How many of you have thought about programming for a living? Of being a part of your favorite company on the development side of the gaming industry? Of creating something that could possibly stand the test of time?
Well I have. At least I think I have.
For those that do not know me well enough I work for the school district. In my position I have had the opportunity to work alongside one of our talented computer science teachers. This teacher always told me that I have a knack for computer languages and ultimately a logical brain that could solve problems through computer languages. You know what I do when people tell me I am good at something?
I roll my eyes, allow my self doubt to kick in, and go about my business as if I was not any good at anything. Yeah my personal sense of self worth is so good that I am the poster child for self affirmation.
This time I decided to take my time to try and understand at least how these amazing machines I use to blog, record video, and more commonly play games on. I did a quick web search in order to understand some of the common languages out there and came across this language called java.
Java is not one of the most powerful languages, at least that is the consensus from reddit users in the /r/programming forums, but it is a language that is almost neutral enough for me to at least learn a little bit about how to create a program. I poked around /r/programming for a bit and came across the recommendation to use a website called hackerrank.com which operates as a tutorial center, a hiring platform, and a game. The tutorials work in many different languages and help you to understand some of the limitations and processes of writing code. The game form comes from these coding challenges that award points based on how you solve the logic problems that are presented to you. I think in theory as you solve these logic problems through coding, you come to a point where you have the highest rank of all the other users. This appears to be the point where recruiters will look at your abilities and offer you a job based on how well you are doing.
I am proud to announce that my current rank is at the bottom of the site, I can't even code the program Hello World yet but I am going to take the next thirty days to try and understand the coding language, the coders mentality, and mostly understand how this little machine that I am using is able to operate the way that it does. Who knows maybe I'll be able to reach the point where I can write my own program to create something amazing in the future, or I'll just learn to appreciate the people that have developed these languages so that I can enjoy the many games that I do end up enjoying.
It finally happened, I got my legendary drop. The funny thing is it happened exactly 20 minutes after uploading last weeks post about the drop rate of Legendary gear in World of Warcraft. It happened while opening caches from the emissary world quests. It happened because I had stopped looking for it. I resigned myself to just playing the game and it happened just like people said it would. Last week we had talked about some of the achievement hunting I had been doing. We talked about Pathfinder Part One and Two as a whole, now we will dive a little deeper into the nitty gritty of it.
This week we will look at reputation.
On a boosted character reputation grinds are a little harder than they should be. You start out at a higher level character with no reputation for the base races in Legion but the ability to go almost anywhere. For pathfinder you need to raise your reputation to the third tier for all the groups. This is a hard thing to accomplish because the world quests only give 150 reputation rewards per completion while the revered tier of reputation requires 12,000 + points to reach. I found through some playing around that it is possible through world quests alone, but to really get that reputation you should also complete each zone. So I have gone back to Azsura in order to finish the quest line for the zone. This has taken my reputation to friendly on to honored, and just shy of revered. I believe by the time I finish the story line in the zone the group of Azsura should be complete up to the revered in the zone. I will continue these updates as I continue toward finishing the expansion of Legion in the most complete way possible.
Legendary stats:
Legendary one: 1/67 = 1.49 % drop rate on first legendary
Legendary two: 0/24 = 0%
Total drop rate = 1.09%
The current theory is that once you have one legendary others drop at a quicker rate. I tend to think that is because the item level score is boosted by the legendary making more endgame content available not an actual change in the drop rate.
When we last talked about this subject when it comes to Legendary armor dropping in the game "World of Warcraft" I had talked about the random number generator and the bad luck protection. Well it has been about one week and I still haven't received my first drop on my test character.
This last week I have put an additional ten hours into the game. During this play time I have done some things that increase my chances at a drop and some things that didn't increase my drop rate. I have been working on my "Pathfinder" achievement for Legion which allows flying in the current expansion. The achievement requires you to explore all zones by foot, complete 100 different types of world quest, raise all expansion base reputations to revered, and fully complete the story line in every zone within the expansion. Once this is complete you acquire a faster ground mount speed and the chance to earn "Pathfinder Part II" which does allow flying.
You may be wondering why flying would be important in a legendary seeking experiment. Well some of the drop chances are tied to world bosses, world quests, and Legion invasions. These activities are spread all over the questing zones which makes a lot of your playtime spent traveling around the map, flying just seeds the travel time up just enough to cut yor daily playtime by a few minutes. And we all know that every minute counts when time is limited. These reasons are why I am choosing to grind towards completion of all zones this expansion, it is time to finally see what the game has to offer.
As far as activities spent working towards s a legendary drop this week, I had already cleared the highest tier raid so I was forced to do other activities. I capped my rated player vs player conquest for the item level 915 drop, during which I opened around 5 battle chests. I also completed 5 world quest chains and 2 legion invasions. These activities took my drop chances up to 62, with a zero drop so far.
Legendary 1: 0/62 or 0% drop rate.
Next week we will look at some of the other achievements in the game as well as give another update to how this experiment is going.
We all come to a point in our gaming lifespan where it seems that everyone is better than you, that the random number generator is favoring those around you while leaving you to your own devices. Well that has hit me. In World of Warcraft: Legion legendary armor is distributed by a random number generator which as the community managers present you have a bad luck protection. The longer you go without a legendary the chances of getting a legendary increase. I have three characters at max level not including the mage that I just boosted and still have no legendary armor among any of my max level characters. I wanted to see how long it takes for a drop to happen, this means that I will only play my new boosted character and keeping track of how long it takes for that magic number generator to finally fall in my favor, by the way I should never gamble as me and random number generators do not mix very well.
Baseline:
Every Hour I play at max level I will count as one try.
Every Raid boss kill will count as one try.
Every Dungeon boss kill will count as an attempt.
And, Every emissary cache opened will count as one attempt.
I will count all of these up after every playing session and keep track of how long it actually takes for my mage to gain access to a legendary piece of armor. You can find this series every Monday right here on the blog as I keep you all posted on how long/ how many attempts it actually takes to make the random number generator finally go into my favor.
Starting stats:
Hours played at max level: 16 hours
Raid bosses killed: 15
Dungeon bosses killed: 4
Emissary caches opened: 5
Total attempts: 40
Legendary #1: 0
For those that have played the entire expansion and still haven't gained a legendary piece of armor know that you are not alone. Some of us also have bad luck too.
I recently purchased my pre-purchase for Battle For Azeroth (BFA). I am saying this because like every expansion that comes out I smile to myself as I try and convince myself that I have an exit strategy, that the time has come to explore different games, and that the age of WoW has ended. Well like every expansion I come over to the dark side, dust off my keys and try and get back into the game. This expansion was no different, Legion kept me entertained and I had fun but quickly shoved it aside as I finished leveling one character and then played some simulation games (my first true love). I had moved on, ready to tackle the game a bit at a time depending on whether I had somebody to play with or not as I would not be playing by myself.
I made the mistake, not really a mistake as it was on my bucket list, of going to BlizzCon 2017. After a whirlwind of emotion and fun I came back and jumped back into WoW. The trailer gave me such joy that I had to try and level up some characters that I wanted to play in the new game. I leveled up two more characters and played at least an hour a week between BlizzCon and when I pre-purchased the game. I got sucked into the vortex of WoW once again, and I love it.
As I write this review I want to tell you all that I have only played through the second patch of Legion, which means I never went to Argus and haven't played through any of that content. I used my token for a 110 boost on a Fire Mage, not my YouTube Mage, on the alliance side. One of the points of this purchase is that you can start to build your alliance and get the new races, but you have to complete the Argus quest line as well as gain exalted with the races you are trying to recruit. So I guess what I am getting at is a quick look at boosting a 110 character without playing through the current expansion, the quest line, and ultimately how to go through the work and gain your reputation as quickly as possible.
Review:
The difficulty of Argus:
I know that World of Warcraft has gone more casual in the recent years but this end of expansion zone is one of the most difficult that I have played. The mobs (monsters and other npcs that try and attack you) boost their skills to match your current gear score (ilvl). This makes them hit hard no matter how much raiding you do or how much gear you are lucky enough to secure. I bring this up because this is one of the hardest parts of boosting a new character, unless you are a tank you will die a couple times as you get used to a class that you don't play very often.
Getting that out of the way, this patch is fun. You finally get to take the fight to the Legion, which means invading their home planet and trying to fight them on their own turf. I would say that the story this expansion is one of the best and I look forward to it every day I log in to find a new angle to write about.
My advice would be to log in and start the campaign on Argus. It is a little difficult but the story makes up for it and the trial by fire mentality is very helpful in learning your new class.
Raiding:
Your brand new level 110 character will have a base ilvl of 870 and weapon ilvl of 900. This means that you cannot do the last raid of the expansion in LFR (Looking for Raid) but you can go through all wings of the previous raids. I found jumping into LFR to be another avenue to learn your new class as well as experience some of the content that I had missed. The encounters aren't that difficult and the biggest thing is that you don't stand in stupid during the fight. My advice to the newish raider is to just pull up the map and click on the boss portrait when you get there. This will pull up a brief synopsis of what to look out for and what to do so that people don't rage during the encounters.
PvP:
Your gear is awful but with the base stats this expansion for PvP you should do alright. If you are new to the game I would recommend getting used to playing your new character before you jump into player vs player combat. I'm not saying this because you will be bad, which you will, but because I love PvP so much and I want you all to enjoy it too. The learning curve for PvP is huge, and because the encounter changes every time you queue up it can get disheartening to always feel like you are losing or dying all the time. Do yourself a favor, go quest a bit, get used to your keybinds, practice on training dummies, find a sequence of keys to push that make the training dummy scream for mercy, and then enter the fray. When you enter be prepared to have fun and make new friends in a sometimes old and dry game.
Allied Races:
I have not had the opportunity to unlock any of these races so I can't comment on the difficulty or the ease of the scenarios to unlock them, I will say that once I get them unlocked I'll do a quick blurb about the scenario and how it was to unlock them. Who knows maybe I'll go and record the scenarios so you all can see second hand how not to do them, or what they entail. I will put spoiler warnings on them if you do not want to see them for yourself.
Overall:
I have enjoyed the presale of Battle for Azeroth a lot. It has breathed new life into a game that can sometimes stagnate, and gotten me to want to complete the current expansion because I mostly want to get it done while it is fresh content. For those of you coming into the game hopefully the pointers I added in my review will help you at least know what to do, and for those of you that have played through the entire expansion let me know what you think of the pre-expansion so far either in the comments here or on my google plus page.
