First impressions of the new five-mans

One of my guild's mages poked me tonight because he wanted me to help out in Halls of Reflection, and was horrified to find out that apparently I was the only person on the server who hadn't done any of the new five-mans yet (and thus wasn't attuned to HoR). Taking pity on me, he logged on his death knight tank soon afterwards to take me on a tour of the new instances. Since we were also feeling confident, we decided to go for heroic mode straight away.

In the end our group consisted of me on my priest, a feral druid main, death knight alt (who is quite well-geared), a pretty well-geared warlock alt and our main tank's crappy mage alt. And I do mean crappy, he's still in his levelling greens for the most part. Funnily enough, before we managed to rope the feral druid in, we wanted to pug a dps using the dungeon finder, but it wouldn't let us queue for heroic Forge of Souls because mage alt's gear was too crappy. Fear not, puggers, Blizzard won't inflict fools like us on any pug. Well, I thought it was kind of amusing anyway (if also sensible). Still, nothing prevented us from attempting heroic mode on our own.

Just to be clear, the following contains spoilers.

The Forge of Souls

My main impression of the Forge of Souls was that it's vast and kind of empty. The first boss, Bronjahm, wasn't particularly memorable to me either. Still, as a healer I had no reason to complain, as there was enough random damage going around to keep me busy. It was also enough damage to kill mage alt a few times on trash, as his health was very low even with buffs.

The second boss, Devourer of Souls, was pretty cool and a nice flashback to Black Temple's Relinquary of Souls. He also has an interesting ability called mirrored soul, which causes damage that he takes to be transferred to the party member he targetted, so if your dps isn't on the ball they might just end up nuking their own allies. Death knight tank tried to explain the boss's abilities as best as he could, but forgot to mention the evil death ray coming from the feminine face at certain intervals (called wailing souls), so I promptly got caught by that, died and we wiped.

While the rest of the party ran back, I spent the next ten minutes circling Icecrown Citadel on my ghostly gryphon, trying to find the instance entrance again. The warlock eventually took pity on me and came back out to guide me inside. On our next attempt we beat the Devourer of Souls without too much trouble, though two people still managed to get caught by the death ray (just not me this time).

Pit of Saron

We continued to the Pit of Saron (What kind of name is that anyway?), which turned out to be a big quarry outside. A sizeable group of Horde NPCs joined us there and promptly got wiped out, just to be raised as undead right after. So basically they are admitting that the Argent Tournament was pointless? Since this was exactly the kind of scenario it was supposed to prevent, wasn't it? Just saying.

Next we had to spend some time running around killing trash and freeing Horde slaves, and I seriously cracked up when one of freed slaves responded to my help with: "Have my babies." The Horde knows its weird slang, yo.

The first boss, Forgemaster Garfrost, was kind of annoying. He does some mildly damaging AoE all the time, and some big AoE every now and then that you are supposed to avoid by line-of-sighting him by hiding behind a lump of saronite. Which is all well and good, but in practice my party also ended up line-of-sighting each other a lot of the time, making it hard for me to keep everyone alive. While we one-shot him, it wasn't without deaths.

The Ick and Krick encounter was fun, but I'm starting to suspect that all boss fights that involve a gnome are simply automatically made of win. And I don't even like gnomes.

Afterwards we managed to wipe on some trash consisting almost exclusively of vyrkul casters who spammed mad fireballs and diseases. I reckon that using crowd control is prudent here.

The gauntlet leading up to Scourgelord Tyrannus wasn't too tough, though the boss himself certainly was. We ended up wiping due to me being unable to keep up with the incoming damage, though while talking about it afterwards it turned out that he too has a damage-redirecting ability, which essentially caused our dps to nuke our own tank. Once people knew to avoid that on the next attempt, the damage became much more manageable.

Then Horde NPCs came and cheered. Yay! Except then Sylvanas suddenly ported us away and everyone else got pwned. Sigh.

Halls of Reflection

We continued to Halls of Reflection, the last of the new five-mans. Sylvanas made a long speech and stuff happened with Frostmourne, which I might have enjoyed more if our death knight hadn't chattered away on Vent the whole time, saying how this was all really cool the first time but was bound to get tedious after so many runs. I pointedly reminded him that for some of us it was the first time and that I was trying to enjoy the show, thank you.

What followed next was probably the longest "boss fight" I've ever seen in a five-man. Five waves of annoying trash, one tank-and-spank boss, a brief pause to loot, then another five waves of trash and another tank-and-spank. It doesn't sound that bad on paper and I didn't actually time it, but I know that I used my shadowfiend twice and got innervated by the feral druid about four times, so in healer minutes the fight lasted a veeery long time. The rogue trash mobs were particularly nasty as they were fond of shadow-stepping behind a clothie. Unsurprisingly mage alt got one-shot more than once. Still, we managed to complete the event without wiping.

Afterwards we swiftly continued to the end of the hall, where Sylvanas was fighting Arthas, our feral druid charged him and was promptly one-shot. We laughed.

Next followed the infamous retreat to the airship, and damn it was intense. Basically you run along a relatively narrow ledge, and Arthas keeps erecting walls in front of you while slowly following you and sending undead armies to annoy you. Sylvanas gets the easy job of shooting at the walls while your party has to defend themselves against the undead. (I would have loved to trade places.)

There are four walls in total: The first one is easy to bring down, the second one a bit tougher but not too bad either, by the third one you'll start to sweat and if you make it to the fourth wall you'll likely be flailing and screaming by that point. Which is actually pretty cool if you think about it, I haven't had such an intense heroic experience in a while.

We had several wipes at the third and fourth wall respectively, but got better with each attempt as we adjusted our strategy. For example we found it wise to kill the casters before the abominations, since they put a lot of pressure on the healer with their shadow bolt volley spam. Getting wiped out by Arthas had a certain kind of amusement value as well, as he doesn't actually attack anyone in your party. He just walks up to Sylvanas, one-shots her, then looks at you lazily and wipes you by casting some mega spell with Frostmourne. You have to admit that it's got a certain amount of style.

Anyway, after five attempts or so we were squeezing ourselves against the fourth wall while desperately whittling down the health of the last abominations, Arthas' icy breath coming down our necks already... but just before he could kill Sylvanas we got the wall down and could make a run for it. And boy, I haven't run away from something in WoW with that much enthusiasm in a while.

Overall rating

I enjoyed all three of the instances, though the Forge of Souls was a little dull compared to the other two. I can see all of them becoming very popular however, as they allow you to participate in a nice little story and that's always fun. There's a reason Escape from Durnhole was the most popular BC dungeon by about a mile.

Difficulty-wise they are also quite tough and actually reminded me of BC heroics a bit. Halls of Reflection was definitely the most difficult one - and as much as I enjoy the new LFG tool, I don't think I'd want to pug that one on heroic just yet (though it's probably easier when you don't have to carry one dpser in greens).

Using the new dungeon finder, day 1

I kind of feel like I'm copying Spinks here since she made a post very much like this only a few hours ago, but to be honest I intended to write something like this long before I saw her entry - and I hope that many more people will do the same, because I'm very keen on hearing what experiences other people are having with the new dungeon finder.

First off, you can shake your head at people who take the day off work when cool new content is released on WoW just to be able to play more, but today I really wished that I could have been one of them. As it was, I was on afternoon shift at my workplace, which meant that I had just enough time to patch the game and see the servers come up before I had to leave for work, and that I didn't get a chance to actually log in until very late in the evening.

I knew that I'd want to turn my attention towards one of the new instance-related features first, so it was either pugging a random dungeon using the new dungeon finder or trying to get into one of the new Icecrown five-mans with some guildies. Seeing how I had found some unpleasant guild drama on the forums immediately upon logging in, I ended up preferring some distance from my guildies for the night and tried my luck with the pugs.

Random heroic #1: Azjol-Nerub on my priest

I started off by adding myself to the random heroic queue on my main, a healing priest. I got a "Your group is ready!" popup literally instantly, then got a loading screen for what I recognised as Azjol-Nerub, then found myself in a party but back in Dalaran. The name tags quickly made it apparent that it was indeed a cross-server pug and that we could chat just fine, but we were confused by the instance teleport apparently not working. Our tank then dropped group so we got thrown back into the queue, but found a new one within only a couple of minutes.

Someone in the group suggested that the tool was likely just buggy and that we should try making our way to the instance portal the old-fashioned way, as we should be able to meet up inside. I was the first to arrive at the Pit of Narjun but the instance portal acted like a solid wall to me. To make things worse I had accidentally got myself flagged myself for PvP by getting too close to Wintergrasp on the way, and before I could even grasp what was happening, a night elf druid had ganked my bewildered self as I was vainly trying to gain entrance to the instance.

While corpse-running back I realised that I had actually been greeted by an unpleasantly familiar error message: "Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later." Argh, I thought we were past this! However, my party decided to valiantly try banging their heads against the instance portal for a few more minutes and eventually managed to snag a free instance ID. An interesting thing to note was that I could see their little dots right beside me on the mini-map, even though they were on a different server; I thought that was kind of cool.

I clearly wasn't the only one having ganking problems, as one hunter stumbled in and managed to die from an enemy dot a second later and right in front of me, which we both thought was kind of hilarious. At this point we had four people in the instance, but the fifth group member, a retribution paladin, was still sitting in Dalaran and apparently AFK, since he wasn't responding to chat and hadn't in fact said anything at all since the party got assembled. So we immediately got to try out the vote-kick feature as well, which worked nicely and we got a new dps from the queue instantly.

Happy to finally be ready to go, we proceeded to have a very fast and smooth run. Someone in the group must have been a disenchanter as the disenchant option came up and we got to try it. About half the group still selected greed though, more out of habit than anything else I suspect. I was also surprised to see the disenchant option pop up for bind-on-equip greens as well, I guess I can save my boyfriend's enchanter alt some work in the future then.

A guildie had warned me earlier that I should need on the frozen orb at the end because the other puggers were sure to do the same. Not wanting to be so cynical I hit greed, as did three of the others... but the fifth hit need and that was enough. Considering the low value of frozen orbs these days and the fact that it had been a nice run otherwise I decided not to say anything about it though.

Random heroic #2: The Nexus on my hunter

I decided to try my luck on my hunter next. Unsurprisingly damage ended up being a lot less in demand than healing, and despite of the tool's predicted wait time of two minutes, I spent a good ten minutes in the queue before a full group for heroic Ahn'kahet popped up. Still not too bad when you're a huntard I guess.

We ended up having the same problem with getting an instance ID, but I happily told my party that it shouldn't be a big deal if we just went to Dragonblight and poked the instance portal a bit, however I got no response. I still flew to the Pit of Narjun on my own and managed to get inside Old Kingdom after only a few attempts. Proudly I told my party that I had managed to snag an ID and if they'd only come over now... at which point several people went "meh" because clearly actually flying to an instance is too much fucking work, and quit the group. The remaining ones disconnected simultaneously, making it impossible for me to add new people to the group in the meantime (cause the tool wouldn't let me), and then disbanded the party as soon as they came back on without saying a word. I felt very sheepish as I stood there all alone on the ramp right behind the instance entrance.

When I complained about these events to my guildies, a couple of them helpfully pointed out to me that there had been no need to walk to the instance myself, as you can just click on the little eye icon next to the minimap and select "teleport to the instance". D'oh, if I had only been able to tell that to the other guys earlier... then again, I can pass on grouping with people that uncooperative and lazy anyway.

Nonetheless I was undeterred and hopped back into the queue. After another five minutes or so another group had been assembled for me, this time for the Nexus. Again we couldn't get an instance ID right away, but spamming the "teleport to the instance" command got us there after a few minutes.

Everyone was there and ready and we set off towards the dwarf mini boss. The resto shaman kept running ahead and pulling in place of the tank (What is it with the Nexus and annoying healers doing that?), complaining that we were going way too slowly. One of the dps responded with "quit your whinging", at which point the shaman decided that he didn't want to deal with "such attitude" and quit the group right in the middle of the boss fight. Fortunately we lived, and upon rejoining the LFG tool we got a priest healer as replacement immediately.

We plodded on happily, but only a few pulls later our mage messed up and brought some adds, causing us to wipe. In the Nexus, yeah. Still, it didn't have to be a big deal, but the mage "mystery-DCed" right afterwards, and the tank said that he had seen him log off on purpose outside the instance entrance (they must have been on the same server). So before I could even type out my suggestion to give the guy a minute or two to come back, the rest of the group had kicked him and got a replacement dps.

The rest of the run continued smoothly, though we didn't have a disenchanter and thus clicking on the "disenchant" option for drops did exactly nothing.

On a side note, I absolutely loved the revamped misdirection, even if the animation for it appearing over my head instead of that of my target confused me at first. Being able to transfer the threat of an entire volley salvo is simply amazing.

After Keristrasza's death we once again had just that one guy who rolled need on the frozen orb, and this time I couldn't resist at least asking about it. As it turned out he was quite apologetic and said that he'd only done it because he thought that's what everyone else would do too. Apparently people are only becoming cross-server ninjas if they are too scared of others ninjaing stuff from them. There was a happy ending though as we just ended up re-rolling for the orb and the priest won it.

Random heroic #3: The Oculus on my paladin

Once I was back in Dalaran, I decided that I had enough time for one more random heroic left, this time on my paladin. I queued up as both tank and healer and once again got a group instantly, though I was surprised that I had been assigned the healer spot. With the constant talk about tank shortages I was pretty sure that I would have to tank.

Once again a new instance couldn't be launched right away, but it didn't take us more than two or three tries to teleport inside. Also, for all the talking there's been about cross-realm LFG making it impossible to meet players repeatedly and to befriend them properly, I was amused to see the AFK pally from AN in my group again. He wasn't AFK this time but still didn't really talk - I think he said one sentence during the entire run, and that was in some nordic language that I didn't understand.

In fact at least three of my four temporary allies were Scandinavian, and happily chattering away in party chat in their native language throughout the whole run. To be honest I thought that was a bit rude - Earthen Ring has a large nordic population as well, but in mixed company it's generally considered polite to speak a lingua franca.

Performance-wise I really couldn't complain much about this group, except that it was maybe in a bit too much of a hurry. I barely had time to loot anything before the tank had once again rushed out of range and into the next group of mobs. The upside of this was that I got both the Experienced Drake Rider and the Make It Count achievements without even intending to. Oh, and nobody rolled need on the frozen orb this time.

The only other thing left to say about this run is that the Oculus really has been nerfed hard. From what I could make out, one of the Scandinavians actually asked if we had accidentally entered on normal mode, because it was just that easy. This was just as we were approaching Mage-Lord Urom, who died before he could even teleport once. Still, up to that point it might have been that we just had really good dps, but the last bit with the drakes had really changed quite noticeably.

The drakes have been scaling with gear for some time now, but as far as I recall that used to mean about a quarter more health for them if you were in top-end epics. Now on the other hand, not a single drake had less than one hundred thousand hit points, and I think the strongest one had nearly twice the "default" value of seventy-five thousand. There also seemed to be considerably fewer whelps around, and everything was just... weaker. I was riding a bronze drake, the one colour that I'm still not entirely comfortable with, and just hitting buttons randomly, yet we never got even close to dying. Also, I was making sure to save my time-stop for Eregos' enrage but it took ages until it actually happened and then we only had that one enrage during the whole fight. I couldn't help thinking of something my friend Scorch predicted when we were discussing what the incoming Oculus nerfs might be: "They removed all the dragons. All of them! You enter the dungeon and there's a mage there with a very big chest. The mage says: I will you give you my big chest, but about twenty minutes after I die, so you have to sit on your hands till then." That seems less and less unrealistic now...

So what's my verdict on the new dungeon finder so far?

Overall I'm happy to say that the quality of the players from the other servers in the battlegroup didn't strike me as any worse than that of Earthen Ring's. The over-sensitive shaman from the Nexus was a bit silly, but then I've had worse than that on ER too. The need-rolling on the frozen orbs and carefree chatter in a language that half the party can't understand struck me as signs of some servers simply having a different pug culture, and we'll see how things will develop in that regard now that we all have to find a common middle ground for the whole battlegroup.

The main advantage of the new tool is simply that it's incredibly fast. Being ported to and back from the instance instantly saves a lot of time (when it works), and things like getting a near-instant replacement for someone who threw a huff or disconnected are simply amazing.

The "additional instances cannot be launched" thing really annoyed me at first, but I have to cut Blizzard some slack. Considering just how many people were likely trying out the new tool they didn't do too badly, and as I said we were always able to snag an ID after a few minutes at the latest.

The few minor downsides I can think of is that not having an actual daily quest to hand in feels a lot less satisfying, plus it makes it impossible to kill two birds with one stone and do both the normal and the heroic daily at once, like you used to be able to on some days. Also, with the daily dungeon being unpredictably random, planning your runs will become harder to an extent. I used to be able to do stuff like run the daily heroic four times in two hours when I knew that it was Azjol-Nerub and thus really quick. When I queue for a random dungeon on the other hand, I might get Trial of the Champion and be done in fifteen minutes, but I might also get Old Kingdom and have to calculate for about an hour of run-time. Still, those seem like small trade-offs for the extreme increase in convenience.

It sucks to be melee

The other day I got a chance to participate in an Utgarde Keep run with my shaman - as melee dps, which was rather surprising considering that she can heal too and healers generally seem to be in higher demand than damage dealers.

As it happens, I was pretty terribad. I ended up at the bottom of the dps metres at the end of the run, caused a wipe by butt-pulling Prince Keleseth while we were still fighting the group of trash mobs in front of him, and consistently failed to drop my totems, which the other shaman in the group rightfully admonished me about.

Now, all of those issues are things that I'm sure could be improved with time and some practice, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to; the run also served as a stark reminder of the fact that I don't enjoy the role of being melee dps. (That's in group situations, mind you - while soloing I don't really care how I kill things, and melee classes generally seem to have the advantage of being less squishy, but in groups... ugh.)

After thinking about it a little, I think my main issue is one of control. When I play a healer or ranged dps, I stand at the back and have an excellent overview of everything that's going on, making it easy to pick out my targets and decide on which abilities to use. When I'm tanking, I'm lacking that, and it can be quite hard to take note of everything that's happening while you're surrounded by a bunch of mobs and half a dozen aoe spells are going off at the same time, but at least I'm in charge: I get to decide when the chaos begins, I determine the kill order, and even if I'm not entirely sure what's happening all the time, as long as I can keep the mobs focused on me, it's all good.

As melee dps, I just feel hopelessly confused and dependent on others all the time. I'm supposed to be at the front, but not at the very front, because I have to let the tank go first. Once he's pulled I have to make sure to quickly close the distance between myself and the mobs, but as soon as I, the tank or the mob itself takes a single step in a random direction I'll get "your target is out of range" messages and have to reposition myself. At the same time I'm of course supposed to keep things like kill order, threat, my dps rotation and nasty melee-range effects like whirlwinds in mind - and that while I'm right in the middle of a big aoe fest and can't make out a damn thing that's happening.

So, remind me: people prefer this over other roles... why exactly?

Alas, poor Outland

Levelling my shaman through Outland in the past weeks left me with one impression above all others, namely that Outland has been hit by the levelling nerfs worse than any other area.

See, I still remember reaching level seventy on my first character: At the time I ran some instances while levelling, but still also had to complete all the quests in Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, Terokkar Forest and Nagrand, before I finally dinged seventy about halfway through Blade's Edge. The alts that followed were all a bit faster, hitting the level cap in Nagrand or towards the end of my Terokkar questing. The latter already started to feel borderline wrong, because what's the point of having all these zones to quest in when you don't even need to go through half of them to reach the cap?

Anyway, when my shaman hit sixty-eight and thus officially became ready for Northrend, she had only just finished questing in Hellfire and started on Terokkar, skipping Zangarmarsh entirely. If progression from the old world to Outland worked like that, you'd suddenly find yourself ready to go through the Dark Portal at some point in Ashenvale. It kind of makes you go: "What? Seriously?" My shaman's ding happened during a Mana Tombs run and I immediately started wailing at my party members that I didn't feel ready for Northrend yet, and they poked fun at me in return.

Since then I've ventured to Northrend on occasion to train my professions and to run Utgarde Keep and the Nexus, but since I've quested my way through Howling Fjord and the Borean Tundra about five times this year already, I decided to go back to Nagrand for my shamans early seventies, just for a change of pace. The experience gains and item rewards aren't as good, but since the mobs are all green to me I burn through everything pretty quickly. And I'm even having fun listening to Garrosh mope, knowing how annoying he gets once he stops doing so.

I wonder if this is how vanilla veterans felt when BC made so much of their old endgame obsolete. I never got to see much of vanilla at sixty, but in BC I did everything at seventy and loved every minute of it, so seeing all of that great content become abandanoned and obsolete makes me sad.

Then again, I think the problem in this case is that it's not even just the endgame - I don't mind that Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley are quiet and that people aren't regularly raiding Tempest Keep anymore. But Nagrand? Nagrand has always been a mid-level zone, yet in BC it was always bustling with activity anyway. These days it's dead quiet except for some lone ranger asking if anyone wants to group for Durn the Hungerer in general chat and being greeted by tumbleweeds, or the occasional zone-wide yell that "Bloodworm" has defeated Mogor because some death knight wanted the achievement.

Alas, poor Outland, I knew you - but it seems that newer players really have no reason to get to know you at all anymore. Who can blame them, if you can be ready to move on to Northrend before you even had time to get properly started on anything in Outland?

Wrath's inconsistency problem

With patch 3.3 coming out soon, I've been spending some time thinking about the things I am and am not looking forward to, and why I still consider WOTLK an inferior expansion to BC. One of the reasons that I've come up with is what I would call Wrath's inconsistency problem.

WoW is a game that is always changing, and that's a good thing - it's an important part of what keeps it interesting. However, I've found that in Wrath, many of the changes that are related to aspects of the game that I like (instances, raiding) have been increasingly... random. That is to say, they don't follow a consistent pattern; instead one patch changes things into a certain direction, then the next one changes them back, then the next one goes into an entirely different direction again. This makes me cranky because it makes me feel unnecessarily jerked around, and as if the developers are treating the live servers like a big beta project, happily trying out new things all the time just to completely discard them again a month later, leaving players in a state of confusion and uncertainty.

Case in point: dungeon and raid emblems

In BC, badges of justice were originally introduced to provide raiders and dungeon runners with a consolation price if the gear they wanted didn't drop even after repated runs of the same instance. At least the badges you gained in the process got you that little bit closer to another new item.

In Wrath, this somehow changed into emblems becoming the main source of upgrades since you can buy entire tier sets with them now, and any useful items that drop from bosses are pretty much just a bonus. With that in mind, Blizzard said that there'd be different tiers of badges for different levels of content, to avoid situations like in BC, where people farmed Karazhan to get gear that was as good as some drops from tier six content. So far, so good.

Except two patches later they decided that actually, people should be farming heroics to get tier nine and even though there'll still be different types of emblems, you'll only see the two newest types drop anywhere and will then have to trade them for lower types. So basically, we're back to the BC system with the one "advantage" that people can't farm for gear that's coming in the next patch in advance (since instances drop the "wrong" type of emblem until then), and the disadvantages of people being left with a whole slew of useless badges every time a new patch hits, the requirement to do a lot of hopping back and forth between different vendors to acquire the right amount of emblems of the right type, and some seriously messed up pricing between tiers (so that for example a pair of ilevel 213 leather boots costs nearly twice as much as an ilevel 226 pair of gloves or belt - that kind of thing leaves me frustrated every time I want to buy something new for one of my alts).

Case in point: tier items

Back in vanilla WoW, all tier items were class- and slot-specific and dropped from raid bosses. In BC this was changed to a tier token system that combined three classes into one token, to avoid getting too many completely useless drops, especially with the reduced size of raids. You can argue about whether this was the perfect system already (I wouldn't say so myself, coming from a raid force that never got enough conqueror tokens), but it was a step up for sure.

They kept this system for the first half of Wrath, then decided that the Crusader's Coliseum would drop tokens that were useable by all classes and for all slots. However, you'd also need emblems to buy your tier, in addition to those tokens. At least for twenty-five-man raids, ten-man raiders got to buy their stuff with tokens only. And the tribute chest for twenty-five-man hard mode would give tokens that were slot-neutral, but limited to three classes again, in the old style. O...kay, sounds slightly complicated, but let's roll with it.

Except that for Icecrown, once again, Blizzard decided that actually they didn't like the changes they made in the last patch all that much, so they are revamping the system once again. I can't recall whether the new tokens are going to be class-specific, slot-specific or both, but they definitely won't be neutral anymore. And you'll have to buy the ten-man version of the item first, and then use that to upgrade to twenty-five-man with your token. What the eff, can't these people make up their minds? Why do I feel like I need a manual for "how to get my new tier" every time a new patch hits? Whatever happened to just killing the boss and going yay?

Case in point: raid difficulty

At the start of WOTLK, Blizzard said that they wanted to make raiding more accessible, but that it would still increase in difficulty later on. Fine by me. Naxxramas was very easy, Ulduar was harder, plus it had some super hard modes for the hardcore.

Then along comes the Crusader's Coliseum, a huge step backwards from normal-mode Ulduar, and with a separate lockout for doing all the fights in hard mode. Okaaay, if that's the way they want to go...? But no, there comes Icecrown, where the multiple lockouts idea has once again been scrapped and you can instead toggle hard modes on and off on the interface for individual bosses.

This kind of thing just makes me want to tear my hair out. Every time they change the way these things work, raiding guilds everywhere have to start discussing anew how and when they should work on each difficulty. Is that really necessary? Could nobody figure out in advance that offering the same raid in four different difficulties wouldn't be that great an idea? Did they have to use us as lemmingsguinea pigs first to measure just how burnt out and bored people would get?

Cataclysm is supposed to change a lot yet again, both in terms of game mechanics and in terms of the environment. I'm still curious and hopefully optimistic about those changes, but I really hope that the developers will make a plan and stick to it this time instead of completely changing direction again as soon as patch 4.1 hits - I'm getting really tired of this constant back and forth.

Five years of WoW, three years of WoW for me

Calli of Pew pew lazers! made a post reminiscing about five years of WoW yesterday, which in turn inspired me to go and remind myself of just how long I've been playing the game myself. As it turns out I completely missed my three-year anniversary a little over a month ago. Three years... that doesn't make me part of the "I've been playing since beta" elite, but it's still a fair chunk of time. Time sure flies when you're having fun!

As I said in my very first post, I made this blog because I didn't want to clog up my personal journal with too much WoW talk, but when I first started playing I did make a few posts about it on my private blog. Looking back at those entries three years later is quite interesting I have to say.

Let's take a look at my thoughts about WoW on the day I installed it, the 20th of October 2006:

[After talking a bit about The Sims 2:] I also got a completely different computer game in the post today: World of Warcraft. I know I said I wouldn't, but those were just the last fragments of denial from someone who was just too curious to resist the temptation any longer. Especially after I talked to mechanichamster [the first ever friend that I made online], who's been playing for a while and assured me that it was all good fun.

Would you believe that the thing that inspired me to buy WoW back then was Warhammer Online, which hadn't even been released yet? Basically my boyfriend at the time was into Warhammer tabletop gaming and while that wasn't exactly my cup of tea, he managed to get me interested in the universe behind it. Reading up on it online I ended up finding Warhammer Online's "under development" site, which then in turn got me really curious about the concept of fantasy MMORPGs. But Warhammer wasn't out yet, so which other games were there like it? The answer I found is obvious.

Unfortunately he wasn't around today to give me any guidance, so I just started by creating a Human Paladin on a German server and ventured out on my own.

I started on a German server because being Austrian I only got access to the German version of the game by default, and it just seemed the natural way to go. I switched to an English server only a few days later though, where a Swedish friend and aforementioned mechanichamster rerolled night elves with me.

My choice of starting out as a female human seems a bit strange to me these days, as I've become a staunch supporter of the idea that I'm already a human in real life, why would I want to play one in a fantasy game too? I think it can be explained though: At the time I didn't really know what to expect from the game, and I assumed that there would be a lot more RP in MMORPG than there actually is. As someone who never played any of the previous Warcraft games I was worried about being utterly clueless about the lore of all the different races and making a fool out of myself, so starting out as a human made the most sense. Anyone knows what to expect from being a human, because they are one! (Apologies to any trolls playing.)

Why did I go for paladin? Because after reading the manual (yes, I'm one of those people who actually sit down and read the manual), I was convinced that I wanted to play a class that could heal itself and paladins sounded nicely sturdy on top of it.

[screenshot of my paladin in the Goldshire inn at level six]

This is Isadora. She's even decently dressed and everything! Though I'm sure I'll end up finding some more revealinguseful armour soon enough.

Now this bit amuses me to no end, looking back at it. We tend to make fun of WoW's chainmail bikinis and roll our eyes at how what looks like perfectly fine armour on males suddenly shrinks and exposes all kinds of body parts when put on a female character, but when I first started playing I was actually surprised by the fact that my character came with a decent shirt to cover herself and full-length trousers. If you think about it, the average piece of fantasy art tends to be a lot less kind than that to its female characters.

Being a newbie was fun, starting from the moment that I entered the realm and was hopelessly confused because I couldn't see myself, having merged with a bunch of other characters that stood in exactly the same spot as me. A lot of exploring, general stupidity and annoying death followed. And I almost laughed myself silly when I found the corpse of "Dumbledore" in the forest. I can kind of see why people find this addictive, because the world is huge, and as you enter it for the first time it seems as if the possibilities must be endless.

I think this is a pretty solid summary of the average newbie experience, though I was a bit surprised to be reminded that I was actually aware of how badly I was doing and that I was feeling vaguely embarrassed by it. Whenever I look back at my newbie days I remember all the things I did wrong and badly, but I forgot that I was also mostly aware of not doing so well. Which in turn makes me wonder if we don't give bad players enough credit sometimes, being way too quick to dismiss them as hopeless causes that just don't know how to play.

Still, I think that all on your own it's bound to become a bit boring after a while, especially with all the running around you end up doing as you level up. I haven't really interacted with any other players yet beyond helping each other out at defeating the occasional monster, and I'm a bit worried about making a fool out of myself due to my noobishness.

Basically I knew from the first day that the game wasn't going to hold my attention if I was to stay an eternal solo-er. I find the addendum "especially with all the running around you end up doing" particularly amusing, because it shows that I realised very, very early on that the reason you need company is that there are long stretches of time when there's nothing too interesting going on and when you'll want to have someone to chat with in the meantime.

I haven't even figured out how to make my character wield anything but that giant hammer thing yet, and I'd really like her to have a different weapon. Not that there's anything wrong with it in terms of functionality, but there's just something very ungraceful about clubbing wolves to death with a giant mallet.

I think it's easy to forget just how daunting even small things can seem to someone who's completely new to the game. The manual said paladins can wield swords, why couldn't mine? It took a friend telling me that I needed to see a weapon master and then some time until I actually managed to find the one in Stormwind.

It's also evidence that I valued my character's looks highly from day one. Can't go around killing things with a mace when a sword would look so much cooler!

If any of you've been secretly playing WoW already, feel free to let me know - or if you've been thinking about giving the game a try but haven't yet, now would be just the perfect time to keep me company!

My Swedish friend replied with "I'll install tomorrow", and so my fate was sealed.

Why I like dailies

I haven't had much time to play WoW lately due to work-related stress (which also explains the slight drop-off in posts here), but I noticed that the one thing that I do without fail if I have any time to log on at all, is do a couple of daily quests.

To be honest I don't understand why they have such a bad reputation. I mean, occasionally I see another blogger mention that they actually like doing dailies, but even then there is usually some acknowledgement that this is weird and out of the ordinary. In comments to blog posts everywhere I mostly see people state that they hate dailies. From personal experience with guildies I get the impression that a lot of people do them, but only when they are in desperate need of money, as a sort of last resort. At the same time goblins look down on dailies as a sub-optimal method of money-making, because they only reward you with so much gold per hour.

Maybe the difference for me is that I don't look at dailies primarily as a way of making money, but rather as an incentive to guide my play into a certain direction. I mean, I like running instances. Which one should I do today? Hm, Gundrak is the daily heroic, which means that I get an extra reward for doing it and that it will be easier to find a group for it - let's do it!

Or to give another example, I also like fishing, but only in small chunks at a time and when I know that I have a good chance of fishing up something useful. So I always talk to Marcia Chase in Dalaran to see what's the fishing daily for any given day, but only when it's Dangerously Delicious do I actually go out and do it, because then it's a great opportunity to level my alts' fishing skill, get fish feast materials for the guild bank and get paid for it at the same time. How awesome is that?

Basically I look at dailies as a way of providing additional rewards for things that I wanted to do anyway. Since I want to do those things anyway, there's no reason not to do them every time I log in, and so I just "happen" to earn more money than I actually need as a side effect, never finding myself forced into a position to do things that I don't want to do just to earn gold.

I really don't understand why there aren't more people that play this way. In this day and age there's a daily for pretty much anything: killing mobs, gathering stuff, PvP, running instances, and in the next patch there'll be a weekly raid quest too. Hell, every couple of days an NPC will offer you a reward for what's basically just running around Dalaran, which you're probably doing anyway! So really, there's no reason not to get paid for the things you enjoy doing as it is - unless you really enjoy neither PvE nor PvP, but what are you playing WoW for then anyway?