Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.
World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.
LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.
Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.
FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.
WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.
Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.
Moonshine Mansion 
I’ve still not bought Diablo 3. Would you say the beginning of a season is a good point to jump in?
The beginning of the season is definitely a good time to start! Everyone is starting over on even footing when a new season begins, and enthusiasm for the game is pretty high so there’s lots of people around to help you out or answer questions. Let me know if you decide to give it a try!
Downloading right now. Can I get started without the expansion?
You can get started and play through the first 4 acts of the story. I’m not sure if you can do seasonal characters or not, since most of the season’s journey requires you to be level 70 (from the expansion). I think you have to play through the story at least once anyway to unlock adventure mode, so it is probably worth it to start it and see if you enjoy the game before buying the expansion!
Well, I’m in and it gave me the opportunity to play a “seasonal” character, so I’m doing exactly that!