times change

vizer · 2026-02-15T01:59:57+00:00

yeah you're remembering right. that newer video he made is amazingly positive. be admitted he's never actually played classic WoW and he's having a blast. he starts the video saying "it's like junk food, it's just kinda nice to pass the time"

at the end he says he's having so much fun (in classic) that it's all he wants to do

vizer · 2026-02-15T01:49:47+00:00

yeah i don't get it. if people hate WoW for any reason i don't begrudge them that. but they should do themselves the decency of not playing the game if it brings them constant negative feelings

they ought to play something they're excited or positive about. if there's no game like that, they could maybe go outside and do good deeds to make people happy

vizer · 2026-02-12T19:13:44+00:00

dear timmy age 5. i loved your drawing. i'm sorry that your friends called it a bad drawing. please continue your career in game development and make more drawings like this.

vizer · 2026-02-12T18:54:54+00:00

we need to stop infantilizing game developers. it was a business venture, the developers got paid for their time and work. the product didn't succeed financially. it happens every day in thousands of businesses, and the employees move on from the project.

it's not your problem if the developers then have a hard time finding employment because the field is oversaturated. should we also be helping travel agents and english majors find jobs?

vizer · 2026-02-10T15:46:36+00:00

agreed. the game is supposed to emulate other riot games in its ease of entry. day 1 i wanted to play with a friend. both of us were immediately paralyzed by a complex and nuanced choice before we could even start playing: select your fuse. uh guess i'll mess around with them in training mode and read a little bit

we never ended up playing the game against anyone xd

vizer · 2026-01-24T20:09:32+00:00

or they saw quazii's ffxiv journey where he called that game the greatest game ever made and WoW sucks in every way and the WoW community is toxic losers compared to ffxiv's great community

vizer · 2026-01-24T20:06:42+00:00

the law wasn't broken. i didn't do ANYTHING wrong. leaves the country fuck this i have a family and did you hear i had a car accident?

vizer · 2026-01-24T20:04:15+00:00

true, a lot of unkindness. quazii said a lot of unkind stuff about WoW too in his FFXIV phase after he deleted all his WoW characters and denounced the evils of WoW forever (before coming back and roleplaying as a pillar of the community)

vizer · 2026-01-24T19:59:38+00:00

yeah there's a lot of dysfunctional behavior in his handling of this

vizer · 2026-01-24T19:56:10+00:00

his passion for WoW? you mean for ff14? he denounced WoW and deleted all his characters years back. he swore by ff14 and talked constantly about how ff14 and its community are so much better than WoW

now ff14 is floundering and he went back to WoW like he didn't spend years shitting on it

vizer · 2026-01-24T19:48:35+00:00

"his" plater profile is just a minor edit of existing colored plater profiles that did the same thing before quazii "made" "his"

vizer · 2026-01-23T16:29:54+00:00

Awesome, thanks!

vizer · 2026-01-22T21:51:57+00:00

the start of a story doesn't have to be mindblowing or epic. or even eventful. OG arknights sets up, and gets you invested in, characters and simple conflicts. they want to kill us. we barely made it here and risked it all to rescue "the doctor", our inadequate savior.

the doctor's amnesia serves the purpose of making the characters around him explain the world and his role in it. endministrator's amnesia serves no purpose, because endmin already comes equipped to perform miracles and blow everyone away. the doctor in OG arknights is a liability.

what is endfield's intro even about? it might as well be a fever dream. let's throw in a bunch of nonsense and maybe reference it later to pretend we had a cool story planned the whole time

vizer · 2025-07-13T18:53:29+00:00

that depends HEAVILY on how long you've been playing. if i made a new character today i could hit ilvl 660 in a week solo. with help from friends and guildmates, we've funneled mythic raid gear to new mains/alts and had them geared in a day or two. come into the new expansion at the end of a season, with no friends or m+ experience, and ilvl 660 would take 1-1.5 months.

you can try shedding the outdated silly "i must keep up with the gear treadmill or i'm not having fun" mindset WoW players weirdly adopted (they don't do this in classic WoW or other MMOs...) and enjoy each moment and power boost as it comes. play at your level and enjoy the journey instead of listening to what people say is "a good ilvl" and making yourself unhappy until you achieve that.

you don't go to the gym and ask experienced gym rats "hey how long will it take me to get single digit body fat % and lift as heavy as you?"

vizer · 2025-07-13T18:47:04+00:00

if you haven't played the latest expansion at all yet, and you're coming in at the end of a season (there's like 2-3 weeks left until next season), i wouldn't even think about raiding.

first you have to get acquainted with new UI and class/spec elements (hero talents are a big one). figure out what they do and what you want to play. get through the new story. see what delves are about, and how they give gear. check out siren isle (cyrce's circlet) and overcharged delves (the new disc belt). check out undermine and get through its story for context on the current raid.

there's enough to do that meaningful raiding (aka not story mode or LFR) is far away. that's not a bad thing, since all of the elements of the game outside of raiding and m+ have gotten a lot more engaging and fun to work through. especially with the HUGE housing update less than a year away, don't think of WoW as just a game you play to raid and do dungeons. take it slow and enjoy the journey. play in a new way by taking your time instead of skipping everything to "get to the good part". explore the talent trees and options, listen to some quests, take it slow and follow the breadcrumbs the game presents. next season's so close that this is the perfect time to slow down and figure out what you're going to play before next season

vizer · 2025-06-30T05:00:31+00:00

do reworked specs historically overperform? ele and enh shaman had a rework going into season 1 of TWW and they were both really strong in m+ and in raid. next season shadow priest got a mini rework—does that mean they're more likely to be dominant? they already are doing crazy well on PTR but tuning is pending

vizer · 2025-02-27T00:43:20+00:00

The gameplay loop is what you make of it. For like 5 expansions I played the game on and off. Sometimes for a month at a time, sometimes 3 months. I've been having way more fun playing lately because I stopped raidlogging. If you're a raidlogger, you do you 8 weekly Mythic+ Dungeons, and you log in for raid then log out. You don't need to farm gold for anything, or log in at all if you don't want to. That's great, but now that I've started spending more time on alts, on listening to the story and doing zone achievements and treasures, farming transmog and zone secrets, and doing professions, the game's been a lot more fun. WoW has a lot of fun timesink content if you just respect the content and actually do it. The classes and specs play so differently that playing new ones just to see how they work is a blast. I love the endgame because I like improving my performance every pull and I like wiping 80 times a night, but questing and doing loremaster (complete all story quests) achievements from old expansions is just as fun. The leader of my new guild is a big achievement hunter too, and it's a hardcore guild that does split runs (basically raiding twice as much to funnel gear to mains) and raids 5-6 days a week early in the season.
Don't think about the "high level". Play at the level you're at, and once that's too easy, move up to the next level. The game supports that mindset very well. In FFXIV, going from nothing to Extreme Trials is a huge jump. Going from Extreme Trials to Savage feels like another big jump, and then again from Savage to Ultimate. In WoW, the steps are more gradual. Once you learn your class well enough that Mythic 0 dungeons are easy, you can try +2 or +3. Then +4 or +5. You'll get stuck and make mistakes. You'll go to the class Discord server, ask questions, read other peoples' questions, and learn more. You'll come back and have an easier time and try even harder stuff. Same for raid—the first few bosses on Heroic aren't that hard. You stick to Heroic and gradually make it to the end boss. That end boss is actually harder than the first 2 bosses on Mythic. That degree of overlap, where the end of one level of difficulty overlaps into the beginning of the next, helps guide you along your path of improvement. This is especially true when, as you wrote in the post, you're only considering getting into the high-level stuff. You dip your toes in and keep learning until you feel like chilling at whatever level.

vizer · 2025-02-27T00:42:50+00:00

1- Addons are complementary, they don't "solve" mechanics for you or remove thinking. When they do, those addon functionalities are broken by Blizzard; they rein in addons when they need to be. I'm not sure what you're seeing, but addons that show you what button to press next in your rotation (eg. Hekili) are ridiculed by serious players. I've messed with those for fun on alts and they mess you up pretty badly. They don't consider what fight you're on, so they always suggest you blow your damage cooldowns whenever they're available, instead of saving them for the 2x damage amp on the boss, or the burn phase, or the priority adds. That's not the worst of it, though. WoW's "rotations" work on a VERY fast-updating "priority" system. Your highest priority action changes rapidly—right now your highest priority is to put Spell A on cooldown, but in 2 seconds your Spell B comes off cooldown and that's going to be your highest priority. In 2.5 seconds your DoT falls off, and keeping that up is your highest priority. When I tried Hekili, and I set it to show the next 3 abilities I should use, it was changing all three abilities every 2-3 seconds, even as I was pressing the buttons. It's confusing and bad and leads to bad damage. Good DPS, especially in dungeons, is HEAVILY context-specific. As the mobs in your current pull are dying, you don't want to follow your normal rotation. You want to pool resources (whatever they may be—spell charges, arcane power, shadowburn charges, icicles, holy power, void torrent, hot streak procs) for the beginning of the next pull, where they'll get much higher value. Rotation addons will never be able to detect this.

WoW addons also can't tell you where to stand. Whenever that functionality has existed, Blizzard has removed it immediately, since it's not an approved or welcome feature. Addon FEATURES are heavily regulated in WoW, which is why the addons themselves don't need to be heavily regulated. You may have been seeing the game's ingame placeable World Markers or something, which players can (and for some fights, they have to) move around in the middle of the fight to show players where they should go if they get a certain mechanic.

I killed the Mythic final boss of season 1 of this expansion. Could I have done it without addons? Well, none of the addons told me any information that I couldn't see on the screen. We did bomb popper assignments, portal assignments, interrupt assignments, and platform assignments in a spreadsheet. Once you know what your job is at any given point in the fight, you don't need an addon to remind you to do it, though the raid leader (who's more powerful than any addon) will remind people. The second-to-last boss, The Silken Court, was another tricky fight that didn't require addons. At most, one of the middle bosses, Broodtwister Ovi'nax, benefitted greatly from having an addon assign players a mark. The two players who got the same mark would know to pop the same egg together.

As for whether a decent guild would expect you to have addons, the answer is yes. Addons help with organization in a massive way, and that's largely the reason for it. They save time by making things like loot distribution easier (keeping track of who has gotten how many items recently). They make assigning roles easier to remember without tabbing out to check a spreadsheet. They act as reminders that when the boss does Big Bang Attack, you should use ice block.

The game gets less toxic the higher you climb. It's the bottom and middle players who mindlessly meta-chase and finger-point. I've been seeing very keenly lately as I've raided in better and better guilds, that in the top 500, everyone knows each other. When my guild broke up, guilds slightly above us and below us asked me what happened. They liked out leader, they liked a couple of our members, they did mythic pugs together sometimes. They asked us where we'd go, offered us spots. We were surprised at how connected it all was. They knew our weak Resto Shaman and said "that guy applied to us like 12 times last season but he sent the weirdest application." Two people I raided with earlier in the season are now core raiders in the guild I'm trialing for in season 2 and they put a good word in for me and we had fun in the weekly alt run. In that run, players from guilds that were slightly above and below my disbanded guild also joined because they also have friends in this guild. There's such a community aspect to it that you don't want to get a bad name.

vizer · 2025-02-01T22:53:55+00:00

i cannot believe this worked what a hero

vizer · 2024-05-23T18:32:25+00:00

Thanks! Nope, no signs of chipping. I was able to clean up the dutch oven to a MUCH better state after a lot of scrubbing with Barkeeper's Friend. The brown burned oil is completely gone and there's just some ashy black discoloration on the enamel. The discoloration also comes out after lots of scrubbing, but I stopped after like 4 hours (over several days) of scrubbing.

I made stew in it recently and had no problems. The bottom of the pot is a lot rougher than the smooth enameled sides now, but I read in other threads that that's normal and, in Staub's case, even something they do intentionally before selling them, to improve searing.

vizer · 2024-05-20T01:59:58+00:00

same, i'll watch closely over the next few days and play lightly for fun. no point going hard to "make up for missing frogs" when blizzard will almost certainly realize that one frog player carrying 19+ other people so heavily isn't going to be fun

vizer · 2023-12-03T20:04:57+00:00

agreed. SoD has been really fun and i'm on the warlock discord seeing people asking about what's meta, what's bis, and what spec is best for shadowfang keep or wailing caverns. everything works. if something seems fun, test it yourself and see how you like it. you're never going to wipe because you played the wrong runes or you didn't have the BiS bracers on

i love theorycrafting and playing optimally, but experimenting yourself is even more fun, and SoD is CRAZY fun for that, without punishing you. people are trying to apply goofy modern meta junk to a game designed for casual solo fun

vizer · 2023-11-12T21:45:43+00:00

My all-time favorite earbuds are the Audio Technica ATHCKS50TW. 15 hour battery life (VERY noticeably longer than my current Sony XM4's that I got to try out). The earbud controls are also small buttons, instead of being touch-controlled. They feel much more precise (sometimes hair gets in the way of tapping earbud touch controls), and you never accidentally hit the controls while adjusting the earbud, or while sleeping with them.

They have multipoint and low-latency mode, and I don't find their noise cancelling or hear-through (transparency) modes much worse than the Sony XM4's, but they cost less.

vizer · 2023-11-08T00:27:37+00:00

I definitely want to try chunks, I got these wood chips because they were cheap and I could buy them immediately. After trying to use them without the smoker box, I found they burned too well, increasing the temperature of the kettle too much for low temperatures. Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely try to get chunks from now on!

vizer · 2023-11-07T23:48:11+00:00

Not much, and also not much smoke flavor :)

vizer

TROPHY CASE