Blessing of Kings
World of Warcraft from a Paladin's Perspective
Wednesday, November 09, 2022
Overwatch 2
Tuesday, November 08, 2022
Dragonflight?
So I haven't been writing much lately. I also haven't been playing much either. I haven't bought Dragonflight, or even logged in since the pre-patch. No Jellycat or whatever for me.
I don't know if I will either. Shadowlands was really, really bad story-wise. Mechanically, I thought it was okay, but I think that opinion is out of step with the rest of the community. So I'm not excited in the least for Dragonflight.
Perhaps the real issue is my guild. I like my guild and the people in it. But since I moved to the East coast, I can't really raid with them. I guess I'm not looking forward to trying to find a new guild either.
Or I don't know. I haven't really played any other games in this drought. I got a new job about six months ago, and I think that is taking a lot of my mental energy, though not really my time.
Are you excited for Dragonflight?
Monday, November 07, 2022
Twitter Warcraft Story
Blizzard is running a pretty neat tie-in on Twitter: #WarcraftStory. If you tweet
Character Name
Realm
Region
#WarcraftStory
@Warcraft
They'll generate a small story and graphic from your armoury and achievements.
Here's mine for Coriel:
It's a pretty nice use of Twitter and social media. Almost perfectly suited for the medium. Well done by the devs and community team.
Friday, July 01, 2022
Canada Day Updates
Happy Canada Day, everyone!
World of Warcraft
I haven't been playing much. I've pretty much just been logging in to send out missions. My convenant people are level 55/56, and I would like to get them all to 60.
Final Fantasy XIV
I finished leveling Red Mage and Dancer to 90. I did the final Shadowbringers role quests and capstone quest. It was quite good.
I also did the role quests for Endwalker. I really like these quests where the story goes back to the different nations and looks at the challenges of peace, of the repercussions for the changes that happened in the MSQ.
Lost Ark
I've also been playing a little Lost Ark, though I've kind of stopped recently. It's a fun ARPG MMO-style game from Korea. It has a variety of different classes (gender-locked, though). The gameplay is pretty good. The story is more or less what you would expect from a Korean game, but is decent enough.
Wednesday, June 08, 2022
Server Merges in WoW Classic
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
First Impressions of Diablo: Immortal
First off, I'm not going to discuss monetization in this post. I've observed before that F2P ends up poisoning the conversation around the game, and I'd like to to discuss the game itself. As well, I'm still pretty low level, and haven't reached a point where the monetization actually impacts me.
Diablo: Immortal is a Free-2-Play mobile phone/tablet game, though it does have a PC version. The PC version is technically a beta, but as character data is shared between mobile and PC, it's live for all intents and purposes.
Now, I don't actually play any games on my phone. But I decided to try D:I on the phone given that it's the native environment. I have an iPhone X, so a couple generations behind the very latest. The game ran pretty well. Controls are fairly straightforward and easy to use. Your left thumb controls a "joystick" for movement, and your right thumb presses the attack and ability buttons.
However, after about 5-10 minutes, my phone got uncomfortably hot. I'm not sure if this is normal, or if it's just a little too old, or if I should have turned down the settings. But in any case, I removed D:I from my phone and installed it on PC. Everything carried over, so I picked up where I left off.
Diablo: Immortal is a somewhat simplified Diablo III. Most of the classes and abilities are very similar to D3 abilities. However, there's only one primary attack, and 4 extra abilities, plus one ultimate ability. No runes modifying abilities so far. Abilities appear to be cooldown-based so far.
I'm playing a Crusader. Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Monk, Wizard, and Necromancer are also available.
The story is very Diablo, featuring many characters from the series. It's also rather grim, maybe aiming a little more towards Diablo II. It's pretty standard, you're chasing down and trying to destroy Shards of the Worldstone, which are being used by a variety of bad guys. For now I'm just following the main questline, but there are dungeons, bounties and a couple types of rifts you can also do.
D:I is kind of an MMO, but one where playing with others is very optional (at least so far). For example, you see other people when running around in the world, and you can opt to do dungeons and rifts with others using automated match-making. But if you don't want to play with others, you can do the dungeons and rifts solo.
The UI is interesting. It's obviously meant for mobile. So for example, there's no right-click or drag-and-drop in the UI. Everything is button-based. It does have a nice feature where gear and menu items have a red gem on them if you can do something with them.
You can upgrade rare items and gems. In a nice twist, if you equip a new item, you can automatically "transfer" the upgraded level and gems.
Diablo: Immortal is clearly a mobile game. The graphics are decent enough, but obviously meant for mobile. It's lacking a lot of the bells and whistles that a PC game would have. For example, it doesn't have destructible barrels and jars, which is pretty traditional for Diablo.
If you feel like playing more Diablo, give Diablo:Immortal a whirl.
Tuesday, May 03, 2022
The Creation Catalyst
This tier, Blizzard introduced a mechanic to help with Tier gear: the Creation Catalyst.
Previously, the problem with Tier sets was that you could be unlucky and never get Tier to drop for you. Or perhaps worse, you have Tier shoulders, and a higher item-level non-Tier shoulders drop, and you have to choose between the set bonus or discarding the higher level item.
The Creation Catalyst pretty much solves all the issues with Tier. Once a week, you can transform a non-Tier item into the Tier item of the same item level. It's pretty much the equivalent of allowing you to purchase a Tier item of any slot at the rate of one per week.
So the first couple of times you use the Creation Catalyst, it's to finish off your 4-piece set bonus. Then after that, you can start transforming upgrades, always keeping your set bonus.
It even allows solo-players or non-raiders to get their Tier set bonus. You can transform the Zerith Mortis rewards into Tier, so you should get your set bonus in 4 weeks.
All in all, the Creation Catalyst was an excellent mechanic that solves many of the issues with Tier set bonuses. I hope it is carried forward for future content.