I really need to get my UI and keybinds sorted out for paladin healing and then hit some heroics.
That's about it. Battle for Azeroth really is more-of-the-same compared to Legion. I'm enjoying it; I'm logging in 3+ nights a week, but it's not super-exciting. And that's okay. It's a fun little source of gaming to-do lists, and that's all I ask of an MMO.
A blagust wrap-up, of sorts
So, blaugust is over, and it's been a fantastic experience. This blog wouldn't exist without it, and I'm incredibly proud of how far it's come from just a handful of plain text files and one simple PHP script. It's pretty fully-featured now; there's not much I want to add. I didn't write as many posts as I wanted, but I did enough to make me happy, and the more importantly, participating the Discord community has been wonderful. I sort of waiting for a wrap-up post from Bel, and then I suppose we'll use the results of that to hand out prizes.
I think Blaugust is an incredible initiative and it's important that something like it exists for the blogging community. I miss the old internet; I miss personal websites and weird fansites, and I dislike the endless homogenisation of user-generated content in the walled gardens of social media. Anything that encourages people to put their content online in their own spaces is a good thing in my eyes, and so I congratulate Bel for running this event.
In gaming news, I decided to shelve my druid and worked this weekend on levelling my paladin, hitting 120 on Sunday afternoon. I know I've set myself back by a couple of weeks by re-rolling now, but I'll soon catch up. I blitzed through a bunch of world quests, getting her item level up to 295, and I'll run island expeditions tonight to give her Heart of Azeroth a boost tonight. And playing retribution vs. balance is like night and day; even in worse gear I seem to be able to handle bigger pulls and complete objectives quicker.
For other games, I still haven't really settled on anything. I played a litttle Q3A, some GTA5, and a tiny amount of Kingdoms of Amalur. I even bought an XBox One controller to use with my PC, which works flawlessly -- it's nice having the Xbox and Windows 10 share hardware without any effort needed.
I forgot to mention; I tried out
Adventure Capitalist after watching
this YouTube video about self-playing/idle games, and wasn't that impressed. I don't like the progress bar countdown model it uses; I feel like resource gain feels better when it's smoothed out.
Ding 120, now start again
It's now day 30 of Blaugust, so the end is very much in sight. I haven't posted every day, far from it; my posting was roughly daily up until the 17th, and then I disappeared. Oh well, I'm not going to beat myself up about it; I disappeared because I got totally sucked into Battle for Azeroth, and I enjoyed every minute. I played a little in the evenings since launch, and then spent the first weekend just completely immersed. I finished up all the Kul'Tiras zones, hit 120, did a lot of profession work, ran Island Expeditions... and then decided to reroll.
I spent a lot of time debating on switching away from my druid main, and then ultimately didn't. And the moment I hit 120 and started the old familiar (but perfectly pleasant) cycle of daily quests and dungeons I felt an incredible sense of buyer's remorse. So rather than dwell on that and power through, I decided to start levelling my paladin. She's only 114 at the moment, and I've barely started on her professions, but I'm feeling much happier to have made the descision. Plus, I'm only a casual player and the Artifact Knowledge catchup system will kick in, so I'm not really going to be behind any curve I care about. I'll unlock Dark Iron Dwarves a little later, but so what?
The process of levelling to 120 and unlocking all the things was largely an enjoyable one. I like all the Alliance-side dungeons -- I haven't run all of the ones that unlock at 120 yet. All three zones on Kul'Tiras have their charms, though I have to say Stormsong Valley is my least favourite, despite the excellent old-sea-god cultists vibe that I really love.
I'm also on the hunt for another game to play "on the side". All Warcarft makes gaming life dull, so I've been trying out a few things; namely Kingdoms of Amalur and Phantom Doctrine. I've also been noodling around with some coding towards making an idle clicker game, a genre which I've always loved and wanted a go at making.
Starting out in Tiragarde Sound
It's been a few days since I sat down and wrote a blog post; my dreams of a Rainbow Diamond blaugust award are slipping through my fingers... But I will persevere. That's not to say I haven't done anything on the blog. There's a new header, and a much less distracting background, and I've added OpenGraph support and refactored how the page header is rendered. Minor changes, but nice to have, and I think the blog is better off for them.
Battle for Azeroth launched; did you notice? I headed off into Kul'Tiras with The Rogue and we've been working our way through Tiragarde Sound. We've only played a little in the evenings, so we're only 112, but this weekend I'm planning a big push, complete with lashings of rum, snacks, and a terribly abused sleeping schedule. So far though, I'm really impressed. The quests are fun (apart from Show Me What You've Got, which is terrible, and whoever implemented it should feel bad), the environments look gorgeous, I got this awesome tricorn hat, and Boralus is rapidly becoming one of my favourite cities. I've spent a fair chunk of time just fishing, cooking, and working on my professions (herbalism and inscription). I'm definitely taking BfA launch at a much more relaxed pace than I did Legion, and I'm enjoying it much more for it.
In fact, I went and looked at my guild's roster yesterday and there's only five characters that are above level 110, the highest is at 117. I can't help but feel that's a little sad -- not that we don't have any 120s yet, but that so few players have made a start on the journey to 120 at all. I don't want to regret my decision to stay Alliance and stay in this guild, as it means a lot to me.
