Was just reading the patch notes. Argh. Lots to sift through.
Oh, it’s 52 and sunny. 
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Right?? I was out today to just tour the yard. The flower bulbs are starting to come up and the crocus bulbs will bloom soon. My garlic is up too.
Probably going to get the roses and butterfly bush cut back this week. I do it when they are still dormant. A warm day in Feb is perfect for it!
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I noticed that the snow is melted around the base of the maple tree. I wonder if the sap is starting to run. My Dad used to tap the trees and make syrup. Mines a Silver maple. Not worth tapping.
Yeah, that silver maple is safe. One of my “cousins” (probably a second or third) does maple syrup. And I think there’s a maple syrup Festival near Mt Pleasant (which is, ironically, flat as a pancake) in the early spring.
It’s up into the 50s here. The snow is melting fast. We’ll probably be down to bare ground by the weekend, when it’s supposed to cool off again.
Got a little mess here at work. Someone at one of our clients had their email account compromised, and sent a bad file around. Now we have an internal user sending the file, too. Got a text from our Security team telling us to delete any emails from the user.
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Vrak, something has to be done about the DK forum. The threads just keep turning into free-for-all dumpster fires where people would rather get into perpetual food fights than just flag posts and ignore the trolls, but there seems to be no proactive moderation on them so this just continues completely unchecked.
If someone were to look at even the most recent threads and just did a quick scroll-through, they would find more than enough inappropriate subject matter to warrant taking action. I know those forums are not meant to be heavily moderated, but they should at least be combed through every once in a while to prune the toxicity.
That’s correct, moderation is reactive. There isn’t any proactive moderation with Bliz. Even in game.
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Disclaimer: Text wall because I am annoyed (not at you), but after this I won’t speak on it anymore.
That’s not universally true. I was specifically referring to the class forums which don’t seem to have any moderators lurking in them as they do here.
The players on that forum, for some strange reason I never understood, absolutely refuse to touch the report button whilst simultaneously complaining for years on end (this has been going on since LEGION) about trolls and toxicity. So, since they choose not to control their own threads, then either a moderator has to do it, or the threads just turn into dumpster fires.
This has been going on for years in those threads, over the same exact issue with the same exact people and I’m just frustrated with the inability to have any meaningful discussion on it. I was considering getting back into my Death Knight this expansion and wanted to know if other people were enjoying it or finding it lackluster in various aspects of the game, but when I make a post asking for constructive opinions, the thread gets no responses and is just ignored.
But when somebody makes a post ranting about how trash everything is, everybody comes out of the woodworks to chime in and either form an echo chamber or derail the thread into a massive food fight. The only threads that seem to get attention over there are negative or scathing in nature, or have replies that start longwinded bickering sessions that turn into dogpiles.
PS: Thank you Orlyia for at least locking down the one thread.
I just finished the last five points for this month’s Traveler’s log. I get that waaaaaay too often.
And my poor, neglected druid, the last character I need to level cap (and get some gear better than Quest greens from DF) is progressing. I’ll be done with that tonight, and then it’s off to gear up again.
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oh hod…I forgot about that! At least I have a few days still.
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I’m glad it is Tuesday here, but still feels like a Monday 
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Just got out of a meeting/call for work. Everyone has to change their passwords, and the boss had to verify (apparently to make sure everyone did things in the right “order.”
And my Druid is now 80 (and geared from Siren Isle). 
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Both of the builds I like, rapid fire and frozen orb, scale so awfully that you need miracle luck to get pie in the sky gear and aspects (because ancestrals are still absurdly rare and never seem to have the aspects you need), so it isn’t likely I’ll get this done. The T4 requirements are absolutely stupid and this season’s journey was very obviously crafted to artificially jack up play metrics showing people “like” partying when they really don’t (at least not in ARPGs). It really does make the game feel bad when you can’t complete the season journey on builds you prefer to play and have to go meta to make real progress.
*Swipes some crocuseseses to plant on the Stardew Valley farm*
In other news I got in touch with Legacy funeral services today and that should start the ball rolling on getting my mom cremated. They said they would try their best to coordinate with me so I can view her for a few minutes before they send her to be cremated. The coordination is due to the drive from the SF bay area to San Diego being too long for me to do in one go as one eye open while holding the other shut means I tire quicker while driving and need to stop overnight at my grandpa’s GF’s house in Bakersfield. $1k for cremation + basic container (we’ll get the final urn up here at the Castro Valley mortuary), $24 per death certificate, $95 for the health permit fee to release my mom’s body to the funeral home and they even check with the VA to see if I’m entitled to any reimbursement for funeral expenses since my mom was married to two different veterans during her life.
My grandpa kept apologizing for me having to do this, but I told him that I view it as a learning experience and it’s best that I do it while I’m able to do so physically and mentally that way I can help others in the family down the line.
I really don’t think so. I am playing solo like normal. I have zero Mythic purple gear. I have nothing max forged. I do not even have the recommended gear for my build on really. I have what I found, not what they suggested exactly.
I am on the last objective I need for it and having fun. Blood Surge Necro. Solo, without the right gear, without the exact affixes they told me to have.
I do have my witch powers maxed now and finally finished my paragon rune things to 45. That sort of just happened playing though.
I think a LOT of builds can do T4 this season. Maybe not the ones you selected, but a lot can. Hopefully you sort it out!
You’re running a meta build. Those are the builds that are broken enough that they can run with suboptimal gear and still push to a degree. Most builds are not like that.
I’m sure more can than before. But we’re still in such an abysmal state that balance feels more like an afterthought of an afterthought than something baked into the development process. Nobody’s expecting WoW mythic level tuning, but we shouldn’t be going “it’s fine” with the current situation either. And it’d be nice if they’d start actually giving frost some love on the sorcerer side instead of just pushing out more and more and more and more and more and more and more lightning specific gear. The bottom line is that even though this season’s theme is neat and helps a lot of builds, the season journey requirements make this season the least accessible overall thus far, which is a shame.
I thought that was true until I did it. Now I realize I was afraid of it and am capable of a lot more than I thought. I am not just sub optimal… I am missing some of the basics the “build” suggests. I did similar things once I understood the synergies though and it worked out.
Most of the T4 stuff just takes time and not dying. You don’t need anyone else to do it, and it does not take boss kills. Now, if you wanted to push high end Pits or something it would take a meta build.
I just checked Maxroll - my build is D tier for bosses, A tier for basic stuff. Not just D tier, I don’t have the right gear for it and am not using the affixes it tells me to. So … not the top of the pack.
I thought it was just me having low gear when I tried a mythic dungeon for the first time since dragonflight. My whole group was getting rolled over by everything when most of us were in at least heroic level gear.
/puts down cups of hot cocoa for everyone.
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I exist I swear. Been a bit busy being sucked into existential crisis for a while. Henlo friends.
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That should tell you just how broken the build really is. For non-broken builds, especially those that receive minimal benefit from the witch powers, even doing T3 is excessively time consuming. I managed to unlock T3, but just barely with 30 seconds left on the pit timer. One elite pack takes me over 1.5 minutes at T3. T4? Unless I go with a build I’m either unfamiliar with or whose playstyle I really don’t like, I’m kind of stuck. I will say again that nobody should have to go do things they really don’t like just to get the season journey done. It’s one thing to have to min/max if you want to get the special season title for doing all of the objectives in the journey, but the basic completion shouldn’t require what it currently does.
Every build should at least be able to complete the season journey without bending the player into a pretzel. It’s OK that not every build can push top tier endgame, but season journey is about as basic as it gets and they got it wrong this season.
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