Dragonflight Professions paralysis

It was much easier to get to True Friend status with Wrathion that I’d been afraid it would be — I just have to find some other players to tag along with at the Obsidian Throne, and that hasn’t been as hard to do as I’d feared it might be — so I’ve gone ahead and started working on getting Kamalia to be best buds with Sabellian as well. That way, I thought, I wouldn’t have to worry about trying to get Obsidian Throne rep with any of my other characters — they could just roll up and buy the Cosmetics they want. I realized suddenly this week, though, that the Obsidian Throne quests are perhaps the most significant source of Primal Chaos for my playstyle… and I am not yet to the stage of having more Primal Chaos than I know what to do with.

I do Crafting Professions mostly for myself, and mostly just for the Mog appearances.
I’ve specced out my Crafting Professions to push for new patterns, only to find that I don’t have nearly enough of the materials to make them (hello Primal Chaos!), or that I need more skill to Train a pattern to make one of the components of the item.
I’ll definitely push for skill 100 with Kaelinda’s Tailoring (but probably not Kaelyla’s), and maybe also with Kamalia’s Leatherworking. First, though, I’m going to have to get Kerisa’s Inscription leveled up and specced out into the appropriate branch of Archiving so that I can make my own Missives so that I can make stuff for skill-ups that people will actually want to buy on the AH… And it feels like I don’t want to start making stuff for the final push from 60 or 75 to 100 skill points until I’ve opened up and put a meaningful amount of profession knowledge into the specialization that improves Inspiration, Resourcefulness, and Crafting Speed for all crafting. With all of that, I am feeling rather paralyzed in my Professions progression at the moment.

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Scrapping was a great idea. Generating a reagent required for further crafting from it was not.

I was thinking about what to do next to continue leveling Kaelinda’s Dragonflight Tailoring when I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet that Battle for Azeroth would be the only expansion for which I hadn’t fully leveled Tailoring. During Battle for Azeroth itself, I’d done just enough Tailoring to craft the basic Tidespray Linen set. Then, having read on Wowhead and the Blizzard Watch Queue and Gnomecore and Coffee Cakes & Crits that leveling crafting Professions during that expansion required an absolutely absurd quantity of raw materials, I decided not to bother with trying to max it out. By now, though, I figured I had enough gold to buy Tidespray Linen off the AH by the freight car. So Kaelinda spent the weekend in Dazar’alor making piles and piles of Tidespray Linen stuff, then feeding it through the Scrapper until she’d gotten enough Expulsom to craft a few more of the items that would actually give her skill points…
Well, at least that’s done now.
Fortunately, I didn’t bother maxxing out Kamalia’s Leatherworking in Shadowlands, so I will feel no such compulsion to go back and cap out her Battle for Azeroth Leatherworking as well 😛

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making progress in Korthia

It’s been about two months since I finally got started on Korthia.
Today, I finished collecting the Korthia questing versions of all of the 9.1 Covenant sets.
I’m about halfway through Revered with Death’s Advance.
I have 14K Stygia, which is enough to buy both of the Death’s Advance Venthyr sets as soon as I ding Exalted… but I also want the Death’s Advance Night Fae set. I am dreading having to just flat out grind the remaining 4K Stygia for it.

The worst part of Shadowlands, for me, has been the punishing Stygia mechanics. Even with completely ignoring Ve’nari as I did, Stygia is so agonizingly slow to get, and you need so much of it for the Death’s Advance Cosmetic sets, and you lose so much of it when you die in the Maw that it is very, very, very discouraging. Before Patch 9.1, you got 20 Stygia every time a soul entered the Soulkeeper while doing Return Lost Souls, so you could get 400 Stygia per week and that felt like a decent reward for the time invested doing the quest. Then Patch 9.1 removed that, and although I understand why the introduction of the repeatable version of the Return Lost Souls caused the devs to make that change, I still haven’t forgiven them for doing it.

At the time that I first went to Korthia, I wrote, “I think I’ll go do the 9.0 Covenant Campaigns for Night Fae and Necrolords with Kaelinda — putting Chapters 5-9 of Korthia on hold until I do — so that I can do each of the Covenant story-advancing chapters of Korthia as a member of the appropriate Covenant”. Then I spent the past two months feeling completely psychologically blocked about playing through the 9.0 Necrolords and Night Fae Campaigns again. It took being halfway through Revered and realizing that if I wanted to get any Death’s Advance reputation from doing the rest of the Korthia Campaign, then I needed to start working on it for me to finally push past the block. I did Chapters 3 & 4 of Necrolords, then swapped Covenants and did Chapter 3 of Night Fae yesterday night. Now if I can just keep going…

So, I’ve still got to do the Korthia and Zereth Mortis story Campaigns. I’d like to get a few pieces (definitely belt & robe, perhaps also cloak pants and boots?) of the Sepulcher of the First ones set via items purchased with Sandworn Relics and upgraded using the Creation Catalyst. I have 54K Anima left of Kyrian Cosmetics to acquire. I’ve also got to finish the 9.0 Night Fae Campaign with my Druid (she’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter 5).
Of course, my current state of lagging has arisen almost entirely from my own play decisions, which have in turn been influenced by the circumstances of my out-of-Azeroth life. I’ve learned from the last several expansions, though, that I’ll need to stay in Shadowlands until these goals are Done, because if I leave, I won’t come back later to complete them.

But then, it might not be so bad to already have the first round of catch-up mechanics in place by the time I finally get to the Dragon Isles 😛

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Current Shadowlands alt priorities

Meanwhile, in Shadowlands…

For awhile, I had all four of my mains in the Night Fae doing the Queen’s Conservatory. Kaurinka recently got hers upgraded to Tier 4. The others waited until they’d gotten their Conservatories upgraded to Tier 2 before beginning to nurture Spirits so that they could use 2x Wildseed Root Grain for every Spirit. Collectively, we’ve gotten the pets multiple times and a few of the other things, but we’re still trying for the Spirit Tender’s Bulb. Kaurinka has restored all of the Spirits she collected before she began actively doing the Conservatory and is only getting new ones from Fair Exchange for a Soul and an occasional Return Lost Souls, so she doesn’t have any active wildseeds right now. Kaelyla and Kamalia both have collections of Spirits that they are actively nurturing, but they’ll run out in another week or two. Kaelinda hadn’t even done the Conservatory Tier 1 activation yet when she was in the Night Fae before, so after she got it going, she only had a few Spirits to nurture. I only really need one Mage to upgrade the Conservatory to Tier 5; while Kaelyla is working on that (recently upgraded to Tier 3), Kaelinda began using the Anima she collected to buy the Renown version of the Faewoven set. Kamalia also began using her Anima to buy the Renown version of the Runewarden’s set; she decided the autumn/fire orange of the Renown version of the set was more interesting to her than the green of the Conservatory version of the set. But having four active characters was exhausting, and having all of them in the same Covenant was, quite honestly, boring. Kaurinka and Kamalia are therefore currently resting; I’m only checking in with Kamalia to turn over wildseeds.

After Kaelinda had restored all of the Spirits she’d gathered (she had only gotten 4/9 of the Night Fae Renown pieces, but she can come back for the rest later — or Kaelyla can get them), she went back to the Venthyr and began doing the Ember Court. And my goodness, the Ember Court is a lot of work!

Kaelinda and Kaelyla are in what I have been thinking of as “Anima Vacuum” mode — trying to get as much Anima each night as I can with both characters — though I don’t do all the available Anima WQs, just the ones I feel the most like doing.

I’m also attempting to get ready for Fall Semester, which will be beginning all too soon. It didn’t take long to get my GE courses ready to go for Fall semester. It’s taken me awhile to get mental traction on reworking my Organic Chemistry course, for which I am doing a substantial overhaul, though. OChem will continue to occupy a lot of time and attention as the semester progresses because I’ll be working on updating my day-to-day course materials as I go along.

With all of this, I’ve been routinely staying up until about 2 am — which isn’t good for my physical or mental health…

~*~*~

I sorely need a new computer to play WoW. My current laptop has a 256 GB harddrive which is somehow almost completely full, to the point that every night it complains about being out of memory and sometimes I can’t take screenshots or the game crashes. I’ve also been getting an annoying lua error which keeps resetting all the UI tutorial banners on some of my characters. I’m getting tired of turning them off every time I log in. I definitely need a new computer before Dragonflight — and before I do Korthia, Zereth Mortis, or the 9.2.5 Blood Elf questline, so that I can take lots of story screenshots that I will probably never look at again! 😛

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I’m burning out on 9.0 and I just wanna go do 9.2

I’m just not feeling the Renown grind this week. I look at the base zone WQs — what can I do for Anima? what can I do to complete Callings? — and I don’t feel like going out and doing them.

I want to go to Zereth Mortis. I want to explore and scout the place out for pretty locations for Mog photoshoots. I want to do the 9.2 Campaign. I want to get whatever the most easily-obtained coloration of the zone set is. I want to do whichever category of Cipher of the First Ones research it is that gives buffs for world activities, and whichever one opens up the Zereth Mortis puzzle minigames — I enjoyed the puzzle minigames in Legion and Battle for Azeroth — and ignore all the other categories.

But I haven’t yet gotten the breadcrumb quest to even start Zereth Mortis. I think it’s because I’m currently in Covenants for which I haven’t completed the 9.0 Campaigns and because I haven’t done the opening chapters of the 9.1 Campaign. I should go do the opening chapters of the 9.1 Campaign because I’m getting tired of being ground-bound; it would be nice to be able to fly again. And I just read on Wowhead that there’s been a hotfix that “Each of the four original Covenant campaign questlines now reward a total of 20 additional Renown.” So I should do the Kyrian Campaign with Kaelinda and the Necrolords Campaign with Kaelyla, because those are the Covenants that they aren’t maxxed out in Renown already with. Which is all scrambled up from my original plans, but at this point, eh, whatever….

The Zereth Mortis zone set reminds me of the Vulpera aesthetic, so I tried it out on Khariba, and sure enough, it looks super cute on her:

Choral set with Shadowmoon Cowl and Mok’Morokk’s Beat Stick

Why is it that the LFR coloration of raid sets always seems to be the green one?

They all have silly hats; the Warlock hat is thankfully not offensive anymore, but is rather the silliest of the lot. The Warlock shoulders, robe, and belt are the most interesting. The other two robes are handsome enough, I guess, but feel… plain, somehow. Still, if I can get Kaelinda and Kaelyla’s iLevels up enough, I might eventually go do Sepulcher of the First Ones LFR. Fortunately for me as a Mage, the Priest robe, Warlock shoulders, Warlock robe, and Warlock belt all have lookalike pieces– but the Mage robe does not have a lookalike piece.

~*~*~

Even though I don’t intend to do anything with her in the Shadowlands for a long time yet, I brought Karaelia out to Bastion for the sake of having a character of every armor class positioned to prep for 10.0 — and wherever Karaelia goes, her twin Kaohana goes, too. Both of them have activated Threads of Fate and pledged to the Kyrian.


Karaelia has been wearing her outfit since November of 2020, and Kaohana has been wearing her outfit since February of 2021! They are both rather anxious for some new clothes!

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WoW 10.0 needs to be spectacular… but I’m afraid that it won’t be

Between the loss of reputation due to the reveals of Blizzard’s internal culture woes and the glowing reviews that the latest FFXIV expansion is receiving, WoW 10.0 needs to be spectacular.

Furthermore, three out of WoW’s past four expansions (including the current Shadowlands) have been, well, misses — expansions where I’ve said to myself, ” meh, I’ll wait to see what comes next…” To be sure, there have been things that I enjoyed more than I expected about Warlords of Draenor, Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands — but the overarching grand story plots certainly weren’t it.

And then there is this… and this… and I’m losing hope that WoW 10.0 will be something that I’ll be able to be really and truly excited about right from the initial announcement.

I’ll probably play it anyway just to say that I played WoW all the way to 10.0, but then I might drift away from Azeroth.

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it’s like the Sparkle Pony all over again, only more serious this time

Darn it if that Celestial Observer’s set that just got added to the cash shop isn’t pretty. It might even be just the thing to encourage Kerisa to get her feathery Boomkin bum back into Horrific Visions of Orgrimmar to get Ashjra’kamas upgraded to its final appearance — that set and that cape look like they’d go together quite beautifully. If the ghastly news about Blizzard’s internal culture hadn’t broken open over the summer, I’d have bought the Celestial Observer’s set and be showing off new Mogs with it in this post already. Now, though, it seems like a money grab and an attempt to distract (or something) from the increasingly bad PR, and I feel rather conflicted about giving Blizzard anything more than my sub.

The “Baby Murloc Satch-Shells” that have also just been released seem like an attempt to ride the coattails of the popularity of The Child from The Mandalorian. Apparently they’re tied to a 6-month sub, so I’ll be getting them by default. I’d rather have the Celestial Observer’s set by default.

Wowhead has some early datamining of the Mythic Progenitor Tier set models. The Mage set looks really bland to me; I think I might be more interested in collecting the lookalike items for the Priest and Warlock sets (from the LFR colorations, of course). The Warlock robe I think looks especially nifty with the ribboned panel with the design that goes across all the ribbons on the front of the skirt.

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habit/routine, playing dress-up, story…?

My WoW playing lately has been driven or dominated by what Kaylriene has recently discussed as the time-wasting or “hamster wheel” aspects of the game. I’m still logging in almost every day, but I’m just doing Anima Conductor Treasures and my favorite super-easy WQs to get my 1K Anima each week. I’m marking time, making minimal increments of progression toward Transmogrification collecting goals (by the proxies of collecting Renown and Anima and Grateful Offerings) between the widely-spaced opportunities when I feel like I have enough time and attention to do a segment of story progression.

Transmogrification is where I get the most fun out of WoW, as you might guess from the persistence and prominence of “Sunday on the Promenade” as a feature of this blog. I love designing new outfits & looks for my characters. With each expansion and patch, I am most interested in finding out what nifty new things there will be to wear and what interesting new character customizations will be available. I catalog which items are both awesome looking and not overly difficult to acquire relative to the comfort zone of my playstyle, then focus my gameplay toward obtaining those items and making outfits with them.

Although I am so, so far behind on experiencing the current storylines, I’ve appreciated and agreed with posts about how the story of WoW is struggling in Shadowlands such this one by Kaylriene and this one by Redbeard.

I’ve found that I engage with the story of Azeroth most at what I think of as the “middle” level — the zone and Campaign storylines. The “little” side-quest storylines can be quite interesting, but I don’t make the effort to search out all of them. As for the “big” overall narrative, well… it lost me in Warlords of Draenor.

For me, the premise of Warlords of Draenor was just a little too reality-warping, even for a fantasy universe. By interacting with the Draenor of the other timeway in such drastic ways, we essentially pulled it out of its original timeway into our own timeway. Between that and the magnitude of the differences between Draenor and Outland, I am more comfortable thinking of Draenor as just another continent (that happens to be on another world) than as a version of the past of Outland. Then there was the “boys’ trip” kerfluffle, which was only tokenly addressed by the roles of Draka and Yrel — and was a clue to Blizzard’s now very public internal woes.

Legion had a good overall premise and narrative. I think that we could have gotten to the premise of “the Burning Legion comes roaring back to Azeroth and we have to make our Final Stand and Stop Them For Good This Time” by another route that didn’t involve timeway shenanigans and alt-Gul’dan.

Battle for Azeroth‘s main premise and Sylvanas and N’Zoth narratives lost me again. I also couldn’t ever quite get over the cognitive dissonance of having the Zandalari be our enemies in Kun-Lai Summit and Isle of Thunder, then our buddy-buddies in Dazar’alor with seemingly very few hard feelings — even with the handwaving that the Zandalari invaders in Pandaria were Zul loyalists whose activities were not officially sanctioned by King Rastakhan, and that Princess Talanji had concluded that the best folks to help her with the Blood Troll problem would be the ones who had thoroughly kicked the butts of that rogue group.

And then there’s Shadowlands, in which I will be more interested, when I finally get there, in how the 9.1 Campaign advances the smaller Covenant narratives than in what it discloses about the larger Sylvanas-and-Jailer’s plot narrative. Because I don’t really care about it, I’ve let myself get spoiled about the Sylvanas-and-Jailer’s plot narrative while trying to stay only minimally spoiled about the advancement of the Covenant storylines.

In each of these expansions, because of my playstyle, I’ve felt like my character’s actions and interactions have mattered the most on the zone-leveling and Garrison/Order Hall/Suramar/Covenant Campaign storyline level. I feel like I could, if I so desired, write an in-character RP story about how my character(s) participated in and thought and felt about these events. The Battle for Azeroth War Campaign, however, was just a vehicle for showing me what was happening in the faction war because the events that happened weren’t things I was particularly enthused about having my characters actually be participants in doing (except for rescuing Baine from Sylvanas — Kamalia did help out with that!). I feel the same about the Torghast questchain and the Sylvanas-and-Jailer’s plot stuff in Shadowlands — it’s a way to show me what is happening with the faction leaders, but it’s not really stuff that my characters would be personally involved in doing. I may be a Big Damn Hero, but I’m not that much of a Big Damn Hero.

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the scandal in Irvine

It is said that to not speak up in support of the oppressed is to tacitly assent to the oppression, so I suppose I had ought to say something about the recent news concerning Blizzard’s corporate culture and the experience of working for Blizzard. I didn’t read the lawsuit itself, but I’ve read most of the coverage from Wowhead and Blizzard Watch, the article about it in the New York Times, and various thoughtful posts by the small list of active bloggers I currently read. Like others, I am saddened and sickened, disgusted and disappointed that such acutely and chronically distressing things have happened at Blizzard — somehow I’d hoped that Blizzard would be better than that. I thought for a bit on whether I should cancel my sub, and stop playing World of Warcraft for awhile — I do have other games to play now, Horizon Zero Dawn where I still haven’t made it out of the starting area, and Bloons Monkey City which is mostly for my kids but in which I could get more involved if I wanted, and it might be fun to run through Portal again and see if I can get past that one level where I stalled out a decade ago… I decided to keep playing; I agree with the sentiments expressed by Gnomecore and Wrath of Kubla Khan about the value of continuing to support the “normal people” at the company — the 2500+ employees who signed on to the open letter rebuking their company leadership, the artists and animators and code writers, etc, who actually do the nitty gritty nuts and bolts work of making the game that I enjoy. Besides, at this time of year I always have to make myself take a break from playing WoW while I’m scrambling to get my courses prepared for the impending doom of the beginning of Fall semester, now only a month away. So for me to say that I was taking a break for ethical protest reasons seems like it would be kind of disingenuous.

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can’t get out of going to Twisting Corridors, after all *sigh*

Well, damn.

I abandoned the Torghast questchain after rescuing Thrall; the Patch 9.1 trailer spoiled Anduin’s fate thoroughly enough that I felt like I didn’t need to do the last two steps of the questchain just for the sake of the lore.

The latest news from the Patch 9.1 PTR, via Wowhead, is that there’ll be a skip for the Torghast questline. Chapter 2 of the Covenant Campaign only requires doing the first three steps of the Torghast questline, but it’d be nice to be able to skip it and jump right into Chapter 3, where the real story of the Covenant Campaign begins. Not particularly surprisingly, however, being able to use the skip most likely will require one character on the account to have completed the whole thing.

This Wowhead post also revealed to me, though, that there was a whole ‘nother questchain that I’d been ignorant of. If you’ve completed the Torghast questchain, there’s another questchain that opens up after defeating Sire Denathrius in Castle Nathria. In Patch 9.1, it, too, can be skipped on alts once one character on the account has done it. Completion/skipping of this second questchain is, however, required to access the Patch 9.1 Campaign.

So I guess I’d better go attempt the Twisting Corridors after all — as three sessions of going just to Floor 6; many thanks to Gnomecore for pointing out that the quest to find three clues about Anduin’s location can be completed in this fashion.

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