Honor's Code

In April, I was perusing my Twitter feed when I saw an announcement from Matt Walsh aka Rhidach. Oh, while no one particularly cares about WoW right now, I suppose I should get around to noting I resigned from writing for Blizzard Watch. — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 While I'm going to miss my column and writing about paladins, I don't play WoW anymore and at this point I'm not sure I will in the future. — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 Life has changed SO MUCH in the last year and I just don't have the time to pay the same attention to the game. I will miss it, though! — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 Matt and his wife recently had a baby and I remember well from those days with both my baby Hammers that neither free time nor energy was in great abundance. I’ve wanted to write for  Blizzard Watch  for a long time, going back to their days before they were called Blizzard Watch. Once I heard about Matt stepping down, I contacte...

In early April, I talked about my experience with leveling a fresh toon in World of Warcraft as part of the Hearthstone promotion to get the new Lady Liadrin Paladin skin. The main issues I ran into were: combat was too short, other players were antisocial and heirlooms made dungeons not fun for anyone who lacked them. Rohan of Blessing of Kings had similar issues leveling for the promotion though he also had issues with the story in the low level zones. I didn't think that the Warcraft Development team would have time to address these concerns with Legion Alpha and now Beta taking up most of their efforts. They proved me wrong. The Devs started rolling out hotfixes to address some of the issues with the low level experience and one specifically to address what Rohan called the TTK (time to kill) issue. Due to the accumulated effect of years’ worth of max-level tuning adjustments, many classes were killing low-level enemies nearly instantaneously, even without heirloom gea...

What do you do with a free night and no Legion Beta invite? SWTOR! I finished Chapter 13. It was pretty good, but again, like all of them, I found it too short. For this chapter, I was really looking forward to seeing Vette enter the KotFE storyline.  Recently, I started a baby Sith Warrior with a guy I used to work with and I've been getting to know Vette better through that toon. Spoiler Alert: I like the way this character is written quite a bit. The initial interaction with her sets the tone well with her wisecracking the prison guard.  In Chapter 13, Vette is more the supporting actress. The star of the show is the Bounty Hunter companion, Gault. I never got far enough with my Bounty Hunter to meet Gault. He was something of an unknown to me and it didn't take long at all for him to turn off my Light Side Jedi Knight. I would have liked the Chapter better had Vette had more screen time. She is still the fun, wise cracking side kick but you can see the last 5 years...

I work the first Wednesday night of every month and I had told our raid leader I wouldn't be on for last week's run. Technically, I volunteer, since the job I'm doing on Wednesday night doesn't pay me, but I like to think of it as work in my mind. I love my Wednesday night job so it's not work in negative connotation, but it's easier to tell someone I can't do something on Wednesday night because I'm 'working' and it has 'work' level priority in my schedule. Much to my surprise when I did log on the next night, I was greeted with a new guild message of the day that stated we were on a raiding hiatus until Legion. Old Raids Even though we have Beta starting today, Legion is still months away. A couple of the team wanted to work on the old Mists of Pandari Meta achievements and I joined in. I'm a relatively easy Dwarf to please, just point me at something that wants to tear my face off and I'm happy. We started with Pandari...

If you recall, at the end of my last Legion post , I was discussing my concern for hybrids being able to maintain two artifacts. Some nights you are going to have too many tanks or too many healers online and you'll need someone to switch to DPS. Most players want to do well in whatever role they are be performing and having a decently progressed artifact looks like its going to be key to that. Blizzard recognized this issue and today, Watcher gave us some details about their proposed solution called Artifact Knowledge. Artifact Knowledge is something you build through Order Hall missions and works as a kind of multiplier to your Artifact power. This system is key to the pacing of overall artifact progression, and to making it easier for players to maintain multiple artifacts if they so desire. For example, at Knowledge Level 7, you would be earning Artifact Power at over triple the base rate. Thus, if you wanted to switch to a spec you hadn't yet tried at that point...

I've now completed SWTOR Chapters 10, 11, and 12 on both my Light side Jedi Knight Guardian and my sort of Dark side Republic Trooper Commando. Major spoilers for the story are included. Consider yourself warned. I'm encouraged that each chapter has gotten better and I'm looking forward to them resolving the cliffhanger ending of Chapter 12 when Chapter 13 launches. If they leave it hanging and move on to the next bit of story, I will be most put out. My main issue with all three chapters was length. Each one felt like it was about 90 minutes or so of content and I knocked each one out in a single night. The problem is I'm paying a sub to get these chapters and 90 minutes of content per month isn't enough to justify it. I'm not sure how long the original KotFE chapters were, but they certainly felt longer, but maybe that's because we got all 9 at once. Chapter 10 I found Chapter 10 to be fairly weak. I did play with Kailyo some on my Imperial Agent ...

There it is. We have a concrete date for Legion. Everything in Warlords just got an expiration date. Legion drops between Week 3 and Week 4 of the NFL Preseason. Week 3 is the most important week, the dress rehearsal. Week 4 is pretty much a bunch of guys who won't be on the team the following Sunday. As far as my own Legion plans, the only thing I know for certain right now is that I want to stick with my Paladin. He's been my main forever and even the couple of times I tried to switch, I always seem to come back to him. After that, I'm lost. The artifact system has me concerned. As a hybrid, I need both artifacts, I would argue that really Druids, Monks and Paladins need all 3. Its still not clear from Alpha if we can even get all three. Even if we CAN get all three, it sounds like maintaining even two is difficult. Blizzard Watch writer, Matthew Rossi mentioned in today's Queue : At present my level 109 Warrior has the Arms and Fury Artifacts and switche...