The Queues

Oct16

I’m not sure why, but lately if I queue for battlegrounds, especially when solo, you can have mismatched teams for a significant amount of time.  I did a Gilneas a while back where we went pretty much the whole game with 9/10 players.  I did a WSG where we were down 4 players for 3-4 minutes.  I did another WSG where 2 players left and again, 2-3 minutes before anyone queued in.  What gives?

Also, whenever a dungeon shows up with extra loot, you are in for a bad time.  I did an Eye of Azshara tonight for the awards and first had a tank afk for several minutes so he could “do a shot” with his druid guild mate.  Then I blocked the druid for randomly saying “penis” and then the tank for using racism.  Yep, it always goes that way.

Quiet on the front

Oct4

I haven’t had a whole lot to post lately.  I’m in guilds that are effectively dead on Sargeras, Whisperwind, and Ghostlands.  I’m not on a raid team, nor a pvp group.  World pvp is not a thing both because the world defense messages are gone, and it’s far too imbalanced.  You can get rocked almost instantly with a preemptive strike by someone else.

I’ve also been occupied by other activities such as my crochet projects and putting together my dad’s dads WW2 letters.

New Pet: Shadow!

Sep16

Mistwidget sent me a new pet! I was talking about getting this last night when I was playing Simcity.  Very cute!  It has fox animations (scratching it’s ears , sitting ) and changes from a tan color to a purple shadow, sometimes with a solid poof of clouds.

 

 

 

He also sleeps if you are idle too long, like a lot of the cats, or at least, the Cinder Kitten does.

 

I really need to get back on leveling battle pets, I have at least 10 to do.

Casting animation changes, and we’re on Argus!

Sep11

One thing I like about Legion is that it’s sent us to older zones.  I don’t want to ever see a mass update of old zones to high level zones, like Lineage 2 did.  For instance with Blazing Swap, I believe it started out around level 60, then they went to 80, and now it’s even higher I believe.  There was some tweaking during the Cataclysm, but at no point did they take a level 20ish zone like the Mithril Mines and make it fucking level 80, and destroy half of the area in the process.

Yesterday I started out heading to the Exodar.  The last time I visited this was probably last expansion to crush Horde who were attacking it. It hasn’t flown anywhere since it landed in BC, but we got to take a trip!

 

 

And fight, what else, demons!

 

 

I also ran into Turalyon who we haven’t seen for so long it was actually in the loading screen tips for a while.  We also see Arator the Redeamer, who I remember from my time patrolling, and questing, in Honor Hold.  He mopes around the inn and had some dialog I remember standing around listening to.  Finally he gets to see his parents, who are Alleria and Turalyon.  Man, it only took like 10 years?

 

 

Main npcs are looking  better and better all the time, I must say. We’re getting a lot of silver foxes lately, on top of all that.

 

Oh and  yeah, spells and animations got a lot of updates!  Smite and ‘holy fire’ have new casting animations for disc, as well as HW Radiance.  It looks really good!  Wild growth for druids looks kind of “earth bendery” and my resto shamans healing spells look equally “water bendery”.  Holy paladins don’t seem to have any changes, though. The “I just did something” idle stance is different too.  Blizzard for my frost mage looks much improved and my gnome has a few new casting animations as well.  I still make the ‘angry face’ when casting flame strike but Blizzard hard-casting and meteor look pretty sweet. I had no idea any of that was coming.

Mercy is getting changes

Aug25

I’ve been saying for  a while that Mercy needed some changes.  Note that I didn’t say BUFFS, because she was basically fine, OP in some instances if one wishes to be fair. 3 major things in my mind.

Her rez encouraged game play of getting her ult, and then hiding and 1. not healing and 2. encouraging her team to all die in one place so she could swoop in and mass rez.  This was beneficial because she could return more than one person from dead to full health which is much better than healing a single person.  And since she couldn’t rez when she was dead, she had to hide and therefore stop healing.

I felt this was dumb because as a healer, my job is to heal, not avoid healing.  I refused to hide and big rez, and got called an idiot.  Yes, it was ideal to big rez and reset a fight but, I refused to do it on the grounds that it was dumb game play.

The other issue was her ability to reset fights.  I’ve done it myself plenty of times, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating game play.  For example, a Zarya ult leads into a quad kill from a Pharah/Junkrat/Mccree/whatever.  Oh wait, that hiding Mercy now flys in and UNDO BUTTONS the entire mass kill.  Oh my, wasn’t that fun!  Or your team is trying to take point B and you kill the tank and 2 dps and you’re about to… NO THAT’S OK MERCY JUST Murazond’s Hourglass the fight back to before the kills happened.  It was amazingly annoying to only get somewhere if the healer was dead or had their rez down. Especially when the healer is encouraged to HIDE.

The last thing was her mobility.  Yes, the guardian thing is really nice, but you are dependent on your team mates being in range and positioned decently.  You can’t fly to the Genji flanking across the map or the Tracer camping the enemy spawn.   I was hoping for a wings based disengage or something.

Instead, I got fixes to everything I was displeased about.  Her rez is no longer an ultimate, it’s on a timer.  She can only rez one person.  This fixes team rez resets and hiding to use a big rez.

Her new ultimate allows her to FLY, heal and damage boost from longer distances, guardian fly from farther, heal and damage boost more, AND her gun is stronger.

So, THANKS BLIZZARD in a non-sarcastic fashion! And like the D.va suggested fix (got called an idiot for saying she should be safe from her own ult, and got downvoted to hell), I was right again.