Priest With A Cause

Fan Club

2012-01-25T02:21:00.003+01:00

As if I needed any more reasons to adore the crazy clowns that make up my rated battleground team, I found out the other day that two of them recently created a 2v2 arena team called "We love Shintar".

I was simultaneously very flattered and deeply disturbed. I just had to share that with the world.

There's bad matchmaking, and then there's this

2012-01-17T01:39:00.005+01:00

Bad matchmaking in rated battlegrounds is something that people have moaned about at length in the past, including myself, but it's actually been a while since I've had any major problems with the system. The devs seem to have found a good way to make it work.

Last night however, it bugged out on us big time.

If you can't be bothered to look at the screenshot in detail, basically our team with a matchmaking value of 1842 got pitted against a team with a value of 2702. Yikes! Lending more credibility to the theory that this was a glitch instead of a major flaw with the system was the fact that their character and server names all showed up as "???". One of our team mates claimed to have found out their names at the end and said that they were one of the top rated teams in the EU. I can believe it.

It's quite amazing just how much of a difference skill can make. (Yes, they had much better gear too, but still...) We rode into battle to face them regardless of the odds, and they just wiped us out with seemingly no effort at all and then proceeded to graveyard camp us while their feral druid quickly capped the flag three times. All in all, the whole affair barely took five minutes, and unsurprisingly, neither team gained or lost any points. A pointless game in the most literal sense of the word.

At least we got a good laugh out of it. Our team leader, a feral druid, was particularly proud as he managed to give the graveyard camping team the slip once, snuck up on their flag carrier, and apparently managed to get him to half health before the rest of the team showed up to obliterate him. He sounded quite chuffed when he told us that one of them gave him an /applaud emote before he died.

Personally I was just grateful that they made it quick.

I do love the Darkmoon Faire Arena

2012-01-04T08:22:00.007+01:00

Last night my rated battleground team assembled for the first time in the new year. As we were queuing up for our last match of the night, we had a bit of a wait while we were swapping people out, and since it had just gone midnight in-game I decided to pop onto Darkmoon Island to see whether anyone was fighting for the chest in the arena. I was quite surprised to find that not only was there fighting going on, but at ten past twelve there still hadn't been a clear winner and the chest remained unopened! A couple of my team mates came to spectate with me, and we commented on seeing some familiar faces in the rumble. Finally our queue popped, I yelled one last encouragement to a friend whom I had spotted fighting in the cage and disappeared.

We came out of our rated battleground match twenty minutes later and the fight for the chest was still going on. Amused by this, the entire team decided to show up and put an end to the affair by wiping out all the other competitors in one fell sweep. It felt a bit cheaty to go in there with a full team of ten, but at the end of the day that's one of the fun things about world PvP - that "bring more friends than anyone else" is actually a viable strategy. As it happens, I got lucky and snagged both the trinket and the achievement. A few stragglers kept coming back into the cage, maybe because they were hoping to get some revenge once the group dispersed, but we stuck together so they eventually gave up.

That could have been the end of the entire affair, except that just as things got quiet, one of our death knights suddenly dropped group, ran into the middle of the cage and started yelling that we could never take him down! Of course he got dogpiled within seconds and everybody laughed. More people began to leave the group, and before we knew it, we were having a mad free-for-all against each other. Of course people soon began to form new alliances in the madness, but it was all in good fun and the spirit of friendly competition.

Me and the resto shaman alternated between forming a healing team to keep each other alive and trying to kill each other. I spammed mana burns on the holy paladin who always complains about mana burns, and he hammered me on the head on cooldown. Our warlock kept dotting people up and then cheekily used Demonic Circle to teleport out of the cage every time his health got low. Our warrior and ret pally ran around bursting people down and I was convinced that I was going to have nightmares of them chasing me across a desert while I was whimpering something along the lines of: "Not Avenging Wrath! Not Recklessness!" None of it served any particular purpose, though our tank said that he thought that it was probably some good general PvP training, but oh god did we have fun. There were no rewards and no honour to be gained, but the whole experience felt very visceral and primordially playful. The closest real life equivalent I can think of would probably be a snowball fight. Or children flinging mud at each other in a sand pit maybe.

The cherry on top was when I was standing at the edge of the arena, and suddenly a feral druid friend whom I hadn't seen in months popped out of stealth behind me and murdered me. She must have seen me online and decided to see what I was up to. I laughed so hard! She and one of her friends then joined in the fighting as well.

Two hours later, we finally said good night to each other and collapsed into our beds. Yes, we really did keep ourselves busy doing random free-for-all PvP for that long, and it was the greatest fun I've had in WoW in a while. I wouldn't have seen it coming.

My nominations for the Piggie Awards 2011

2011-12-27T23:57:00.000+01:00

Don't know what the Piggies are? Go read this. Only a few more days left to get nominations in too, so if you were planning to add yours and haven't done so yet, it's time to get cracking! In fact, I haven't seen any other nominations posts yet this year, but maybe people are just sending them in by e-mail (I hope).

The Melting Pot is trying to spice things up a bit this year by accepting nominations for all MMOs, not just WoW, which sounds like a sweet idea in theory, but I'm a bit concerned how well it will work out in practice - after all WoW is still by far the biggest game out there, so it's likely to have an edge simply due to the amount of players that are familiar with it. I'm not sure how much enthusiasm there will be for including other MMOs in nominations. Not to mention that I'm not sure all MMOs are equally comparable... but we'll see how it works out. Myself, I'll mostly stick to WoW since that's what I know, and maybe make the odd point about SWTOR here or there where it strikes me as relevant.

Best raid instance

This one is easy for me and my vote goes hands down to Blackwing Descent. It didn't really have anything to truly amaze like other great raid instances of the past, but it was definitely my favourite of Cataclysm's offerings. It recreated some of that old school Blackrock atmosphere, the difficulty was nicely tuned in my opinion and all the bosses were interesting in their own way.

Least successful raid instance

My first instinct is to say Firelands, simply because that seemed to be the raid where most people had something to complain about this year, whether it was the bosses being too dance-y, too hard, or too easy after the big nerf.

However, I've said in the past that the truly unsuccessful raids, in my opinion anyway, are not necessarily the ones that people complain about, but those that they don't even bother with. In that category I think the winner should be Throne of the Four Winds. It being an instance with only two bosses that felt kind of out of the way of everywhere, even with portals to Uldum available in the cities, and crappy loot with random stats, I got the impression that few people ever went there once they had killed Al'akir... or even if they never killed him, they simply might've forgotten about it completely. (I know our raid group always scheduled raids for either Blackwing Descent or Bastion of Twilight in tier eleven, Throne was a complete afterthought that only came up whenever someone whined about wanting to go because they had never even seen a Conclave kill.)

Best small-group instance

I think Cataclysm has had some pretty nice five-mans in general, but this is where I'd like to give a vote to SWTOR's The Esseles, which I've seen people compare to the original Deadmines elsewhere - and it certainly gave me that same epic feeling that I got from the old Defias hideout back in the day.

Least successful small-group instance

Like with the least successful raid, this kind of depends on your definition of success. The Zuls got everyone riled up with their repetitive valor grind, but Halls of Origination sticks in my mind as "that instance where most people don't even want to bother killing half the bosses". A shame too.

Most longed for instance

I think the Dragon Soul five-mans were the most longed-for, simply because people wanted to have an excuse to get out of the Zulroics.

Silliest gold sink

Larísa gave this award to the Sparkle Pony last year, and in line with that I would give it to the Winged Guardian this year. The whole craze about store pets and mounts reminds me a lot of fashion trends in real life, which are something that I don't care for either.

Biggest game addition / improvement

I think the single biggest addition to WoW this year has without a doubt been the raid finder. However, since I'm still not convinced that this will actually be an improvement to the game in the long run, I'd nominate transmogrification instead - something nice that finally allows people to give their characters some individuality again, and there really is no downside.

In a more general sense, I think that SWTOR's more interactive quests and group dialogues have really made a difference to how people will perceive questing in the future.

Best quest

I can't think of a single quest that stood out above all others, but Silverpine Forest as a whole has been rewritten in a very compelling and interesting way.

Ugliest new piece of outfit

Probably hunter tier 11. There is trying to be creative and then there's trying to pass off a murloc suit as epic armour. Priest tier 11 with its shoulder bird baths was pretty awful as well though, especially since up until then priest sets had never been truly ugly.

Favourite non combat pet

I loved Mr. Grubbs and his silly bouncing when I picked him up in the Plaguelands while levelling new alts! Though an honourable mention has to go to the Lil' XT that was gifted to me by a guildie and that finally provided me with an easy way of getting rid of annoying train sets.

Most charming games company employee

I listened to a long interview with one of the people behind SWTOR the other day, but unfortunately I lost the link to it so I'm not even entirely sure what the guy's name was. I do think it was Daniel Erickson, the lead writer, and he sounded like an utterly charming fellow.

Best podcast

The Instance continues to amuse and entertain me at a level that is unparalleled by any other podcasts I've tried. I don't always agree with everything they are saying, but it's refreshing how the hosts always remain both positive and professional.

Most memorable blog post

Are 400 Pull Kills Good Design? Are They Fun? by Beru.

Most noticed blogger breakthrough

Stubborn from Sheep the Diamond. He made his entrance sneakily by leaving thoughtful comments all over the place at first, and if you then clicked on his name you'd find an even more thoughtful blog, written in an interesting and unique style.

Most solid content provider

Nils from Nils' Blog. He just can't stop talking, but I'm very grateful for that because it gives me new things to read all the time!

Most hugged blogger

Probably the Gold Queen after that horrible ordeal she went through one and a half months ago.

Best writing

I would give this one to Stubborn as well, because he really has a way with prose. I don't think I've read a single post of his that didn't make me crack a smile at a pun or unusual turn of phrase. We need more teachers in the blogosphere...

Biggest controversy

I always suck at remembering these for some reason, though I always follow them with interest while they are current. Probably the Mists of Pandaria announcement.

Most appreciated announcement

That SWTOR wouldn't launch with a dungeon finder... *cough*

MMORPG Company of the Year

I want to say Bioware, because regardless of how SWTOR turns out in the long term, they've delivered a very smooth launch for a highly anticipated and so far very fun game.

Most “Er… what?” moment in MMOs this year

The announcement of Mists of Pandaria.

People’s Choice: Blog Post

Same as above.

People’s Choice: Games Company

Same as above.

Since some people asked for it...

2011-12-22T22:26:00.001+01:00

Any further thoughts I have on SWTOR will now go here. Enjoy!

Fair Warning: World of Star Wars

2011-12-19T22:54:00.004+01:00

Like many people in the WoW blogosphere, I'm currently trying out Star Wars: The Old Republic. For me this is a big step though, because unlike many other bloggers, I've never really tried out any MMO other than WoW. To be honest, none of them ever looked interesting enough to me to make me want to play them, and none of them looked like worlds I'd want to immerse myself in. Observing various MMO launches over the years and seeing pretty much every single game go from the hyped up Next Big Thing to just another small fish in a big pond hasn't really enthused me towards trying something new either.

SWTOR has been different for me however. I wasn't interested in it at all initially, but the closer it came to release, the more I learned about it that had me really intrigued. Now I even ended up in the early access for preorders, and I'm positively hooked. People are already nitpicking about all kinds of little things, and I can't honestly say that they are wrong, but a lot of it strikes me as akin to criticising a painting for the brand of colours the artist used and completely missing the actual picture. I imagine that very few people ever quit their MMO of choice because the chat window wasn't in their favourite place or the crafting system felt a bit bloated. And TOR's big picture is great in my personal opinion. In fact, I'm very much reminded of WoW the way it was when I first started playing: a beautifully stylised world, vibrant and teeming with activity; general chat full of people looking for groups, answering questions and sharing their thoughts on the experience. Group content that can actually kill you; elites out in the world that you have to keep a watchful eye on. People bonding in guild groups where nobody minds if one member gets lost on the way and takes a while to actually arrive. And to spice things up, some comparatively minor new features like more interactive quests and companion crafting.

Anyway, before anyone feels sickened by my gushing, let it be said that I won't be doing any more blogging about TOR on here. This was always meant to be a blog about WoW, and that's what it's going to stay. I think I'll be happy just enjoying TOR "blindly" for a while, without overthinking any of it, but if I do eventually feel the urge to talk about it more, I'll make a new blog for that.

To be honest, I initially expected to cancel my WoW sub by the end of this month. I still think that it's a great game in many ways, but over the years it has changed too much for my taste - the only issue was that I wanted to continue playing an MMO and until now there wasn't anything that looked even remotely like a viable alternative to me.

The only "problem" that remains are that social ties are hard to sever. I still owe someone a Sulfuron Hammer for which I need to grind Molten Core trash every now and then. My rated battleground team is still ace. For these things alone I'll stay subscribed to WoW for now. But I expect that I'll be playing a lot less, and as a result this blog might become quiet as well, as I'll have nothing much to talk about.

In the meantime, I hope that we can all continue to have fun in the game(s) of our choice.

Holy Priest PvP Patch Notes for 4.3

2011-12-15T02:20:00.003+01:00

Yes, I know that I'm a bit late but I wanted to actually play around with the changes for a bit first to make sure that I knew what I was talking about.

In PvE, the general consensus seems to be that holy got a big, fat buff this patch. I think part of that is actually just the fact that unlike Firelands, Dragon Soul seems to be shaping up to be very "holy-friendly", but more than anything else PvE holy priests have been boosted by the buff to Divine Hymn.

Unfortunately this does very little in PvP, where interrupts are so prevalent that you're lucky if you can get a Flash Heal off. Channelling a spell for over seven seconds? Get real. There are exactly two occasions in PvP where I do use Divine Hymn: One, when I'm already dead, in Spirit of Redemption form and thus safe from interrupts, and there are lots of people around me who need heals. This doesn't tend to happen more than once a game, so it's not really worth investing extra talent points into it. Two, when High Commander Halford Wyrmbane in Isle of Conquest does his crushing leap and most of the raid inevitably fails to avoid it and gets hurt really badly. Yeah, not really worth spending points on either.

Still, holy has been buffed for PvP this patch, via the reduction of Holy Word: Serenity's cooldown. I hit that baby pretty much every time it's off cooldown, and I used to attempt to hit it when it was still on cooldown as well. Actually, that still happens even now, but less so than it used to. More instant healing? Yes, please!

On a side note, the patch notes also state that the developers reworked the functionality of Spirit of Redemption, presumably to address issues such as people not getting achievement credit for some things while in spirit form. Good plan, but in PvP this has apparently resulted in a bug that causes our deaths to never show up on the score board at all. It's silly, but I actually get a bit of a kick out of it. Oh really, you killed me five times? Well, you can't prove it! Zero deaths, see? I'm invincible! The thing that would really interest me is whether it's just a display bug or whether it actually affects the death counter on a functional level, as that would mean that holy priests could now potentially "cheat" their way towards getting achievements that require you to do certain things without dying (such as Ironman). I haven't really tried it.

Also, one stealthy change that wasn't mentioned in the patch notes is that they changed the Levitate animation so that when you run while levitating, your legs don't move anymore and you just float. I cast it on our warrior in Arathi Basin and he spent the next minute floating around the Stables flag going: "Boo, I'm a ghost!" Now that is clearly broken.

Deathwing is dead

2011-12-14T02:37:00.000+01:00

I braved the raid finder a second time last night because I wanted to see how the story of the Dragon Soul ended. The following post contains spoilers for what happens in there if you're concerned about that kind of thing.

Once again I was thrown into a run that was already halfway done, so I was immediately faced with a brief cut scene of people jumping out of an airship (wait what) and next thing I knew we were on Deathwing's back. Can somebody tell me how you measure your progress during that fight? I sure couldn't figure it out at the time. People just killed tentacles and oozing blood over and over, and the raid leader said stuff like "just one more time" and then Thrall apparently kicked Deathwing into the Maelstrom.

Pro tip as an aside: If you want to be successful in the raid finder without having a clue, queue up as a healer. Seriously, I've now seen the whole instance and there wasn't a single fight where any healer was required to do anything but spam their AoE heals. I still don't know half the mechanics and it hasn't really been a hindrance. Occasionally a tank will die when they suffer from a damage spike and nobody bothers to provide them with extra healing, but since there is no identifiable tank healer, it's hard to place blame. Not to mention that that's what combat resses are for. At worst someone will decide to initiate a vote kick on whichever healer currently has the lowest hps (yes, I've seen that too), so you should be fine as long as you're not at the very bottom.

Anyway, unsurprisingly Deathwing wasn't dead yet, which led to the last encounter where he was sort of clinging to some rocks in the Maelstrom and you basically stab him in the toes. Above anything else, this fight led me to the conclusion that Deathwing is simply too large. I can appreciate Blizzard's attempts to directly correlate size and epicness, but there's a tipping point where you start to feel like an ant chewing on someone's ankle and that's just not cool. In this particular case I couldn't really see any part of Deathwing other than the claw directly in front of me, and that despite of having my camera set to maximum zoom. He pretty much makes Kologarn look like a midget. I heard the NPCs shout and I got warnings from DBM, but it was really hard to see what was going on. This is not good.

We wiped twice on this encounter, at which point about half the group left, but the raid filled up again within a minute and we simply tried again. I wasn't bothered by the wiping except that it always forced us to repeat a huge portion of the fight where there wasn't really much to do for me, which felt quite tedious, until we got back to the point where we'd all die very suddenly. (It was always when we were assisting the last dragon aspect, Kalecgos in our case, and the AoE damage would ramp up very fast and very suddenly.) Someone said that it was due to some tentacles not getting killed, but I don't think that anyone paid attention to them when we eventually did kill him either. The third time I just made sure to have Divine Hymn ready at the worst point of it and then we made it through. (Not saying that I single-handedly saved the group, but it did feel like it made a difference.)

After the final cinematic had finished playing, which I'll comment on at the end, I requeued once again to see bosses number five and six. I already said it in my last post, but I think it bears repeating that the type of storytelling Blizzard uses in this raid really suffers when the raid finder throws you at the bosses in an almost random order during your first visit. I mean, I had no idea why I had got from Wyrmrest Temple to the Maelstrom, but hey. I wonder what percentage of raid finder users could give a coherent summary of what they just played through at the end of a run. Not that many I bet.

Eventually I did find myself back at Wyrmrest Temple to face off against Ultraxion with a new raid, the infamous "button boss" I had heard about. I was nervous about messing up on this one, but in the end the button mechanic turned out to be really obvious anyway. (Just wish DBM hadn't constantly covered my button with timer bars which I then had to frantically click away every time I needed to access it.) Again we wiped twice, and people complained about button-push failure, though from what I could gather hardly anyone died to that. In the end it just seemed to once again come down to the healers saving all their big cooldowns for the very end, and once I made sure to do that, we won.

Deathwing then showed up and broke the Horde gunship (what is it with Horde airships getting shot down, damn Alliance bias), which is why we ended up on the Alliance one. A-ha! There we then had to fight off some Twilight attackers, which qualified as the third boss fight. This one actually had a bit of movement, but other than that it was once again just more AoE healing and Warmaster Blackhorn died on the first attempt.

And that's how I ended the Fall of Deathwing, by killing the boss just leading up to the Deathwing fight. Yeah.

Back in Wrath I wasn't very happy with the way my first Lich King kill turned out, but killing Deathwing through the raid finder was a completely different experience altogether. I was neither frustrated nor excited, I simply felt completely detached from the whole experience. In a way it doesn't really matter how epic Blizzard tries to make a boss fight if I end up doing it with a bunch of strangers who think it's a smashing idea to drop a train set just as the entire raid is gathering in front of the boss for the pull. It can't end up being anything but a joke.

But even that aside... seeing the bosses in a random order was a bit of a mood killer. There was also a lot of emphasis from the NPCs about how we, the players, were a bunch of goddamn heroes, and the only thing that was missing was Alexstrasza turning to look straight at the screen and pointing at me to emphasise that yes, I am the saviour of Azeroth! Go me! I suppose that's a step up from being reduced to the Lich King's plaything while Tirion Fordring saves the day, but it still felt a bit awkward. Just having someone say "You're a hero!" doesn't make me feel heroic if I didn't actually do anything particularly exciting. (And spamming Holy Word: Sanctuary really isn't that much of a feat.)

The overuse of the term "Cataclysm" also felt kind of fourth-wall breaking to me. I thought the Cataclysm as an in-game event was what happened when Deathwing broke out of Deepholm and broke everything. We can still feel its after-effects, but generally speaking it's over and done with. Having Thrall say stuff like "The Cataclysm is over now" just feels weird, as if he's proclaiming the end of the expansion. Also, "Deathwing begins to cast Cataclysm"? Really? Destroying the world is simply a matter of casting a spell? Again, that just seemed odd to me.

That the final cinematic showed the dragon aspects becoming mortal was a surprise to me. I wonder what they are going to do now? I can just picture Nozdormu settling down in Silvermoon and Ysera chilling in Moonglade.

Oh, and whatever happened to the young dragon that came out of the purified black egg from the Badlands? Does he only show up in the rogue legendary chain? That would be a tad disappointing. Also, in which book did Kalecgos officially become the new aspect of Magic anyway? It's a bit sad that the more attention I pay to WoW's lore, the less I feel I understand what's going on...

Anyway, in summary there's nothing outright badly done about the Fall of Deathwing, but I found nothing to get excited about either, and that's quite impressive for a last raid of the expansion. I just spent a lot of time standing around spamming my AoE heals while listening to NPCs talk and watching cut scenes. I suppose it's a fitting ending for what most people seem to consider the game's worst expansion so far.

So I tried out the raid finder after all...

2011-12-09T16:27:00.004+01:00

... and it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. I mean, my initial predictions for this new feature were pretty dire, but the reality actually wasn't nearly as bad. There was a lot of rotation as players continually dropped out and were instantly replaced, but it all happened so fast that I barely noticed. A couple of people said rude things, but it wasn't anything particularly out of the ordinary for WoW (as sad a statement as that is to begin with). I didn't really look at the time, but I think I completed the whole Siege of Wyrmrest Temple in a little less than two hours and with only one wipe. On the whole I would say that the entire affair felt a lot like an average dungeon finder run - which isn't exactly glowing praise, I know, but I hope you get what I mean. It's not really particularly fun if you're looking to socialise, but if you just want to "get things done" and collect some loot, it definitely works as intended.

To start at the beginning, I had just completed a random heroic with a guildie and he mentioned wanting to "do a raid finder" next. I asked to come along since two guildies vs. 23 puggers is still better than a single person vs. 24 puggers, right? As we queued up, I had a brief moment of worry as I realised that I knew pretty much nothing about any of the fights, but I quickly reassured myself with the argument that this was probably perfectly in line with the audience the tool had been designed for.

We got into a run in progress and zoned in just as people were clearing the trash leading up to one of the squidiphant bosses. A few people said something about stacking and spreading out, but I didn't quite catch whether we were supposed to alternate this pattern between trash packs or during different parts of one pack - not that it seemed to matter. I noticed a mechanic that temporarily removed all my mana and then returned it later, but couldn't figure the details of it out on the fly.

In a way, these early trash packs were an amusing throwback to more old-school raiding for me, as one or two people died pretty much on every pull. Just being in a bigger group again was nice too - I do kind of miss the twenty-five-man atmosphere sometimes.

Then we got to the boss and he was pulled with no explanation. As a healer I just healed whoever took damage. Again, people shouted something about stacking up every now and then. I deducted that the tanks did some taunting at some point, purely because one of them died and then whinged at the other tank for not taunting at the right time. The main mechanic of the fight seemed to be a bunch of coloured blobs that spawned in different corners of the room and then crawled towards the boss. I gather that only one of them has to die, and someone was always kind enough to spam a raid warning macro to yell "Purple!" or whatever and as long as at least a few people were confident in their colour choice, the rest followed them anyway. Things seemed to go quite well until we lost the main tank a second time after a few minutes and then we wiped. A couple of people immediately started shouting abuse at whoever they thought was to blame. My guildie said that he wanted to try again from the start and left. I followed him and was surprised to not get any kind of debuff.

In the end my guildie ended up having to log however, and I was intrigued enough to requeue on my own. Since my healer queue was instant, I tried to requeue a few times to see if a fresh run would pop up, but there just seemed to be several different ones in progress. Eventually I just accepted a 2/4 and found myself clearing trash to Mr Squidiphant once again. This time things went more smoothly however and he died right away. Much to my surprise I ended up winning a pair of tier leggings.

Since I hadn't seen any other part of the raid except for this boss's room, I was a bit lost and blindly followed the throng of people through a portal and up to the top of Wyrmrest Temple. A lot of well-known NPCs were there and seemed to be having a talk about something important, but I didn't dare to pause and actually listen to them because I had enough trouble following what was going on with the raid. Suddenly we jumped through a portal and were in the Eye of Eternity. Bwuh? Really made me wish I had listened to the NPCs after all.

We started Hagara the Stormbinder with no explanation as usual. To be fair, someone had asked whether everyone knew the tactics, but nobody spoke up either way (myself included). I suppose it served me right that I died to an ice wave pretty early during the fight, along with about ten other people. One or two players suggested to wipe it since they weren't going to beat the enrage timer with half the raid dead, but in the end they kept going. I leaned back in my chair and continued to watch the rest of the fight for five minutes or so, in order to at least learn something, and yes, they did beat it with half the raid dead. I was actually kind of relieved that this one didn't drop any loot for me, because I would have felt bad about rolling on gear that I hadn't really earned.

After the group had disbanded, I immediately requeued again because the whole experience hadn't taken very long, and I now wanted to see the other two bosses that I was still missing. Presumably other people were doing the same, as I got into a fresh run right away. This helped to put the story of the raid into context somewhat, but I still found it very hard to pay attention to what was going on with the NPCs while trying to keep up with my group ploughing through the trash. Morchok really was just tank and spank with a detour behind a pillar every so often. I got a ring from him.

There seemed to be a bit of disagreement about which of the two squid bosses to take on first, but in the end the majority pulled the group towards the one I hadn't done yet (yay me), the General Vezax lookalike. I thought that this one would have some sort of mechanic to him (something about bouncing a ball around?), but someone said that this didn't matter in the raid finder and we just stood there and spanked him, except for the couple of times when everyone had to stack up on him to avoid dying in the void, or something. Basically, similar to the last boss of Grim Batol, only easier. I also dispelled some debuffs occasionally, but I don't even know whether that was actually necessary. My loot luck continued and I won a new trinket as well. Afterwards I left though, as I had seen everything there was to see in this half of the raid.

Three new pieces of loot for relatively little time investment, not too bad a deal. Even though I had no clue about how any of the bosses worked, I only suffered a single wipe. In a way that sounds way too easy, but after having experienced it myself, I have to say that this strikes me as as a decent enough difficulty for a pugging tool like this. In a way the reduced reliance on individual performance is actually very "old school" - I can still remember when you would sometimes down a normal raid boss with half the raid dead, like my group did with Hagara, but in normal raiding this isn't something that's generally possible anymore as far as I know.

So, is the raid finder a success? I honestly don't know. I can see how this must be awesome for people who like to use the dungeon finder but don't usually raid. No commitment but you get to fight more epic feeling battles with lots of people (the number of players does make a difference in that regard), see the bosses and gather tier gear. But if you're not that keen on the dungeon finder... it's really more or less the same, just scaled up in size. The whole experience has little in common with raiding in the classic sense: no camaraderie, friendly banter or the sheer joy of overcoming a challenge together. In my opinion you can't even experience the story properly because in typical "gogogo" fashion you constantly have to scramble to keep up with the rest of your group. Is that really "getting more people into raiding"? Not by my own definition, but your mileage may vary.

Impressions of Darkmoon Island

2011-12-07T22:30:00.006+01:00

It took me a few days to realise that the new and revamped Darkmoon Faire still seems to follow the same old pattern of only being available for one week per month. It's easy enough to make the portals unavailable I suppose, but since the new Island is a dedicated zone instead of a temporary addition to existing scenery, I can't help but wonder how limited it will really be. What happens if you log out on the Island before the Darkmoon Faire is supposed to end? Do you get teleported out? Can you stay but find the whole site abandoned? Or will you be able to do dailies all month if you're insane enough to never leave the area? There's probably a very simple and straightforward answer to this, but I haven't seen anyone mention it yet.

My first impression of the new Island was actually very positive simply due to the sights evoking pleasant memories. The portal dumps you in a dark forest with scary eyes blinking at you from the bushes, with the faire in the distance, and the whole scenery reminded me a lot of Melee Island in the original Secret of Monkey Island, a game that I enjoyed very much.

A quick look around the place didn't really reveal anything amazing or surprising. The main impression I got was that the Faire as a whole has simply been streamlined and brought up to par with the rest of the game, so instead of trying to work out an obscure hand-in system for otherwise useless items, you simply do some dailies now. I reckon that Soft Bushy Tails and the like will soon be turned into greys - which is kind of a shame, as I still have tons of them, evil bat eyes, scorpid blood and whatever else there was, left in my bank.

The first thing I did was do the non-daily quests for professions. They are very simple along the lines of "pick five flowers" but award five profession skill-ups at once. Irrelevant to a level-capped character but probably nice for levelling alts. While they weren't dailies, I would be very surprised if they didn't end up being repeatable at least once a month.

The new daily quests are all little mini games which are decent enough fun. My favourite so far is Whack-a-Gnoll, which is incidentally also the only one where I can currently complete the whole daily in one go. I truly am a born healer. The only thing that bugged me a little bit was that I had positioning issues with some games. More specifically I would get an error message when trying to use the shooting gallery, telling me that I had to stand at the booth (even though I already was), and then I had to step back, forward and sideways a few times until the game would actually let me play. Not a big deal in principle but annoying when you have to pay for each attempt and it only lasts a limited amount of time, so time spent fiddling around in an attempt to find the right spot is wasted money too.

I was glad to see that they kept the big cannon, even though I'm terrible at it. I swear I got a bullseye once but the game disagreed with me and only awarded me three points.

They didn't completely get rid of the hand-in idea though, and I was pleased to see that there are several things that you can collect in PvP. I was just a bit disappointed that the drop rate for Grisly Trophies seems to be low and generally weird... I've seen comments from people saying that they managed to gather hundreds in a single dungeon run, but after a whole night of doing battlegrounds I had barely collected a dozen. At first I thought it was related to me being a healer and generally not scoring any killing blows, but I didn't notice myself getting any more trophies once I made an attempt to do more damage. In fact, sometimes I would still get them from enemies that I hadn't even touched, so I still don't really understand how it works.

Journals, banners and insignia dropping from enemy players in PvP is a strange adjustment as well, as I stopped trying to loot player corpses years ago (usually they are only a distraction and drop nothing but a few silver). Now it's suddenly worth doing again, but you have to be lucky to be the first one to click on a body and actually get a drop. I only managed to pick up one item all night but a friend was nice enough to gift me the other two needed for the Darkmoon Defender achievement.

Speaking of PvP, the new Deathmatch Pit is pretty fun. It's basically identical to the Gurubashi Arena except that you need to go through a click and a cast bar to actually enter it (presumably to avoid players falling in by accident) and that it's located smack in the middle of a new quest hub and thus always busy. In the Gurubashi Arena you can get lucky as a low level at a quiet time of day and grab the chest there unopposed, but I reckon that there's no chance of this happening at the Faire anytime soon. Even at 3am the pit was absolutely packed - I went in with a group of friends and we wiped everyone else out; I imagine that it must be very difficult to win this fight on your own right now. Of course only one person can actually get the loot, but nobody seemed to begrudge the mage in our group the achievement.

My absolute favourite part of the new Faire are actually the small things though, such as noticing a gnome mage NPC near the shoreline when I crawled out of the water after failing to hit the cannon target for the umpteenth time. When I clicked on him he offered to teleport me straight back to the cannon for a small fee of thirty silver. Thanks, Blizzard, for anticipating my repeated failure and giving me a shortcut to repeating it even faster!

And while I haven't really been playing Alliance very seriously in a while, there are some things that you never forget... and I actually burst out laughing when I spotted this little fellow in one of the animal holding pens:

Happy Patch Day!

2011-11-30T23:22:00.008+01:00

I might not be particularly positive about the future of WoW, but I was looking forward to today's patch. While I've barely seen half of it so far (I haven't even looked at the new Darkmoon Faire), I don't feel disappointed so far.

The first thing I did after the game had patched itself up was log onto my main and start putting stuff into void storage. You can tell for how long some of my gear had been rotting away in the bank untouched because I had to repair most of it before being able to store it away... all because of a change to armour durability that happened what feels like aeons ago. I nearly filled up my new storage space completely, but it was nice to finally have some bank space again, even if the transfer cost me a lot of gold. I seems that they really wanted to make this another gold sink and as far as I'm concerned they succeeded at that. Too bad I didn't end up freeing up any more space in my bags, but that's really my own fault for carrying so much junk around. But hey, you never know when you'll need that MiniZep Controller or a Brazier of Dancing Flames!

Next I got started on transmogrifying. My priest's set was all prepared and easily done. My druid slipped into full tier four for feral spec and I spontaneously bought her the old merciless gear for resto, because I remember wearing that when I really got into PvP healing with her back in Burning Crusade. My death knight was also easy because I simply mogged her blue starter set on top of her current gear. However, after I was done with those three I was left staring at the rest of my characters a bit blankly. I already started collecting a few pieces for my shaman, but for most of the others I'm simply stumped for ideas right now. That's okay though, not everyone's gear has to be modified this way - if I'm happy enough with their current outfit, that's fine too. I also enjoyed wandering around Orgrimmar and actually taking a closer look at the people around me again and inspecting their cosmetic sets. It sure made the population look more diverse.

In the evening I put together a guild group for the new heroics. They were advertised as similar to the ICC heroics and from a technical point of view they followed the same pattern of being a sequence of stories that require unlocking the first time. Like the ICC heroics, I also found them pretty enjoyable, at least this first time around. I think it was a good move by Blizzard to give us something to do in the Caverns of Time again, because that setting allows for the telling of some great stories, plus they can let you get up to all kinds of silly hijinks because it's time travel and time travel be crazy, right?

We did the first one, End Time, twice because we had to swap group members out after the first run and their replacements needed "attuning" as well. This wasn't a bad thing though, as I got to see all the bosses that way - I hadn't been aware that you could get two out of four different ones each run. A few people died on Tyrande and we wiped once on Sylvanas because we didn't know what to do with the ghouls, but other than that it was pretty smooth sailing. Jaina's Echo struck me as kind of tragic because she was still nice even in a dystopian version of the future in which she had already died! Oh, and the rewind mechanic on Murozond was incredibly fun. Overall I felt that this was a great instance.

Up next: The Well of Eternity. Wait, what? I'm a night elf? Bwah! For extra hilarity I also underwent a sex change during the second half of the dungeon, though I suspect that that was unintended. It was an instance full of laughs either way, as there's something comically endearing about Illidan and his grumpy no-nonsense attitude. (My favourite bit was him playing "traffic warden" to allow the group to get past the legion of demons.) At the end he also provided us with some fun as we had a quest to hand in to him but he kept running away, which caused our entire party to chase him around in circles for several minutes in a Benny Hill-esque fashion.

My only slight concern was that it felt like there was almost a bit too much going on in terms of lore and NPC action. I'm perfectly happy to play second fiddle to important lore characters in an instance like this, but I felt like I could barely keep up with what was going on towards the end; demons attacking left and right; Tyrande needs help, where's Malfurion, Illidan is yelling something... and all that while we're actually trying to complete a boss fight. Maybe it becomes a bit clearer on repeat playthroughs - or more annoying.

Finally, the Hour of Twilight felt like the weakest of the three dungeons. You're supposed to escort Thrall to Wyrmrest Temple, but especially during the first and last third of the instance he kind of acts like the classic escort NPC, always moving a bit more slowly than you'd like and forcing you to run back to fight some "ambushers" whom you wouldn't have to deal with in the first place if he'd just hurried up already.

The voice acting on the first boss is also quite over the top and I mentally nicknamed him Asthmarion for the way he sounds as if he's about to breathe his last breath with every sentence. His insistence on referring to Thrall as "the shaman" was also a bit amusing because didn't they consider that there might be player shamans in the group as well? As ours put it, "I'm going to go where I damn well please... he is talking about me, right?

The fights were all pretty tank and spank, and the big "reveal" at the end wasn't that exciting as not even Thrall sounded surprised by the guy's sudden and inevitable betrayal. Still, it was a fun little romp that left me curious about how the story continues in the Dragon Soul raid. I'm not sure when/if I'm going to see that though, as my initial curiosity about the raid finder has been replaced by pure dread and I simply don't want to deal with it right now. Which is funny, considering that all the reports that I've heard so far actually make it sound a lot better than anyone expected. A guildie from our rated battlegrounds used it to go on his first raid ever today and told me afterwards that they cleared it. One has to wonder just how much the devs lowered the difficulty in there, considering that our raid group killed the first boss on normal mode on their first attempt as well. Oh well, not something I can really comment on anymore.

How's the guild finder working out for you?

2011-11-29T00:16:00.004+01:00

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a while. I was quite excited about the introduction of the guild finder in 4.1. Of course it was never going to replace the full application process for a raiding guild, but at least people would be able to see that we were out there, right in the game, without us having to do any special advertising!

Right after the introduction of the thing, we actually managed to find a discipline priest who was kind enough to sign up for our guild website and ended up joining us as a somewhat infrequent but loyal raider. Then there were two or three people who applied to be social members and were invited straight away; they usually chatted for a few days and then left again or simply never logged in again.

Since then however, ninety percent of the applications we've received either contain no text at all or something like "i need a gild". I reject them with no comment, but it gets tedious. The other ten percent actually do write a line or two but then never seem to log in again either, as you can tell from the guy who applies at level 15 and says something like: "I'm a really fast leveller and will be able to join you guys at the cap in no time!" Twenty days later he's still 15 and inactive. It kind of makes you wonder just how serious the churn in this game is, or whether there are really that many people who keep rolling up new characters just to abandon them again after 5-10 levels.

I originally volunteered to take care of in-game applications, but I've been finding the task increasingly depressing. I've written so many in-game letters to people, telling them that they are welcome to join us and to just whisper any guildie next time they're online... and yet the recipients are never heard from again. It wouldn't be so bad if we still got some serious applicants every now and then, but I just haven't seen any in months. It feels as if all the energy that I'm putting into these attempts at being welcoming and friendly is being poured down a bottomless hole; it shouldn't be surprising that this gets draining after a while.

I don't know if that's just my guild, my server or what. Still, I can't shake the feeling that the guild finder is at the end of the day too much like a dungeon finder for guilds. Press button to ~~queue~~ apply, later press "accept" to join the group. No talking required. I would imagine that if you're running the kind of guild which only exists for the perks and to collect some money from Cash Flow, this could work very well. However, the "classic" guild is a purely social construct with no inherent gameplay elements, and you can't be social by just pressing a button and not interacting with people.

I could see it working much better if guilds could set up some simple filtering mechanisms for applicants, such as a mandatory "why do you want to join us" field to keep out the pure button pushers. On the other hand the tools for prospective applicants could use improving too - I can't imagine any half-serious raider (or PvPer... or roleplayer... or anyone who genuinely cares about what kind of guild he's going to join) trying to apply purely via the guild finder right now, where they'd struggle to find out anything about any guild beyond the little paragraph that the guild master can fill with information.

Pilgrim's Bounty and Cooking

2011-11-25T23:39:00.003+01:00

Cynwise said something funny in his guide to this year's Pilgrim's Bounty: "doing those first 350 points any other way is just silly". I have to admit that at first that comment actually stung me a little. Why is it silly? I love cooking (in game; in real life I'm terrible at it), and have done so pretty much for as long as I can remember. I remember being a level six noob with barely half a clue about anything in the game and eagerly cooking up Herb Baked Eggs and Kaldorei Spider Kabobs. At around level thirty or so, my friend who was wisely levelling her cooking and fishing in sync gifted me a stack of Sagefish Delights one day and I was like, OMG, eating these gives me an mp5 buff? Crazy! I also have fond memories of winning the recipe for Runn Tum Tuber Surprise in Dire Maul East and being told that I was extremely lucky.

I've always loved cooking for how it was a profession that benefited from almost everything I enjoyed doing in the game anyway. Explore and find a vendor in a remote location who sells an interesting recipe, hoard anything that might look useful to find out later that you can turn it into a tasty meal with the right recipe, quest to raise your cooking skill beyond 225, and so on and so forth. It always felt very engaging to me, and to this day I've maintained one to two tabs in my private guild banks that are devoted to nothing but raw cooking materials, gathered in one place to redistribute them to alts for later use.

However, looking at it honestly, I had to admit that I've really been struggling to level cooking on my new alts whenever I tried. With the new levelling system, you zoom from one place to the next and past many zones so quickly that you might never even see many recipe vendors, and you end up killing fewer mobs that might provide you with raw materials as well. Having alts "help each other out" seemed to have a very limited effect too, as I found it hard to keep track of who needed which recipes (Altoholic is supposed to track that in principle, but for me at least its profession tracking has been buggy for ages), and somehow pretty much every character seemed to run into the same skill point humps, needing stacks upon stacks of the exact same raw foods and I never had enough. As much as I used to love it, it had become annoying in its current incarnation. It worked when levelling was slow and had you traipsing all over Azeroth, but in this brave new world... not so much.

So I thought what the hell, might as well get it done, and so I've been spending a good chunk of the past two evenings cooking up Pilgrim's Bounty foods on various alts. (I still have a couple left, but we'll see whether I get around to them tomorrow.) I didn't just level my cooking either; basically I did the following things on all of my characters:

- I did the quest line that sends you back and forth between the cities to deliver different foods to different places.
- I ate at a Bountiful Table to complete the Share a Bountiful Feast quest and did Sharing is Caring while I was at it.
- I completed each of the dailies at least once, which was easy enough since I was cooking up lots of food to level my skill anyway, and got the Pilgrim's Progress achievement on the side.

If there were other people at the table with me, I threw food at them for "FOOD FIGHT!", but I didn't hang around to wait if nobody else was eating. Fun fact: even though I've been participating in this holiday in some form or another ever since its inception, it took me until this year to figure out how this achievement actually works. I used to think that it was just a random chance whenever you hit the button to share food. D'oh.

I also got The Turkinator on lots of characters, though not all, as I didn't fret about it if I had a streak of bad luck. As long as I got enough turkeys to do my cooking I was happy.

I only did Pilgrim's Pouch on one or two characters as I considered getting to the Exodar too much of a hassle in addition to the repeated back and forth for the quest line (most of the alts that needed skilling up were Alliance). This rang particularly true after I tried to take the portal to the Exodar from Darnassus one time and accidentally sent myself to the Blasted Lands with my hearthstone on cooldown. Arrrgh.

However, even without such mishaps these little adventures turned out to be quite a time-intensive endeavour, with each character needing about an hour to complete the whole tour, mostly due to travel time and the time it took to gather sufficient amounts of turkeys. It was all pretty relaxed though, and I watched some tv on the side and went AFK while on flight paths. Missing the boat over and over again also gave me happy flashbacks to my newbie days, though I never fell into the water.

The only thing that really got on my nerves was, funnily enough... people standing in the fire. Seriously, you don't need to stand in the cooking fire to use it! I noticed that it was mostly max-level characters in raid gear who were doing that, which then made me wonder whether it's some kind of subconscious way of being rebellious? An "I have to move out of the fire all the damn time, this one's not hurting me so I'll stand in it all day long" kind of thing? The thing is, I don't really care whether they stand in the fire in their raids or not, but being audio-spammed with incessant "oof oof oof" sounds gets annoying really quickly. This then got me thinking whether bad stuff on the ground wouldn't be easier to avoid if it always made your character make that sound... you might find yourself moving out of sheer annoyance, or else your guildies would at least yell at you for the same reason. (I vaguely recall a bug in DBM during ICC I think it was, where it kept making a warning noise on Blood Princes even if other people were moving with the shadow prison debuff... you bet that had me shouting at them!)

Battleground tidbits

2011-11-22T01:05:00.004+01:00

I still have a couple of different post ideas floating around, but right now it would feel weird to work on any of them because none of it actually relates to what I've been doing in the game this past week... which is pretty much nothing but running battlegrounds, both rateds and randoms.

Just for laughs I decided to pick up my paladin whom I've neglected in the past couple of months, reactivate her holy spec and throw myself into random battlegrounds with zero resilience. I think it says a lot about just how powerful holy pallies are right now that I still had a pretty good success rate. Of course, if someone really zeroed in on me I died quite quickly, but most of the time just being a paladin seemed to be enough of a deterrent that people didn't even bother attacking me, which I found quite amusing. Compare that to my druid who gets harassed by the enemy non-stop even though she's in full PvP gear.

I'm now maxing out both honour and justice points on several characters in order to be able to buy them as much of the new gear as possible once the new season starts. Saving up justice points to convert into honour later feels quite bizarre to me, considering that PvE always used to be my top priority. But the thought of running random dungeons doesn't excite me at all anymore, while the idea of gathering PvP gear now does.

The other night four of my team mates and I ran a couple of randoms after our rated matches, or rather we did Battle of Gilneas over and over again since it was Gilneas bonus weekend. At one point we got matched up against a nine-man Alliance premade, to much groaning, but at least we didn't go down easily. While they had an elemental shaman with the Arena Master title in their group, they weren't actually very good at battleground strategy and spent a lot of time simply zerging in circles. We fought them as well as we could and even managed to score a few points by continually assaulting whichever base their zerg had just left. In the end they overwhelmed us however and we got three-based. We shrugged it off and queued again.

Next match, the same premade again. Okay, this time we did groan. My damage dealing friends decided that if we were going to lose again, at the very least they were going to get some revenge on that Arena Master and annoy him with some focus fire and crowd control spam. Again we were getting dominated quite hard, but at least people seemed to be having fun annoying that shaman. But then, I don't know how it happened... suddenly we had two bases and they had only one. Everyone banded together and to everyone's surprise we actually managed to squeeze out a win! That was a true fist-pumping moment for everyone in the group, friends and puggers alike.

Next match, we met the Arena Master again, this time on his own. I guess he decided that premades that couldn't actually win weren't really worth the effort.

In which I come to a nice but surprising realisation

2011-11-16T01:49:00.001+01:00

I frequently waffle on and on about how all the best times I've had in WoW happened during the Burning Crusade. If I had to pick one specific event or achievement during that time that had a bigger impact on me than anything else, it would without a doubt be the original Zul'Aman bear run. Mind you, I have a lot of happy memories from the BC days, but working on beating that timer week in, week out, failing over and over again until we finally had those ten Amani War Bears for everyone in the team definitely stood out.

(Incidentally, looking back at that picture of our "Team Bear" makes me kind of sad, as not one of the other nine people still plays with me anymore. They all either left the guild for one reason or another or simply quit the game entirely. I'm still in loose contact with most of them, but at least one guy has pretty much vanished off the face of the earth as far as I know. If you read this, Kordac, I still miss hearing your Irish accent on Teamspeak!)

Obviously I've had other good times in the game since then, but nothing that really lived up to those bear runs... until...

The other night I was thinking about how PvP season ten is ending soon and pondering our rated battleground team's performance over the last couple of months. And it suddenly hit me just how much of a good time I've been having and that I really, really care, in a way that I haven't cared about anything in the game in three and a half years. We've had our problems, sure, and for a while we had a couple of players that didn't really mesh with the rest of the team and who made things awkward sometimes, but looking at our regulars right now, there isn't a single person there that I don't like.

I don't exactly await every rated battleground evening with baited breath, but once we get started I tend to completely forget about the time (which is quite a feat, considering that I'm usually one of those people who look at their watch every five minutes) until someone says "well, that's it for the night I guess" and I realise that it's three hours later. I get completely immersed in exciting matches, and I laugh out loud at the silly banter that goes on during breaks between games. Who'd have thought that Cataclysm managed to bring back a little piece of my favourite expansion after all? That feeling of playing in a team, kicking butt and just having oodles of fun is back. I was honestly kind of shocked by this realisation.

The funny and slightly confusing thing is that I can't even really explain what makes these rated battlegrounds so different from everything else that I've done in the game since those infamous bear runs. The first things that come to mind that I enjoy about rated battlegrounds, other than the company, are the challenge and the pacing. Due to the matchmaking system almost every victory and loss push us to our limits in one way or another, but there's also plenty of time to chill out and be silly - between matches, at the start and towards the end of a game, as well as when you're simply waiting to resurrect at a graveyard.

As a bit of a side note, I've been thinking about challenge in games lately. Whenever WoW's difficulty is discussed anywhere, I tend to side with those who say that it needs to be harder, but at the same time I'm the kind of person who sets all her single player games to "easy", so am I being hypocritical? After a bit of soul searching I came to the conclusion that I don't really need challenge in my single player content (though I don't necessarily mind it either if I have to face it), but I absolutely do need it in group content because otherwise... it doesn't really feel like group content to me.

I mean, if I did a heroic Grim Batol through the dungeon finder right now, it wouldn't even matter whether I did it with friends or random strangers in terms of gameplay; just running along and AoEing everything down is boring. There is no interaction. I mean, I could chat with my friends while doing this I guess, but for that I don't really need to have the game running; we might as well go for a walk. For group content to be satisfying for me, it has to be at least difficult enough to require the assistance of another human being that can think for themselves, so that our goal is only achievable by working together. That is the true joy of having other people to play with, for me at least. And PvPing with a fixed group of people is like that all the time.

However, none of these things make rated battlegrounds truly special. Raids still have challenge and cooperation too! It's an interesting conundrum. Then again, maybe I just like riding around with a group of people who are all using the same mount as me. Vicious War Wolves, hoo!

Surprise zone reviews!

2011-11-13T00:25:00.004+01:00

In my last post about the new low-level areas I said that I would look at a bunch of zones in central Kalimdor next. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint, but something else came up first: my undead mage! He's yet another character that I've been playing on and off; I just never had much to say about his adventures. I mean, "cleared the new Badlands for the third time, it's the same on Horde side"? Not very interesting. However, as I made it through his last couple of levels to sixty, I encountered some things that gave me reason to pause.

Burning Steppes

I briefly wrote about levelling through the Burning Steppes as Alliance in this post. On Horde side the story is exactly the same, and I still liked it. However, I was kind of surprised by the way the parallelism was handled. When I did the zone as Alliance, I already had a hunch that Horde might be going through the same motions, but I wasn't sure how they were doing it. I only saw one Horde base in the entire zone, and no equivalent to Flamestar Post where Corporal Keeshan hangs out.

Turns out that Flamestar Post serves as both an Alliance and a Horde outpost at the same time, not by being a neutral base per se, but by phasing pretending to you that only your respective faction is present. So as Horde, I didn't even see Keshan, but instead there was Ariok the orc. I thought that was an interesting approach... it makes no logical sense to me from an immersion point of view, but it still struck me as clever in its own way.

Speaking of Ariok, he made me feel really lore-dumb.

Wait, Eitrigg has a son? (Where are all the daughters?)
Wait, Eitrigg is a former Blackrock orc? (I guess the grey skin should have given it away; I used to think he was just really old...)
Wait, Eitrigg serves in the Argent Crusade now?
What the hell? When did this happen?

This was not a bad thing by the way; I thought it was rather amusing.

Also, I ran into some mobs that even in Cataclysm's simplified levelling game turned out to be real mage killers: the various types of Obsidian Elementals. They have a chance to spell reflect, which is all the deadlier the more powerful you are. Nothing like giving yourself a pyroblast to the face! Good fun, that.

Swamp of Sorrows

Swamp of Sorrows was once again largely what I expected it to be: several neutral quest chains and then the Horde/Alliance conflict from the other side, with the quests being exactly the same only for different mobs.

However, I was once again confused by whether one side was actually supposed to win, and if so, who did. On Alliance side you get to assault Stonard and then the quest giver gives you a pat on the back afterwards, which I always interpreted as "we won, well done". However, apparently Stonard actually reverts back to its original state afterwards (I have to admit I never checked), and on Horde side I was given the impression that the assault was successfully repelled. Which is it? It would be rather odd for the Alliance to just lose with no explanation or even acknowledgement after they had the Horde on the run for the longest time. Though to be honest, I also found the experience a bit unsatisfying from Horde side because I was apparently super successful at all these quests to kick Alliance butt but somehow we were still losing the entire time, until the very end at least. It just made me scratch my head.

At the end of the zone, there was a quest that surprised me by how it was basically a clone of an Alliance quest but still ended up with a totally different feel. On Alliance side you help a draenei who's trying to heal his sick friend, but he dies anyway. This is sad, but in the end Velen himself makes an appearance to provide some comfort, which is pretty cool.

On Horde side, you help an orc lady whose husband was mortally wounded and he dies anyway... and nothing happens. Most depressing quest in the game? I remember standing on top of the watchtower afterwards, looking out across the swamp and suddenly hating the zone - not for having bad quests or anything, but for being a place where good orcs die in the dirt (after I had done no less than four quests to save him, too) and nobody gives a damn.

Blasted Lands

The Blasted Lands were a bit more samey than I would have liked, though each faction had at least a couple of unique quests. And I still like the storyline about the demon hunter regardless, as well as the way I kept finding junk that I could exchange for greens every now and then. And saving tadpoles of course.

A Gnome's Life

2011-11-06T18:15:00.008+01:00

Every now and then the WoW blogosphere is good for some in-game laughs. First there was Single Abstract Noun, the bloggers' guild (is that still going?), then there were the Real ID heroics (which I didn't write a separate post about, but I did participate), and now the latest craze are gnome clones, originally inspired by a nostalgic post by Alas.

Since I had yet to try out the new gnome starter area anyway, I decided to join in the fun as a gnome clone "impostor" (copying the look but rolling up a warrior, so I won't be able to be a fully armoured clone). While I've been playing a lot of alts this expansion, I mostly used already existing characters that had simply been sitting around at level twenty or so pre-Cataclysm; I haven't actually done a lot of levelling from one to ten. But holy crap, Nils wasn't kidding when he said that those first ten levels were hardcore!

I started off being confused by what was only the second or third quest in the gnome starter area. After I'd just made my way out of a gnome refugee camp, I was told to save some more survivors that couldn't make it on their own. "Okay, that makes sense!" I thought and went back to save all those injured gnomes that were lying on the floor. Nope, couldn't target them or they came up as "invalid target". Turns out that I was supposed to "save" some perfectly healthy and only slightly scared gnomes that were standing around outside. O-kay?

Not much later I was told to ask for a teleport to the surface. Why teleport when there's a perfectly serviceable elevator right next to me? Fortunately a vague memory reasserted itself to tell me that taking the lift would not be a good idea before I could do anything foolish.

At level three a warrior quest rewarded me with a Very Light Sabre. Yes, I know... cheap joke. But I really loved it!

In a cave full of troggs I had my first death as early as level... was it four or five? A rogue in full heirlooms had just mowed everything down in front of me, and then all the mobs respawned at once and I was buried under a pile of troggs. It's as if the game wanted to teach me early on that the presence of other players was only going to cause me headaches.

Getting Victory Rush at level five increased my survivability a lot, though I learned quickly that its use is limited when it comes to casters. Nothing like dying at the feet of the second Frostmane Seer that's attacking you a mere second before you manage to run over and hit it. That was death number two. On a side note, I'm impressed that the Frostmane trolls have survived as long as they have, considering that they appear to live on nothing but weed and fight by throwing snowballs at you.

Then there was the cave with the wendigos. I managed to overlook one of the quest NPCs near the entrance and (unnecessarily) went all the way to the back of the cave in search of him. However, I found something else there, a rare! Acutely aware of my vulnerability, I made sure to clear the mobs around him before attacking, but once I charged him I found to my dismay that he still had quite a lot of health relative to my puny damage output. So I died, again.

Since it had been quite a close affair, I immediately ran back in to try again, and this time managed to get him down with literally one hitpoint left on my own character. More exciting than any raid boss kill these days if you ask me!

I had one more death when I was asked to kill a yeti called Vagash. Non-elite, no adds... no biggie, right? Well, maybe if you have heirlooms, but as a warrior in whites he kicked my arse, and in a very thorough fashion. I went back to my trainer to pick up Thunder Clap, which I hadn't done yet, in hopes that this would help - though I'm not sure it would have, considering how I hadn't even come close to killing him before. Fortunately I was saved from any further embarrassment as I ran into a random gnome priest upon my return to the cave, who tentatively threw a heal on me and looked at me in what I interpreted as a hopeful manner. We grouped up and it was easy peasy. I couldn't help but wonder whether he hadn't got his arse kicked before as well.

Then I hit level ten, picked up prot spec, and the next cave I went into seemed to hold no threat to me at all. I also dinged eleven before I even knew it. I guess the really exciting levels are over. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing where the project as a whole goes.

On the whole, this starter zone was amazingly fun! The only thing that marred the experience ever so slightly for me was the how-to-use-the-flight-master quest line, which still told me that I couldn't fly anywhere where I hadn't been before (flat out not true anymore), and the quest text couldn't seem to decide on what exactly it was that I was transporting for the dwarves, as it alternated between cleavers and mining picks every other sentence. Okay, it's kind of fun to joke about dwarves cooking with mining picks, but really? That's one of those things that I would have expected them to have fixed nearly a year after release.

Random Karazhan Memories

2011-11-03T15:08:00.002+01:00

I just noticed that I didn't even have a Karazhan tag yet before writing this post. The humanity! Like pretty much everyone who started raiding in Burning Crusade, I spent a lot of time in that place and it was a crucial part of my formative months of becoming a raider. I even remember one time, admittedly already towards the end of the expansion, where I did two full clears of the instance in a single day. Some guildies called me crazy for it, and I do remember feeling slightly dizzy afterwards.

But it wasn't always like that, breezing through the entire raid in a few hours. I remember repeatedly wiping on the trash to Attumen and being completely unable to get even the first boss down. I also remember learning to be sensible about aggro, because the last thing you wanted to happen when Attumen spawned or mounted up and the aggro reset was for you to stand out as the noob who couldn't wait for the tanks to get a solid grip on the boss (again).

I remember huddling on the stairs leading up to the ballroom, and having to trust the tanks blindly to pull the trash correctly because you literally couldn't even see what was going on up there. Most of the time it was fine, but sometimes there would be an exclamation of "uh oh" and we'd get more than we could handle. I also remember standing on those stairs when we first noticed that Blizzard had added music to the instance, and discussing our opinions on it.

I remember wiping a lot on Moroes as well, and learning how to kite, crowd control and use a focus macro. I'd position myself in a far corner and as soon as the tank pulled, I'd grab my CC target's attention with a Shadow Word: Death and then shackle it a safe distance away from any AoE. I was very proud of that at the time.

I remember Maiden of Virtue forcing me to fiddle with my UI and keybindings for the first time in order to be able to dispel her Holy Fire quickly enough so that people wouldn't die from it. Up until then the old point and click had always been good enough, but not anymore.

Everyone always seemed to love the Opera Event, especially the Big Bad Wolf - his "Run away, little girl!" was DBM's default warning for any bad effect that needed avoiding for a long time. Myself, I was never a big fan, and I vaguely remember never being very good at kiting him. My favourite was always Oz, because I loved how it gave different people different things to do, such as someone who did fire damage having to tank the strawman. I get the impression that a lot of people hated the idea of fights requiring specific classes though.

I remember the Curator and being exempt from flare duty as a shadow priest because we had absolutely no burst back in the day and switching targets actually harmed my main utility of regenerating other people's mana. I remember the trash afterwards that was immune to magic and all the casters meleeing with their staves and daggers.

I remember Illhoof's sacrifice always making me nervous and me reminding people to make macros to target the chains. Deaths remained frequent for a long time. I also remember what an extreme novelty it was to have a paladin tank the imps. Hah!

I don't actually remember anyone ever blowing up the raid by moving in the Flame Wreath in the Shade of Aran fight. Instead it was always people dying to the Blizzard, or the Arcane Explosion or what have you. He forced people to dance even back then.

I loved Netherspite because shadow priests were the best tanks for the blue beam after warlocks, and I enjoyed the way this enhanced my special class abilities. I became so fond of this boss that I was frequently happy to do the beam assignments for everyone during later runs, even if I wasn't the raid leader.

Wait, didn't I forget another dragon? Of course, Nightbane! I remember being so proud of getting my own Blackened Urn to summon him myself, and I felt my heart break when Blizzard turned it into a useless grey item in Wrath and encouraged me to vendor it. And yet another extremely gimmicky fight! Blizzard would never make a boss like that again, with a deadly cleave and an AoE fear on a short cooldown. I mean, you can't require a ten-man raid to have multiple fear breakers just like that! Outrageous!

The Chess Event: a fun little distraction, including the shame of "wiping on chess" (which we did, more than once).

And finally Prince Malchezaar and his infernal infernals. I remember wiping on him so many times simply due to bad infernal placement, and always people chucked it up to bad luck, though I could never quite shake the feeling that maybe we were just doing something wrong?

It's really kind of funny to remember all these little things. Karazhan is often cited as a "raid done right", and I actually agree, but at the same time it was chock-full of gameplay that Blizzard and many players would consider awful these days: Watching your aggro? How terribly un-fun! Crowd control? Boring and just slows things down. Having boss fights that heavily favoured or even required at least one of a certain class? Way too limiting! The thing is... while I understand why many of these things were changed, I don't think that their replacements are necessarily that much better. I mean, is needing a ranged dps with healing dual spec really that different from needing a certain class? And is it really that big a deal if your spec does kind of poorly on one fight due to its limitations, as long as there's another one where your strengths really get to shine?

Anyway, you might wonder why I'm feeling nostalgic about Karazhan in the first place. Before my boyfriend cancelled his subscription, we ran the place a few times for transmogrification gear, and after he stopped playing I wasn't in the mood to go back for a long time. However, I finally decided to go back to complete my druid's transmogrification outfit the other week, and it's been... interesting.

Opera still nearly kicked my butt on my own. Nothing like being little red riding hood on the Big Bad Wolf all the time, only having a chance to attack him for three seconds every thirty seconds or so. You'd think that he wouldn't hit that hard on a level 85 character, but it still adds up when you can't do anything to fight back or defend yourself for ages and ages. I was also terribly fail at interrupting Julienne's heals, but got there in the end.

But oh, the biggest problem when soloing Karazhan is definitely the Chess Event, that former joke. While Medivh moves his units all over the place and cheats left and right, you can only use one unit at a time, and you get a debuff that forces you to wait ten seconds before controlling another unit. And without your control, your pieces are dumb as rock, willing to auto-attack whatever's in front of them but nothing else - so if they get mutilated from the side, they'll be happy to just stand there and stare off into space until they die.

On my first run, it took me about four hours until I finally beat the game, and I was close to bursting into tears out of sheer frustration by that point. I had looked up a variety of guides online but nothing quite seemed to work. Yesterday I went back and beat it on the first try, though Blackhand only had 6k health left at the end. The sad thing is, I can't even tell whether I got better at it or whether it was just sheer dumb luck, as Medivh's moves can be quite random and screw you over big time at the worst moments.

The only things I've learned for sure are that the fire cheat always happens at roughly the same time, and you have to be ready to move your king (and/or possibly one other important unit) out of the fire patches as soon as they spawn, and that the castles are good pieces to push forward and then leave alone, as their main attack is a non-directional AoE and thus useful even if they refuse to focus on the "right" enemies. Otherwise it's largely about flying by the seat of your pants and hoping that your king and queen can kill the enemy king off before it's too late.

It's really funny how these things can work out, with the former joke boss becoming a soloers nightmare two expansions later.

A goblin in Azshara and Ashenvale

2011-10-28T11:13:00.002+02:00

I rolled a goblin priest to see the goblin starter area some time ago. Those zones seems to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion.

So once I had seen what it was all about, I parked my little priest in Orgrimmar and didn't touch her for the next couple of months. I've found that not playing a character for a while gives them time to settle, and possible negative associations from the past are given time to dissipate. So I finally felt ready to play my goblin again the other week and took her to Azshara.

Azshara is a sort of continuation of the goblin starter experience, but officially open to all races and not quite as silly. Yes, the hyper-intelligent raptor that escaped into space with a rocket was a bit mind-boggling, and then there was that whole affair with Azuregos and the spirit healer. What the...? However, a lot of the zone was about fighting night elves and naga and typical wildlife, and I was happy.

I saw a comment on someone else's blog, I don't remember by whom, who said that Blizzard had "destroyed" Azshara with Cataclysm. It's certainly not the quiet and empty land it used to be, but... don't get me wrong, I certainly appreciated the old Azshara, but let's not kid ourselves: emptiness is cheap. Azshara was what it was due to Blizzard failing to do anything useful with it, not due to any intentional design making it awesome. They did the same thing again in Cataclysm in some areas, so if you miss that feeling of being lost in a landscape that is nothing else but land, you can always go for a stroll through Alterac. (Or actually, Gilneas works quite well too, due to so many things being phased.)

While Gallywix is ugly as sin, I have to admit that I still found this display oddly awe-inspiring.

Meanwhile, Azshara offers lots of questing fun now and I think it's a solid experience, though I had one problem here that I haven't managed to have in any other post-Cata zone: I managed to lose the plot. Suddenly I had no more quests in my log, even though I still had a good quarter of the zone left according to the quest achievement, and I was sitting out in the middle of nowhere, lost. I then spent about half an hour driving around the zone on my annoying-sounding trike, until I finally found a quest on a lonely mountain peak which then reconnected me with the rest of the story.

I wasn't sure how I felt about that. On the one hand it's nice to engage your own brain in search of quest givers every once in a while instead of blindly following a breadcrumb trail all the time. But if the entire zone is designed around the idea that you will be following the breadcrumb trail along fifty different mini-hubs, losing the plot is annoying because it could literally be anywhere. How I longed for just being able to check three different quest hubs for updates instead of having to peek into every nook and cranny of the zone in search of that lone missing exclamation mark.

I also felt bad about ending the zone by killing the former Alliance flight master.

I continued onwards to Ashenvale. For comparison, I wrote about how I experienced the zone on Alliance side in this post a few months ago. Horde side was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster to me. Oh cool, I get to ride around on a kodo. Argh, why are we killing all these night elves and I'm not allowed to join in? Why am I doomed to watching passively as the cut scene plays out? Combat cut scenes seriously need to go, considering that's the basic unit of WoW gameplay.

There were a couple of NPCs that I liked, like that orc couple where the guy made me pick flowers for his lady and she made me collect fel fire. It made me like the Horde. I was quite happy to slaughter generic night elves by the dozen, and I was absolutely delighted to see that the three named beasts from The Ashenvale Hunt were still around and dropping quest items.

Around the third time or so when I walked through Silverwind Refuge, I noticed that there were actually night elf corpses on the ground still... and named ones. Agrnagvekf. I didn't really remember them very well, but I found myself wondering which one of them had sold me the expert cookbook back in the day. Suddenly I hated being Horde.

Emotional turmoil aside, seeing the Alliance vs. Horde conflict in Ashenvale play out from both sides was also a bit strange. I've talked about how quests running in parallel on both sides can make for a more interesting story, and to some extent this is happening in Ashenvale, but it's all very inconclusive. The Horde has you bombing Astranaar and then happily sends you on your way with a pat on the back. But didn't I put all those fires out as Alliance? Didn't I save Astranaar? So Alliance wins, technically? Likewise a Horde quest sends me to corrupt the Forest Heart, and I do, but I know from Alliance side that they cleanse it afterwards. At Splintertree Post I fought off not one, but two major night elf attacks, but the attackers never really went away entirely. And at Raynewood Retreat the Horde kills the local Alliance leader, but the Alliance lays massive waste to the Horde army on their side of the quest. They then say that I saved the place, but did I really?

Silverwind Refuge is the only area where it's completely clear who won, but that happened before I even got there. Anything I contributed to the war effort made no particular difference from what I could tell. That's actually not a bad thing in principle, but what bothered me a little was that I couldn't tell whether that was by design, or whether the developers simply didn't want to tell Horde players that they lost those fights... because knowing what I knew from Alliance side, it kind of felt like they should have.

Next zones coming up in review from Horde side whenever I get around to it: Desolace, Southern Barrens, Thousand Needles.

Pondering the MoP priest talents

2011-10-25T15:36:00.000+02:00

Okay, so I might think that completely revamping the talent trees yet again is a really bad idea (I think Nils has a very good summary on the subject here), but that doesn't mean that I'm not curious about what new talents the developers are thinking of for my class. Let's have a look, shall we?

Tier 1 aka The Mass CC tier

You only need to take a brief look at the new system to see that every tier of talents seems to focus on a certain theme, such as survivability or crowd control. The first tier of priest talents appears to be designed around our mass crowd control, and sees Psychic Scream being turned from a baseline ability into a talent with alternative options.

The Good: I think that the three options given here, mass root vs. "fearing totem" vs. the old psychic scream are interesting alternatives to achieve a similar effect. Void Tendrils sounds like a good way of getting melee off your back in an environment where psychic scream frequently fails to achieve much because so many classes have been given counter-fear measures by now. (Though I noticed that they are also planning to give shamans an anti-snare totem in MoP. Clearly the class is meant to remain our nemesis in PvP.)

The idea of a fearing totem, which is what the Psyfiend basically sounds like, is a very funny one. It's nice to imagine dropping this on top of a flag carrier under pressure for example. I do suspect that it will need buffing though, because one single-target fear every two seconds for ten seconds is not that amazing, and most of the effect can still be nullified by a single tremor totem while it still has twice the cooldown of good old psychic scream.

The Bad: All the good things above refer to PvP only. In PvE this choice is likely to feel borderline pointless for all specs, because single target crowd control is already used rarely enough in group content, and mass CC is used even less. At best you can probably hope to get some use out of it if you get into a tight spot while questing, but I'm not sure how likely that is to happen anymore.

Tier 2 aka the Movement Tier

This one currently looks very boring to me unfortunately: increased movement speed after getting bubbled vs. increased movement speed while levitating vs. Fade removing movement impairing effects.

The Good: Body and Soul is a fun talent right now, and I guess it's nice that they are making it available to all specs - I miss it all the time on my shadow priest.

The Bad: As it stands, I don't see this tier offering any genuine choice. I just can't see anyone taking Path of the Devout. Body and Soul is the clear winner for PvE, because being able to get out of the fire sixty percent faster is amazing. And Phantasm will probably be the undisputed choice for PvP in the future, since snares are the bane of any priest's existence. The only reason it would lose out to Body and Soul right now is that the current PvP 4-piece bonus for priests has something similar baked in for whenever you shield yourself. Hopefully something will be done to make this entire tier less of a no-brainer.

Tier 3 aka... Shinies?

Aha! Finally something that affects the priest's actual role, whether it's healing or damage dealing. We get to pick between Surge of Light / occasional instant Mind Blasts that consume no shadow orbs, a shiny holy boomerang of healiness and Archangel with the mana regen aspect removed.

The Good: For healers, there's a genuine choice here between saving mana with Surge of Light or increasing your output with Archangel (assuming that all specs will get Evangelism as well, otherwise having this as a talent would be kind of pointless). Divine Star sounds like the kind of ability that might end up with an awesome spell effect that makes you squeal in delight every time you use it, though its usefulness remains to be seen.

The Bad: Shadow doesn't appear to have much of a choice here. Two of the three available talents give dps boosts, and it will probably only be a matter of time until theorycrafters figure out which one is better.

Tier 4 aka The Survival Tier

Another tier that I feel very meh about as a whole. From what I gather they intend to give all classes a pick of survival talents, but I feel that to a priest the whole concept is probably less exciting than it is to other classes. Shadow already has a good survival cooldown in Dispersion, and the two healing specs are already dedicated to guaranteeing their own survival with their default tools all the time. Anyway, the offerings are Desperate Prayer, +30% effectiveness for bubbles on yourself, or a bubble that gets auto-cast on you when you get low on health (once every 90 seconds).

The Good: I think there is an interesting trade-off between Desperate Prayer and Final Prayer. The former has a slightly longer cooldown and you have to actively cast it, but you can choose when to use it. The latter is applied automatically and occurs a bit more frequently, but you have no influence on it; it just happens when it happens. That sounds like an interesting choice in PvP.

The Bad: Unfortunately I suspect that Angelic Bulwark is always going to win out over both of the abilities mentioned above, since getting more absorption and thus protection against spell pushback from your shields all the time sounds like a lot more bang for your buck in almost any scenario I can imagine. Also, I don't like that Final Prayer sounds like they just copied over Sacred Shield from the paladins and increased its cooldown.

Tier 5 aka The More Damage and Heals Tier

Aha! Finally another tier that affects core abilities! In this one we have more damage and healing done to targets at or below 25% health, Power Infusion and Serendipity / a tweaked version of Mind Melt.

The Good: I reckon Power Infusion is one of those talents that every spec would be happy to be able to pick up. Disc priests might enjoy being able to grab Serendipity to boost their single target output even more when required.

The Bad: I thought that we were past the age of flat bonuses to damage and healing. I guess holy is going to be rebalanced either way, but at the moment I find it hard to even imagine functioning as a holy priest without Serendipity, which wouldn't leave me any choice but to take that. I think for shadow PvE Power Infusion is going to be a no-brainer; I don't know enough about its PvP side to be sure what a PvP-ing shadow priest would pick here.

Tier 6 aka The New OP Spells

This tier is exciting simply because everything in it is actually new, and a lot of it looks extremely powerful in its currently suggested implementation.

First we have Vow of Unity, which looks like it's inspired by Beacon of Light and Hand of Sacrifice. Then there's Void Shift, which swaps health percentage with a friendly target, and Vampiric Dominance, which applies free extra heals to three nearby friendlies every time you heal or do damage (though it doesn't say whether they have to be near you or near your target; I assume the latter).

The Good: Well, it all sounds very exciting, doesn't it? Void Shift would be another very powerful survival cooldown that can either be used on yourself or someone else. And Vampiric Dominance sounds amazingly powerful for a healer (kind of like the old Flash of Light glyph for paladins, except even stronger) - so powerful that I have a hard time imagining this talent making it live.

The Bad: Vow of Unity is really hard to judge since there are so many unknowns about it, such as duration. I suspect that Void Shift will be a no-brainer for shadow priests as the other two talents are both healer-centric. It also has enormous griefing potential in the currently suggested incarnation - in battlegrounds for example you could swap health with some poor random schmuck whenever you're close to dying and get them killed instead.

Final Verdict

I think that even if I agreed that another talent revamp was badly needed, I doubt that I would be happy with this system in particular. People are complaining about the prevalence of cookie cutter specs in the current system, but as a healer this doesn't affect me nearly as much. As a holy priest I'm free to choose between a variety of talents to boost my hps, mana regen, cooldowns or effectiveness of different spells, all depending on my preferred playstyle, and they are all equally valid.

A reduction to six talent points is less than what I currently get to contemplate, and about half of them don't even affect any core abilities. A few of the new abilities sound very cool in principle, but it remains to be seen how frequently they will be used.

Dreaming of a different dungeon finder

2011-10-24T15:47:00.000+02:00

While link-hopping the other day, I stumbled across a post by Doone - which is admittedly already several months old - in which he talks about why the dungeon finder sucks. It's widely known that the dungeon finder has a bad reputation, though people will quote different reasons for it: no consequences for bad behaviour, too much anonymity, being grouped with players from other servers in general etc. Doone on the other hand looks at the issue from an angle that I honestly hadn't considered yet: he says that the problem with the dungeon finder is mainly that it takes away the player's choice. You have no say in who you get grouped with, and if you do take matters into your own hands by leaving or initiating a vote-kick, there are systematic punishments involved. We are basically being herded into groups like sheep.

Whenever I see the subject of the dungeon finder come up anywhere these days, I have to admit that I'm overcome by a certain defeatism. Yes, it's had some very bad effects on the game, but what is the alternative? Not getting groups at all? Clearly future MMOs will have to implement a dungeon finder too. Doone's post was a nice reminder that the issue is not as black and white as that, and that there are ways of providing players with group-finding tools that don't take away their choice.

This got me thinking about the way WoW's looking for group tool worked before the dungeon finder. Personally I always thought that it worked quite well actually - as evidence let me refer you to this old post of mine in which I talked about completing the daily heroic on four different characters within only two hours, with groups that were formed manually, by people using "looking for more".

Looking back at it now, I think the tool's main problem wasn't actually anything related to its technical implementation, but that people simply weren't ready for it mentally at the time when it first came out. They had loved their old LFG chat channel, and I remember there being lots of complaints when it was removed, with players stubbornly refusing to use the new tool and spamming trade with LFG requests instead. Whenever I hear people complain that finding groups before the introduction of the dungeon finder was so hard, and that they spent hours sitting in trade without getting anything done, I can't help but think that maybe they should have just used the damn tool instead of sitting in trade? But what do I know.

Fun fact: The old tool also had an "auto join" option, to automate group formation if enough people were available, but nobody in their right mind ever used it because obviously you didn't want to risk getting grouped with some random schmuck you didn't like. Kind of funny to look back at that now.

Aside from simply having an undeserved bad reputation, I think that the old looking for group mainly had three problems: First and foremost, a lot of the time there simply weren't enough people using it, partly due to the aforementioned stubbornness, but partly also because a single server generally couldn't sustain a large enough player base interested in dungeons across all levels. If you wanted to get a group for Zul'Farrak, nothing could really help you except maybe for spamming general chat in the right levelling zones and some helpful guildies.

Secondly, for some reason you were only ever allowed to queue up for a maximum of three instances at once. This made things quite awkward if you just wanted to run some heroics, any heroics, as a lot of people would not even see your availability on the tool if they happened to look at one of the other thirteen you weren't queued up for.

And thirdly... well, some of it just felt kind of clunky to me to be honest. For example there was no option to "view all" players in my level range who were looking for a group, you had to go through sixteen different screens for individual dungeons to see them all. Actually putting the group together also felt a bit mindless and involved sending lots of messages that you might as well have macroed for their sameness: "Hey there, I'm putting together a group for [instance], would you like to join us as [role]?" Or you could just throw out ninja invites, but those were considered rude by many people.

Looking back at that now, those problems could have been fixed quite easily without turning the whole thing into the fully automated dungeon finder that we have right now. For example we already have the option to queue for all instances in our level range at once instead of just three. I would think that making the default view show everyone in the right level range, with optional filters by dungeon, role, level or whatever, couldn't be that difficult either. Finally, they could implement a special invite window for the tool, similar to the current guild invite and dungeon finder pop-ups, that says "[Name] wants to invite you to play [role] in [instance]. (x/5 spots filled)" or "[Name] wants to join your group as [role] for [instance]" and saves you from having to type slight variations of the same questions all the time.

That only leaves the admittedly major issue of not having enough players to work with - but I think that if players were actually able to choose who to group with, allowing cross-server grouping wouldn't be that much of a problem. It could simply be another filtering option to only see people from your server or to see everyone in the battlegroup.

You ask, what's the point of choosing among a huge bunch of strangers? I think there are still a lot of factors that can influence your decision even then: maybe you like or hate someone's name, maybe their guild name rings a bell, maybe you really want to have a certain class in your group... you could also check out people's gear on the armoury. Are all of these things a bit superficial? Absolutely, but we are also happy to heavily judge people by first impressions in real life, and it's not completely without merit. Also, if you make a wrong choice, you can learn from it and do better next time: okay, so that guy's guild name sounded cool, but he was a total jerk so you'll avoid him and his mates in the future. And so on and so forth. Over time you'd probably be able to find some friends and make a name for yourself even in an extended cross-server community, because people would actually have to pay attention to who they play with, and acting like a twit would increasingly cause others to avoid you.

Of course a system like that would also need proper group leaders again, but I think that's okay. Clicking on a bunch of people of the right classes to invite them is not exactly a huge amount of work, but it shows some investment, earning that person the right to retain group leader status in the actual dungeon as well. There would be no need for vote-kicking or deserter debuffs because it wouldn't be random. You get to choose your groups anyway, and if you're not happy with the way things are going, you can always try again and do better (instead of queueing for the same amount of randomness again and blindly hoping that your next group will be less obnoxious).

Finally there's the issue of teleports. While they are not directly connected to the process of group formation, I'm not a fan of them in the current dungeon finder and would happily get rid of them as well, partly to emphasise the dungeon's place in the world again, partly to increase people's investment in the run by making the whole endeavour take a little more time. I'd probably put a summoning stone inside the instance portal though, which could be operated by a single person to mass-summon the entire rest of the party inside, across servers and all.

There are still some issues for which I don't really have a solution: For example the tank shortage would probably persist, so getting a tank for your group might come down to who can "snipe" an invite the quickest as soon as a tank appears on the list of available players, which isn't really desirable. There is also the awkwardness of multiple half-formed groups floating around that can't really merge without kicking anyone. And on lower levels, with few available players even across multiple servers, one might have to "camp" the looking for group window for a while to find enough people, which would be pretty boring - maybe the optional "auto-join" feature could make a comeback for that.

The main things that a system like that would change about instance groups compared to the dungeon finder would be that people could choose who to play with again and filter out unsavoury elements more easily, and that dungeons would require a bit more organisational effort again, thus becoming a bit rarer. Still, I'd rather have a really fun experience every so often than lots of half-baked runs that I end up being completely sick of after a few months.

To be sure, I have no illusions that Blizzard is going to take the current implementation of the dungeon finder back out of the game. They must be really proud of whoever designed the thing. But sometimes it's nice to dream.

So... Mists of Pandaria is official.

2011-10-22T00:07:00.003+02:00

There is a lot of raging and incoherent complaining going on right now, and I don't really want to add to that... but I'm sorry to say that I am disappointed. When the title of the next expansion first came up as a rumour, I said that I was feeling pretty indifferent about it... but I have to admit that since then I'd developed some hopes that regardless of what the expansion was actually going to be about, it would contain something that would reignite my spark for the game. Unfortunately the expansion preview panel hasn't revealed anything that excites me - on the contrary, I kept reading about plans for the game that I personally find nothing but extremely off-putting.

As far as the pandaren themselves go, I don't mind that Blizzard changed their mind about including them and that they want to make a former joke race a more serious part of the lore. New races have always been one of my favourite expansion additions. And a race that at least starts neutrally is something that I'm sure a fair amount of people are going to be quite excited about. (I have to admit I'm somewhat intrigued by the further-reaching implications myself - if Blizzard doesn't care about race as an easy way of identifying friend or foe anymore, could other races eventually be allowed to change sides as well?)

However: while I approve of new races in principle, I personally don't find the pandaren appealing at all, and unfortunately it kind of looks like there isn't really anything else to this expansion. I don't think Burning Crusade would have been as good if it had just been "WoW: Blood Elves and Draenei". Or think "Cataclysm: Goblins and Worgen", with no Deathwing or anything. I get the impression that Blizzard is counting on the pandaren being such massive fan favourites that nothing else will matter. Well, it doesn't work like that for this (soon to be former?) fan.

There are other features that don't sound bad in principle, like the pet battles (Pokemon is popular for a reason), but that simply don't interest me personally and just work to reinforce my feeling that I'm not part of the target audience anymore.

The real kicker for me however were a bunch of announcements that actively made me shudder:

Talent trees getting reworked again

Or is it more like "removed"? Whatever. Cataclysm's talent tree revamp was extremely painful for me and actually made me fall out of love with my favourite class for several months because things were just that bad. They did manage to balance things out somewhat after a while though, and in fairness, I did feel like it was worth it. I think the Cataclysm talent trees are good. Not perfect - people who love to go crazy with customisation find them boring I believe - but they achieved what they set out to do.

So why they hell do they want to turn everything upside down again? You know it's going to be another balancing nightmare, and I absolutely do not have the stomach to relearn everything about all the classes I play from scratch again. I think Elder Game has the right of it when he says that Ghostcrawler has gone overboard with the idea of trying to achieve perfect balance.

Challenge Mode Dungeons

"Complete a dungeon in x minutes". As Redbeard already pointed out in a comment, it's pretty ironic that this feature is announced right after I mentioned in my last post that I hate the "rush rush" culture that has developed in instances since the introduction of the dungeon finder. Meanwhile, Blizzard thinks that players should be encouraged to rush more! Sorry, but we simply don't see eye to eye about what makes a fun dungeon experience anymore.

Changes to Questing

"Incentives for dungeons/raiders to run quests and do outdoor/daily kind of stuff. For example finishing a quest might give you a buff for the day, and maybe that buff will let you roll on a loot that only appears to people with that buff." I don't know about you, but once again I can't help but think that this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Dailies and random dungeons are already making people feel burnt out with their subtle pressure to do ALL THE THINGS every day. At least you still have a bit of choice about whether to focus on dungeons or dailies right now, but with a system like that people will not just feel that they have to do the daily dungeon, but to make it worth it they also have to do the quests that will provide the extra loot later... ugh!

I suppose one should never say never, but I really can't see myself buying that one.

Ran some normals again

2011-10-21T19:59:00.004+02:00

I don't think I've ever hit my weekly heroic cap since it was first introduced, but I used up all of my weekly random bonuses for normals on my newly dinged night elf priest within two days. I think that says something about me as well as about normals, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

I've talked about the advantages of running normals before, and all in all, they still apply. I think I'm also finally managing to pin down what has been bothering me about dungeon runs in the game as of late, and it's not so much about point systems, immersion or difficulty by itself, but the whole "rush rush" culture. Players want to get through dungeons as fast as possible, and the developers keep talking about releasing content at a faster pace. I don't like that! It turns fun into stress for me. My favourite run these past two days was actually a normal Grim Batol with four people from the same guild who advanced at what most people would consider an agonisingly slow pace (one trash pull every other minute or so). At one point their dps warrior fell off a bridge, died, and took ten minutes to find his way back. The tank apologised profusely for his friend's drunken stupor, but I honestly didn't mind. I just watched a bit of tv on the side and was happy. I'd rather deal with someone who's ten times slower than my "ideal" pace than someone who pulls even a bit too fast. It's pretty obvious that I'm exceptional in this attitude though - I'm pretty sure that ninety-nine percent of pug healers would have abandoned that group quite quickly.

I also met several nice players again with whom I continued to do more than one run, and even the not-so-nice ones were never outright mean or rude.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses however. In fact, my very first run was pretty disastrous. I got into Lost City of the Tol'vir with nobody using crowd control, two melee dps, and the very belated realisation that my keybinds were completely messed up. I struggled on for a bit, casting the wrong heals all the time and finding myself forced to drink after every single pull, but when we wiped on some trash after the first boss, someone finally complained about "bad tanking and healing". Since I was most definitely performing sub-par, I apologised and left, to try again later.

Subsequent runs with properly set up binds went a lot better, though getting fewer melee dps that loved to bathe in any ground AoEs helped as well. Still, I have to admit that I felt a lot more performance pressure than I had in a while. I think I only met one person who wasn't geared for heroics yet, and most tanks had around 150k health. I remember when we tanked heroics with 125k! I really didn't think I'd feel so undergeared in normals of all places - and other people having better gear only did so much to make my job easier, as AoE damage remains the same if people don't dodge or prevent it, and I was still left with a lot more green bar space to fill than my poor mana pool could handle at first.

There wasn't a whole lot of gear to be had either, since mages are still needing on all the spirit cloth (and winning it) even a full year after 4.0 made the stat obsolete for their class.

At some point I did the Horseman and won a ring, at which point the system suddenly tried to put me into heroics. What is this, I don't even! I'm in greens and can't heal my way out of normal Lost City and you want to put me into heroics? Clearly a single high-level epic can seriously screw with item level restrictions.

In a Vortex Pinnacle run, my group spent eight minutes on the first pull with two Temple Adepts because they just could not control or interrupt the heals. I still don't know how I managed to keep everyone alive that long, even with blowing all my cooldowns. When we ran into the same problem on the next pull, I did run out of mana eventually and we wiped. The tank told everyone that they sucked and left, at which point everyone else dropped group as well, presumably in shame. I requeued for an entirely new group, and we almost wiped to the same problem again, though we eventually managed to scrape by, barely. I think I might have to reconsider my opinions on Cataclysm dungeon difficulty...

Lost City of the Tol'vir was the instance that came up for me most often, and I think there wasn't a single group that didn't wipe on those trash packs at the entrance to the last third of the instance - you know which ones I mean, the ones that people always try to skip, but then someone inevitably butt-pulls them, you get two or more groups at once and you die. I thought it was amazing how consistent that was. You'd think people would learn eventually.

Still, I had fun, because even if it wasn't perfect, nobody was stressing about speed and that made all the difference. Also, chain-running instances is an awesome source of cloth for levelling tailoring!

Questing from 80-85 again, this time as Alliance

2011-10-20T18:56:00.004+02:00

I still feel burnt out on Cataclysm questing and have avoided completing zones that my various max-level alts are still missing because I just don't find it fun - even if it would benefit them by unlocking certain reputations and perks. I did manage to finally level my night elf priest to 85 the other day though, driven by the desire to see what this stretch of levelling looked like from the other side.

Mount Hyjal and Deepholm were exactly the same, but that didn't really come as a surprise since it was always obvious to me that these quests were given by neutral organisations. I still think that these two are probably my favourites of the five new zones.

I only dipped my toes into Vashj'ir briefly to unlock the portal, get my sea legs and the sea horse. From what little I saw, it reeked heavily of "superficially different but actually the same" syndrome, as I wrote about it two weeks ago. The only thing that made the experience feel different to me was the fact that I realised for the first time that Vashj'ir was actually located off the coast of Stormwind. As Horde I just got a loading screen while sailing there and assumed that the zone was placed in a separate instance, since the coast was too far away to see it anyway. In contrast, sailing there straight from Stormwind harbour and with no interruptions felt nice and immersive.

Something that has nothing to do with factions but that struck me once again was that the Vashj'ir intro quest makes no sense. First you get a summon from the Farseer/Earthspeaker who then gives you that vision of Thrall... and then they send you off to some random island off the coast to fight the other faction. Talk about a non sequitur! When I first did these quests as Horde and skimmed parts of the quest text in my drive to advance quickly, I actually thought that the boat was supposed to take me to the Maelstrom. It just makes no sense to have Thrall's call for help as an intro to a completely unrelated zone - in my opinion it should have been part of the introduction to Deepholm if anything.

I avoided Uldum and then got started on the Twilight Highlands - finally a zone with noticeable differences between Alliance and Horde! And it was quite a pleasant surprise to me too: on Horde side I didn't really like the introduction to the zone much. First Garrosh has you kicking around scared goblins and lazy orcs, and then you have to endure a twenty-minute "event" that is effectively a long, unskippable cut scene that still requires you to move on and off the blimp at the right moments (so you can't just go AFK or you'll eventually have to start all over again).

The Dragonmaw storyline is... a bit weird as well. Like I mentioned in my review of the Stonetalon story at the time, I find it kind of unpleasant when the game mirrors real life politics too closely, and a story where a large foreign power kills off the local leadership and puts rebel sympathisers in charge instead felt way too close to comfort for me, even if the lines are very clear-cut in this case, as Warchief Mor'ghor is an evil bastard and Zaela is likeable. That aside, the Horde story then sends you on missions that are all over the place and on very different ends of the seriousness spectrum, from dealing with wild dragons and evil spirits to shooting pool ponies out of goblin contraptions, which makes the whole experience feel a bit disjointed.

The Alliance version really is very, very different. Where Garrosh just continues to cement his reputation as a massive ass, Varian has you strolling around town with Anduin in tow - and that boy is freaking adorable. He actually cares about his subjects, and he wants to be a priest when he grows up, just like me! D'aww. Mercifully, the Alliance doesn't have to endure an endless travelling cut scene either; you just hop onto a plane, see it fly away and then it's fade to black and a straight cut to you already being in the Highlands.

Once there, the story flows a lot more organically as well, as you visit the various Wildhammer tribes to get them to work together and basically get to save the day by being a successful diplomat. A certain degree of humour also comes naturally to the dwarves and it doesn't feel as jarring as the contrast between the super serious business of the orcs and the utter silliness of the goblins on Horde side.

There are some parallel quests, but it's not excessive. It's also notable that there are examples of how you can use parallels to make interesting content for both sides. For example the Horde has a story where one of the Dragonmaw warlords rushes off to attack the dwarves and gets killed. You don't actually get to see this, but you see him storm off and then have to retrieve a valuable item from his corpse afterwards. On Alliance side on the other hand, you get to fight off this attack and personally get to land the killing blow on the orc. I think this is a great example of how synchronous storylines on both sides can be used to provide different experiences that add up to a more interesting whole, instead of just giving the orcs a quest to kill ten dwarves and the dwarves a quest to kill ten orcs (though those exist - and have their place - as well).

I dinged 85 not long after the Maw of Madness, and while I still intend to finish the zone, it looks like the rest is going to be a mix of neutral hubs and more "different but the same" quests, except that you get to work with Mathias Shaw instead of Garona and the Gob Squad.

All in all, I enjoyed the dwarf quests enough that I think my endeavour to level an Alliance character to cap was worth it to see those alone, but I still think that it's a bit of a shame that the developers didn't try to differentiate the experiences of the two factions more.

Playing a holy priest in (rated) battlegrounds

2011-10-13T23:26:00.000+02:00

I have to admit it: I'm jealous of discipline priests. Not because their spec is sometimes a raid leader's preferred choice in PvE; that's all part of the normal up and down of class balancing. But because discipline is still considered to be the only viable PvP healing spec for priests.

I didn't mind the situation back when disc was designed for PvP only and holy was designed for PvE only, and I actually played both at the time. I don't require perfect balance for everything if different specs simply cater to different niches. But then WOTLK came, disc was made to be PvE viable as well and I thought that was great for all the priests who had longed to play it seriously in PvE for a long time... but I have to admit, I'm rather cheesed off that holy never got the same treatment for PvP. Like I said, I'm fine with different specs having different niches, but if you make one talent tree able to do everything while still limiting another, it gets kind of annoying for those who suddenly find themselves left behind.

I know that various damage dealers have had to deal with this issue for a while, but as far as healers go, holy priests are currently the only healers who are not considered PvP viable at all. I don't know why Blizzard can balance all other healing specs around both aspects of the game but not holy priests. It gets really depressing though when you're trying to look up guides for playing rated battlegrounds as a holy priest and find that there don't seem to be any because even the most basic "rated battlegrounds 101" guides assume that you won't want to bring anything other than a disc priest.

Well, screw that, I say! I'll write my own guide then!

As far as credentials go, I'm not amazing at PvP, but I've managed to get Legionnaire as holy this season and I feel that my team's further progress has not really been limited by my spec but that we've simply hit our skill cap. I reckon that a really good player could get much higher as holy still.

Here's the thing: while holy is still not really balanced around PvP, it's actually in a much better position than it has been in a long time. I believe that the bias against the spec mostly comes from two sources: disc priests having greater survivability, and that holy is still more focused on AoE healing, while PvP tends to be more about being able to keep a single target up while it's being nuked. Both are fair points... however there are "but"s attached.

As far as survivability goes, I would still agree that disc priests have more of it, but the difference is not as pronounced as it used to be. When I come up against a team with a disc priest while playing in my (admittedly low ranked) arena team, it never feels to me as if they are that much better at keeping themselves up against damage - the bigger problem tends to be mana regen, as a disc under pressure keeps getting returns from Rapture, which works in a "the more you get attacked, the more you regenerate" way similar to a shaman's Water Shield. As holy on the other hand I'm in serious trouble once I run low, because even with full "of meditation" gear (aka spirit on everything), the rate of regeneration is comparatively slow and if the match continues for long enough, I'll eventually die simply due to being oom.

In rated battlegrounds, with the sheer amount of people involved, survivability is in an entirely different ballpark. A good team can pretty much burst down any healer if they are truly focused. Still, your best bets for survival are paladins and shamans, because they are a bit sturdier due to their armour. Druids and priests of either spec are all considered squishy, with the differences being so marginal as to hardly even matter. I'm still continually surprised by how many teams will go for our resto druid first before coming for me because it just feels weird to not be the primary target.

Also, the holy PvP talent Blessed Resilience works much better when there are other healers around to help you out. Survivability going up when someone else heals you may sound like a bit of a "duh" observation, but compare Blessed Resilience to the disc equivalent Focused Will, which provides the same amount of damage reduction regardless of circumstances. A +30% healing taken buff on the other hand scales in effectiveness the more people you actually have healing you.

As for holy priests being AoE healers... well, that's true, but it's also the reason why the spec works much better in battlegrounds than in arena - there are actually enough people around to make AoE healing worthwhile. You just have to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and plan accordingly. Leaving your holy priest behind as the only healer to guard the tank against rogues is a bit of a waste, and a paladin or a shaman could do a much better job. As a holy priest you always want to be hanging out with as many people as possible so that your AoE heals get a chance to shine. I love joining the big battle for the waterworks in Battle for Gilneas for example, because Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing are absolutely perfect for easily healing up incoming AoE damage as the enemies try to prevent you from capping the flag.

Let's look at some holy talents and talk about their best use in PvP.

Desperate Prayer

Okay, this is far enough up the tree that I'm guessing that most disc priests are specced into it as well, but I wanted to mention it because it's a talent that I've always avoided in my PvE specs because I simply didn't need it. In PvP however it's awesome, because it's a sizeable instant heal, and in an era where every single melee class has at least one interrupt on a short cooldown, instant heals are king. I use it all the time whenever I get nuked, which is quite often. I think that it should always be your first choice of survival cooldown, because as opposed to Guardian Spirit it can only be cast on yourself - better to save the latter for someone else if possible.

Lightwell

Now, I have to admit that Blizzard managed something that I had thought impossible with Lightwell this expansion - they actually made it not completely pointless. Still, its actual viability remains highly dependent on how well you can train the rest of your team to use it. I'm quite fond of it in arena, because it's easy to convince one or two other people to use it, and sometimes I simply use all the charges myself to click-heal myself through various stunlocks and silences. In battlegrounds, even rateds with a fixed team, I have to admit that I haven't had as much luck, and even in very heated battles I often see it expire with several charges still unused.

Still, in base-capping games it's worth plopping down a Lightwell near a flag that you're defending or assaulting - only if you intend to stay there yourself though. I learned the hard way that you can't "leave" a lightwell for someone else to heal themselves in your absence as it despawns if you move too far away. In flag-carrying games I tend to put one down near our flag carrier if we're preparing to defend against an incoming assault in the flag room - he's the only one I've seen click on it with any regularity whenever he gets nuked.

Spirit of Redemption

"Improved Death" has never been a favourite of many priests, and I remember intentionally skipping it in my PvE spec for a long time because I didn't want to "reward" people with free heals for letting me die. I have to admit though, in PvP it's quite awesome. In PvE you can argue that counting on your own death is a bad idea since you should always plan to beat each encounter with no deaths, but in battlegrounds in particular, most people will suffer several deaths each game (unless you're dominating your opponent completely) and there's no shame in it either.

In such an environment, Spirit of Redemption is actually a bit of an Obi-Wan Kenobi power: "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!" Massive uninterrupted healing for fifteen seconds, hurrah! Considering it's usually quite tricky to get cast-time heals off due to the many interrupts and silences, this is seriously huge. You can generally recognise the smart teams because they'll actually avoid killing me until almost everyone else is dead, so that there's nobody left for me to heal once I'm in spirit form. If I die while there are still people up, I'll spam Flash Heal x2 for Serendipity stacks and then follow it up with a Greater Heal or even Prayer of Healing. If the group is under serious pressure, being dead is a great time to pop a Divine Hymn too.

One thing to keep in mind is that since dying actually provides a (limited) benefit to healing, it goes from being something that just happens to you, to something that you consciously plan for. For example if it looks like multiple people including me are close to going down, I'll stop healing myself and try to die, so I can spam uninterrupted heals on the others and keep them up for longer (which can be quite essential when all you need to do is hold on to a base or keep a flag carrier alive for just a few more seconds).

Resurrect timers are an issue as well. In rated battlegrounds you should always try to communicate them anyway if someone's already dead, so that others can "die up" at the right time and res up again immediately, but this is even more important for holy priests. If another round of resurrections is imminent, it might be better to click off the spirit buff early so you won't get stuck with a 40 second res timer once it runs out. On the other hand if you die and just missed a res, it can be fun to have someone else throw you a combat res, die again, and then spend another fifteen seconds spirit healing while you wait for a "proper" res. Might as well make use of that downtime, no?

Chakra

Chakra is interesting because the way it was first introduced, it was not very useful in PvP at all. The 30 second duration was simply way too short, and nobody had the leisure to recast Heal or Prayer of Healing to refresh it either. Now that it's got unlimited duration however, you can "buff up" into the correct Chakra state at the start of the match or after resurrecting and then you don't have to worry about it anymore.

When I still ran into other holy priests in our rated matches (haven't seen any in a long time), they seemed to be using the Sanctuary Chakra state most of the time, but I never understood why. Yes, the buff to Renew's output is nice, but the associated Holy Word is quite useless in an environment where you have little to no control over people's positioning and they move around all the time.

Chakra: Serenity on the other hand is awesome, simply because it's an instant heal on a short cooldown, and you remember what I said about instant heals earlier, right? The fact that it refreshes your Renew on the target is just a nice bonus. I pretty much use this on cooldown.

Holy Word: Chastise is worth mentioning in so far as it's nice to have a brief stun/disorient effect if needed, and one that people generally don't expect at that. It's useful to have a macro to quickly cancel your current Chakra state so you can use this as your Holy Word instead if needed; however, it can be a bit of a pain to get back into your desired Chakra state right afterwards once you're in combat.

Circle of Healing

There isn't much to say about this one other than what I already said above about AoE healing in general: try to stick to larger groups so you can get the most bang for your buck when casting this. For PvP it's generally not worth glyphing it for the extra target. Also, if you're really under pressure it's nice to keep in mind that this is basically another instant heal that you can use on yourself, even if the single-target portion of it is relatively small.

Guardian Spirit

Once again, similar to what I said about Blessed Resilience above, this is not as powerful as Pain Suppression in PvP, because preventing damage is more powerful out of the box than increased healing. Still, it's a pretty decent survival cooldown to use on a beleaguered flag carrier... or anyone else for that matter. I have it glyphed for the reduced cooldown because unless I'm anticipating an attack on our flag carrier, I'm pretty much using it on cooldown. Glyph of Desperation is a must-have as well - nothing like seeing someone be sure of their kill as they apply a stun on you on low health - and suddenly the wings go up and you're saved.

In general however I actually avoid using Guardian Spirit on myself, because I have Desperate Prayer as a survival cooldown for that purpose, and because as I mentioned in the Spirit of Redemption section, for a holy priest in PvP dying can actually sometimes be a good thing. (And you can still cast Guardian Spirit on someone else while dead/in spirit form!)

Anyway, this is just an attempt to summarise my own knowledge about holy priesting in PvP, as I've acquired it over time. There needs to be more information about this out there! I'm open to feedback or links to more resources if anyone's got them.

The homogenisation of WoW's two factions

2011-10-09T16:50:00.002+02:00

I've been hopping back and forth between a bunch of my lowbie alts lately, looking at the last corners of revamped Azeroth that I hadn't seen yet, and while I've been enjoying the experience overall, it also reminded me of something that has been bugging me about the Cataclysm quest revamp. No, I'm not talking about the speed and ease of levelling this time - I'm thinking of the homogenisation of the two factions.

Let me grab my veteran cane for a moment and say that "back in my day"... I levelled up as Alliance first and found that, in the most general terms, Alliance quests mostly seemed to be about one or more of the following things: politics (mostly human-based), searching for ancient artifacts and lost treasure (dwarves), slightly mad inventors trying to reclaim their lost home (gnomes), protecting nature (night elves) and gathering goods for trade. Basically the Alliance side seemed to represent a "classic" fantasy society that was reasonably well off apart from the occasional intrigue, kobolds in the woods, and bigger but also more vague threats looming beyond the borders.

When I rerolled Horde several months later, it was actually a bit of a culture shock, and not just because Orgrimmar was very different from Stormwind and I kept getting lost in the Undercity. Playing the other faction just felt very different in terms of atmosphere and story. The Horde felt a lot more down to earth, or more savage if you prefer, and the quests seemed to imply that everyone was constantly fighting for survival. They were about hunting for food (tauren), gathering building materials (orcs), trying to carve out some space in the world, ancestor worship, dealing with dark magic (trolls) and struggling with and rebelling against an unpleasant past (undead).

Even though there wasn't a whole lot going on in terms of Horde vs. Alliance in the overarching story, I was always kind of wary of the enemy, because I knew first-hand that they lived in a very different world and had very different priorities.

There've always been zones with neutral quest givers, but those never bothered me. I didn't find it hard to believe that there were outsiders who simply didn't give a damn which side you belonged to and simply wanted to hire you regardless, especially if it concerned a greater cause. I didn't feel that this affected the way I viewed either side.

In Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, the borders between the factions started to get a little fuzzy however, as they still had separate bases in most zones but often pursued the same goals regardless, which made many faction-specific quests feel a bit same-y. Still, there were a fair chunk of storylines left on each side that were exclusive to that faction and remained in your memory as uniquely Horde or Alliance.

To take Hellfire Peninsula as an example, there are a lot of parallels between the quests from Thrallmar and Honor Hold. Where the Alliance clears up the Path of Anguish, the Horde kills the exact same mobs in Felspark Ravine. While you burn Horde blade throwers for Honor Hold, the Horde has you setting fire to the Alliance cannons on the other side of the map. Both sides send you on the same tough group quest, even if it comes under two different names.

However, the zone also still had plenty of interesting moments that were unique to their faction. On Alliance side, who could forget The Exorcism of Colonel Jules? Who didn't feel bad about the events set in motion In Search of Sedai? Who didn't get tired of players asking in general chat where to find Nethergarde Bitter, over and over again?

In the meantime the Horde got to be amazed to rediscover the clan of its Warchief, the Forsaken got to make friends with some local undead, and vindictive players got to help a duped blood elf woman get revenge on her cheating husband's mistress. While Horde and Alliance may have shared the same goals in regards to the Burning Legion, they were still two distinctly different cultures with different priorities.

In Cataclysm however, it feels to me like the borders haven't just become fuzzy, they've almost been completely erased beyond the immediate starter zones. The two factions seem more and more alike to me, or rather the Horde appears to have become more and more like the Alliance. Orgrimmar may still look very different in style, but it's every bit as pompous as Stormwind these days. Garrosh and Varian are both unpopular warmongers, and the orcs in general feel a lot like more aggressive humans to me, with their fight for survival and shamanistic roots largely swept under the rug. (There is a quest in Durotar where a shaman tries to convince an enforcer to be less hasty and aggressive, gets completely ignored... and nothing bad comes of it.) The Bilgewater goblins have been set up to be "gnomes for the Horde" and even share the gnomish backstory of having lost their home. Even sub-factions have been copied across, and where the dwarven Explorer's League formerly had a monopoly on archaeology as a hobby, the Horde has now received its own version in the Reliquary.

If you look at it at the level of individual quests, the parallels become even more glaring. In neutral zones where both factions have their own bases, it's often shocking to see just how close to identical their quests are. During the end of the Lashtail Hatchling chain in Stranglethorn you talk to a draenei priest who can't speak proper common as Alliance... and as Horde you get a troll priest who speaks orcish exactly the same way. (One of the user comments on the page for the draenei does in fact bring up in-game evidence to show that the character was simply copy and pasted.)

Or take the Badlands, which I replayed only yesterday: as Alliance you get sent out to hunt with a group of dwarf NPCs, as Horde you get a group of orcs with exactly the same abilities. God help us if either faction did anything slightly differently.

This just strikes me as lazy. Clearly the developers thought that if they made a nice quest chain for one faction, they could just copy it over to the other side and get two quests for the price of one! Maybe they even thought that they were doing their players a favour this way, by not "limiting" precious lore to one faction only. I really dislike this practice however. If you're just going to give both sides the same quest, simply make the quest hub neutral and be done with it. Making two faction-specific towns that offer exactly the same quests, only from different NPCs, just waters down faction identity and sets players up for disappointment. The former because a draenei shouldn't be acting like a troll and orcs shouldn't be acting like dwarves, and the latter because by setting up separate bases for the two factions, you create an expectation that they'll actually contain different content that makes it worth levelling an alt of the other faction to see - if you then just end up with a carbon copy of the same content you've already done, that's nothing but a massive letdown.

That aside, I also think that it leads to Blizzard making their own lore less convincing in a way. These days the writers are all about beating the war drums between the two factions, but when the game actually represents both sides as more similar than ever, the hostility only becomes less believable. Don't waste all that wonderful background lore by having all races of both factions pursue the exact same interests in the contested zones!

Blizzard Entertainment wants my feedback!

2011-10-06T16:41:00.000+02:00

That (sort of) was the title of a mail that I found in my inbox this morning. After careful inspection it turned out to not be just another stupid phishing attempt - Blizzard does indeed ask random players for feedback this way sometimes. Considering that I've been rather unhappy with recent developments, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to make my voice heard and immediately went to fill out the survey.

Unfortunately... I'm not sure it's actually going to be very useful to anyone. On the plus side, the questions indicated to me that Blizzard is quite aware of most of the game's current problem areas, but the way they were phrased I doubt that my (or anyone's) answers are truly going to provide a lot of useful feedback to the developers.

Am I "satisfied" with daily quests? No, not really, though some are better than others. They never asked about the whys though, so for all I know they could interpret my answer as "There aren't enough dailies, we need to make more!", which could hardly be further from my intended message.

Same with raiding. How useful is it really to simply ask me to rate how "fun" I consider raiding on a scale of one to seven? If you're just going to guess about what exactly I like and dislike about it, you're just as likely to make things even worse. Am I satisfied with Cataclysm raiding? Considering that it made me quit that part of the game after more than four years, definitely not, but it's not as if Cataclysm just dropped one big change on me that instantly flipped my feelings from love to hate; it's been a long time coming based on changes that already started in WOTLK.

Do I approve of storyline quests? In principle yes, I just wish that they didn't turn entire zones into one giant linear quest chain. But again, if I simply declare that I haven't liked the Cataclysm storylines that much, how are they going to interpret that? Now I'm actually kind of worried about my responses being used to justify more changes that I won't like.

At least I got a chuckle out of how many questions they asked me about Star Wars: The Old Republic. Are you going to buy it? Are you going to stop playing WoW then? They may not care about the details of my opinion about the game, but they are certainly concerned about the competition...

MMOs can really spoil you for single-player games

2011-10-04T16:39:00.005+02:00

It's been quiet on here because I haven't been playing much, and as a consequence I haven't had a lot to say about my limited play time. On the plus side for me, this means that I've had time to do other things that I hadn't done in a while, such as play a single-player game, in this case Dragon Age II.

Without going into too much detail about it, I can say that I really enjoyed it. I was a bit wary of it at first because it had received some very mixed user reviews, but my worries were completely unfounded. I had a blast. I stayed up late several nights in a row just to play that little bit further. And when I finally completed it, I was happy to simply watch the credits roll by for a good ten minutes or so, just to allow the whole experience to sink in.

Even after I had finished my first playthrough, I still wasn't done. There were alternate progression paths to be explored! But more than anything, I felt an urge to connect with other people who had also enjoyed the game. I talked to friends who had played it, read reviews and sought out a bunch of forum threads that were discussing various aspects of the game. This was enjoyable for a while, but oddly enough it also diminished my desire to actually play again somewhat. I wanted to share my enthusiasm, but playing the game again effectively meant isolating myself.

At the end of the day, I can talk to other players about how they played the game all day long, but I can never actually meet their characters. We all play in our own little bubble worlds, and we can talk about how much fun it is but we can never actually interact while playing. And it's kind of scary just how much I miss the ability to share space.

Back before I got into WoW, The Sims 2 was my game of choice. I spent hours upon hours breeding funny-looking Sims, taking screenshots and making up stories. I was also a member of various communities and took part in a vivid exchange of ideas and information there. It was all I could have wanted from a game.

But then I started to play WoW and... in principle playing with my Sims was still as good as before, but I just could not stand playing completely on my own anymore, having to wait for the interaction to happen afterwards and on forums. In Dragon Age II I could briefly overcome this problem because I managed to really immerse myself in the story and wanted to see where it was going, no matter what. However, now that I know the ending I'm really longing for company again.

It's a bit of a shame because intellectually, I'm aware that single-player games can still offer great entertainment. And I would kind of like to play around with different settings and options. After having spent so much time playing an MMO however, the experience of just doing my own thing in my own lonely little world just feels a bit hollow these days.

Raid Finder Theories, Part 2

2011-09-22T11:45:00.001+02:00

When I first heard about the raid finder coming out in 4.3, I wrote a fairly cynical post summing up what I'd imagine this new feature to look like if it was exactly like the dungeon finder, only with more people. Since then more information about it has come to light, most importantly the fact that it will have a separate lockout on an easier difficulty setting, and I find that idea really interesting.

I still think that this feature will have a similar effect on the game as the dungeon finder in so far as it will be a smashing success in terms of numbers, because anyone can press the "queue" button and thus the number of people who have at least tried raiding in some form or another will go through the roof. However, I also believe that just like it happened to five-mans, the quality of the average raid group will plummet dramatically. We'll see what kind of long-term effect that will have on the game.

Anyway, the thing that really intrigues me is that I believe bloggers are interpreting Blizzard correctly as wanting this new raid finder to be a tool to teach people and encourage them to get into "real" raiding. If this is indeed something the developers are hoping for, I can only see them failing spectacularly.

First off, the teaching idea. Remember how at the start of Cataclysm, harder heroics were meant to be a stepping stone towards raiding? Well, it turns out that the average dungeon finder pug was totally overwhelmed by concepts such as having to use crowd control on most trash pulls and boss mechanics that could actually wipe you if you ignored them, so Blizzard had to nerf the content. In hindsight, I can even kind of understand why. Back when people formed their own groups for five-mans, it was easy to tell off whiners with lines such as "the difficulty is fine, you need to group with better players". However, if the expectation is that game mechanics will put together your party, then the developers are actually at least partly at fault whenever those groups don't succeed. It's just a shame that they seem to prefer the option of making bad teams viable to trying to actually create better groups.

Anyway, nowadays we're back to most heroics being AoE zergfests, and they teach people exactly nothing about good play. I'm pretty sure that this will be the inevitable fate of the looking for raid tool as well. Unless all bosses become more or less tank and spank, randomly formed groups consisting of people who don't want to talk to each other will fail. Players will complain about the fights being too hard for raid finder groups, they will be nerfed some more, and eventually they'll be about as instructive about normal mode boss mechanics as an AoE zerg is about using crowd control.

As for people feeling encouraged to get into "real" raiding, I don't think that this will happen either. In fact I'm pretty sure that the looking for raid functionality will be another blow to traditional raiding and decrease interest in it even further. Just wanting to see the boss, regardless of the details of the mechanics, is one of the major motivations to raid. If you can just get to see the boss event in easy LFR mode, why bother with all the extra hassle of being part of an organised raid group?

Better loot, eh? I don't think a few more ilevels will be enough to justify such a massive jump in investment for most people. I expect the whole thing to work similarly to the decline of 25-man guilds. Sure, those who are already doing it will keep going for a while, but fresh blood will become more and more rare as people are simply lacking another major incentive to make the jump to bigger groups/normal mode raiding.

Incidentally, I do wonder how exactly the looking for raid loot will work out and how it will compare to what you can get out of the new five-mans and valor points. Everyone knows that people gravitate towards wherever getting the loot is easiest, so I think that LFR and the dungeon finder being in competition with each other might become a bit of an issue.

More than anything I am curious to see how it will all work out, and I'll definitely hit that looking for raid button a few times once it comes out, just to see what it's like. However, on the whole I have to admit that I expect it to have more negative than positive effects on the game. Personally I just can't see the benefits of more people seeing the bosses outweighing the negative effects of the game gaining yet another incentive to play in crappy random groups.

After four years, I've decided to stop raiding

2011-09-16T21:30:00.001+02:00

I've got quite a few people on my blogroll who don't actually play WoW anymore or who have at least taken a step back from it and play less now than they used to. None of them did so angrily, shouting "this is the last straw" and raging about how much the game sucks these days. It pretty much seemed to be a gradual process for all of them, where certain changes to the game bothered them, though never enough to make them want to quit - until one day they suddenly realised that somehow a lot of small things had added up to enough to not make them want to play anymore. All they were left with was a certain sense of melancholia about what they had lost, but they knew that there was no going back.

This is how I feel about raiding right now.

Ever since Wrath of the Lich King, almost all the major changes that were made to raiding have been things that I personally disapprove of: the removal of attunements, all raids having a ten- and a 25-man mode, the introduction of heroic raids, the changes to the badge system, the abandonment of older tiers in order to have all players playing together in whatever was the newest raid, the equalisation of tens and 25s. And yet, every time I just moaned about the changes and kept going anyway. As the Grumpy Elf is fond of saying, complaining about something is not necessarily a bad thing; it shows that you still care... it's when you don't even care to complain anymore that things have gone really bad. I suppose I should have known that something was amiss when the subject of the newest Firelands nerfs came up on our guild forum, and all I could get myself to say was that I didn't think they were a good idea but that I couldn't be bothered to elaborate anymore.

Last night I came home late after having been out all evening. I briefly checked my guild's website and was greeted by a screenshot of a Majordomo first kill, a boss that I haven't even seen yet. I mentioned the sting of missing out on first kills only about a week ago, so there was a brief pang of regret... but it was gone surprisingly quickly. The reason that I hadn't even logged into WoW in two days was that I had been working long shifts, and then spent one evening watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes with the boyfriend (really good by the way) and the other being social with my co-workers. And I wouldn't have wanted to miss either of those things in favour of raiding. In fact, I really enjoyed doing something other than raid on my raid nights for a change.

I've talked about how I generally haven't been that enthusiastic about raiding lately, at least not compared to other activities. It didn't feel like a chore to me, but I wasn't really having lots of fun anymore either. It was just something that I'd been doing for so long that it seemed strange to stop on no particular grounds, not to mention that I didn't want to hurt my guildies by making myself unavailable for no good reason. Ten-man rosters are such a frustratingly fickle thing, and after having helped with the back end of recruiting for one for the better part of the year, I definitely didn't want to be that person - the one who left completely out of the blue and suddenly tipped the guild from rolling along just fine to having to cancel every other raid due to not having enough signups.

However, seeing that screenshot was an epiphany. It was yet another first kill that had passed me by. But you know what? That's a sign of a healthy guild. They didn't need me. If anything, we've been having a bit much rotation as of late, with some people feeling slightly frustrated that they didn't get to raid as often as they would have liked. And suddenly it hit me that if I didn't really feel like raiding anymore, I didn't have to. I could quit without spoiling other people's fun. We have enough healers.

The other day it also really hit home for me just how little I cared about raiding itself anymore when I noticed that I had capped my conquest points without fail every single week since the start of season ten, and that I was in fact getting close to having a full set... but I still hadn't bothered to buy even a single piece of tier twelve. How much of a boon is a raider who cares so little anyway?

Gear has been another little thing that has been contributing to my raid blues in general. I always frown when people say that they don't care about the gear from raiding because I find that strange. It's not all there is to raiding of course, but finally seeing that upgrade drop and winning the roll is part of the fun. Unfortunately Firelands has been absolutely horrid to me as a holy priest. I've seen other people rake in oodles and oodles of gear for both main and off-specs, and the only thing I got after all this time was a BoE off-hand that didn't even drop while I was in the raid, it's just that nobody else wanted it at the time and it went into the guild bank. There is no spirit cloth in Firelands, period. There's something oddly discouraging about a whole tier that drops close to no gear for your spec at all. Completely irrational I know, but it's as if even the developers themselves are telling me that they don't want me there anymore.

And then the recent news about the incoming nerf. Like I said above, I don't even have the energy to be angry about these things anymore, just a little sad. Once upon a time raiding felt a bit like climbing a mountain to me. It was harder on the logistics and it took long to get to the top, but at the end you could look down at how far you had come and feel like you'd achieved something. If I'm still climbing mountains by raiding today, it's only because I'm surrounded by an ever-rising tide and I'm trying not to drown. I'm finding it highly ironic that Blizzard's constant attempts at making the content more accessible to the casual player via nerfs make me feel as if more and more demands are being put on me. Here's the thing, imposing shorter and shorter time limits on people's ability to complete a given task is in fact another way of raising the bar, not lowering it. Seeing tier eleven get nerfed after six months was already hard for me, but as they keep cranking up the pace I'm simply finding it impossible to keep up. Sorry, but I do not have the energy to complete your content within the imposed time limit, and I'm not going to waste my time trying if I won't see half of it until it's only a mere shadow of its former self anyway.

Taken by themselves, I wouldn't even have considered any of these things worth posting about, but without me even realising it at the time, their combined weight has by now become too much for me to keep calm and carry on. I'm not done with the game yet - I still want to quest, level alts and do rated battlegrounds.

But raiding... raiding had me, and it's lost me. I'm sad to hurt my guild leader, because I love him dearly, we've been through a lot together and I know he'll miss me being around regardless. But honestly, I'm done moaning and I think I have to accept that this particular part of the game simply isn't for me anymore. I am glad however to see that my guild is doing fine without me and that my departure from raiding won't hurt its progression. May they kill Ragnaros many times over.

On Wings of Nether

2011-09-11T15:38:00.007+02:00

I'm really burnt out on the Molten Front dailies, even though I only completed them on a single character. To be honest I was kind of surprised by the strength of my own negative feelings. I mean, I expressed some disappointment when I first completed them, but at that point I still thought that I would keep going back to finish up the achievements at least, but when it actually came down to doing it, the mere thought of it was just too repulsive. Same with the idea of doing it on alts - even though every single one of mine would benefit greatly from the gear upgrades from the vendors, it's really not something I fancy doing at all.

I think the linearity of it all is once again the biggest problem for me. If I could pick and choose... do just the dailies I still need for achievements on my main, and maybe kill spiders for the Shadow Wardens on my hunter for the skins or something - I'd be all over that! But there's no way of bypassing the earlier quests and it just becomes too grating.

Like I said in a comment to Nils' post on the subject the other day, I don't mind dailies in principle, I just think that they should never feel like they are absolutely necessary to advance your character. They should be just one option out of many. With the Molten Front making me feel too pressured, I decided to go back to doing other random dailies that I found fun: A Tol Barad quest here and there, getting some Champion's Seals at the Argent Tournament... and for the first time ever, I started gathering reputation with the Netherwing.

Considering how often I've said that the Burning Crusade was my favourite expansion so far, it may come as a surprise to people that there are whole chunks of content in it that I never even touched. In part, I think that was part of BC's beauty: that I always felt that I had things to do even without participating in every part of the game, and with no achievement system there was no meta game to tell me what I should or shouldn't do.

A lot of people were madly in love with the Netherwing back in the day, seeing how they offered the first dragon-like mount in the game, back before Wrath started handing out dragon mounts like candy. Personally, I just thought that they were ugly and thus wasn't interested. But that was okay!

I decided to go back to them for a variety of reasons. I wanted to keep doing some dailies that didn't feel excessively grindy to me and that had little to no reward pressure attached to them. I wanted to get my mount count up to get the Mountain o' Mounts achievement. I finally wanted to see the story. Certain aspects of it, like the Booterang quest or the Skyshatter races, have become pretty iconic and I wanted to experience them myself. And with me being fifteen levels higher than the intended audience, they were easy to do even as a healer.

I was surprised by how many other people seemed to be doing the same thing. Pretty much every day I ran into at least one other person who was also busy on the Netherwing Ledge, and it wasn't always the same guy. For endgame content from two expansions ago, I think that's pretty good going.

Reputation gains have been buffed considerably over time, and as the Grumpy Elf remarked recently, you could pretty much get to exalted within a single day if you really wanted to. I took it easy and only did most dailies once as they unlocked, just to see what they were about, and pretty much skyrocketed towards revered solely by doing that. After that I only did the Netherdust Pollen daily and the Booterang every day, which slowed my progress considerably but I didn't mind. It was nice to be able to trade faster progress for the ability to only do the dailies I actually felt like doing. (Yes, that was another jab at the Molten Front.)

What did I enjoy most? Well, even though they are not dailies, the Skyshatter races deserve a mention as something that I felt was quite unique and different. I felt like a bit of a cheat with my 310% flight speed, I can barely imagine how hard some of the later ones must have been back in the day! Seeing Wing Commanders Ichman and Mulverick reunited with a shared hatred of Alterac Valley made me crack up.

The Booterang quest was every bit as fun as people always made it out to be, because the disobedient peons are just too funny. Work is da poop! WHY IT PUT DA BOOTERANG ON THE SKIN? WHY?

I loved doing the Netherdust Pollen daily because like many gatherers I'm quite obsessed with removing all those little yellow dots from my mini map, and I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed there actually being daily quests for it. I think I got at least one character to exalted with the Shattered Sun back in the day purely by doing Gaining the Advantage every day. I wonder why they don't make quests like that anymore? Gathering professions could definitely use some love like that.

Most of the other dailies honestly didn't seem that great to me. Flying all the way to Nagrand just for a daily quest in Shadowmoon? Eh. And the mines must have been a veritable death trap back in the day considering the sheer amount and density of mobs in there. But hey, maybe someone else enjoyed them - once again, there is value in having a choice.

Today I finally hit exalted, on a bit of a whim really - after doing my "usual" dailies I realised that I was only missing a little bit of rep to max out, so I did the mine dailies as well just to complete the whole thing. The final quest was striking in its simplicity, a lot less flashy than what we're used to these days for sure, but it still evoked a solid sense of "you're finished, well done" from me.

When it came to picking my personal mount in Shattrath, I was a bit taken aback. These weren't just random mounts, these were sentient creatures that wanted to be my friends! That struck me as quite touching. Nonetheless I couldn't resist having a little moan in guild chat about how their quest text claimed that I could pick only one, at which point a guildie informed me that I could actually gather the whole set if I visited a vendor in Shadowmoon afterwards, a Dragonmaw orc.

Now that felt like a weird ending: "Okay, I choose you to be my best friend, Zoya! And now I'll go buy the rest of your mates as slaves from our mutual enemy! Muahahaha!" Not to mention that I still think that they are ugly. But I'm still glad that I did the whole thing. I wonder if I should work on the Terokk quest line next, as that's something I never did back in the day either... not sure if there's much point though, as I did get to see the final fight multiple times when I helped friends with completing it and I'm already exalted with the Skyguard anyway.

Alas, Alterac

2011-09-09T00:06:00.005+02:00

About two years ago I wrote a post about how I enjoyed questing in the Alterac Mountains. Considering that I used to be quite fond of the zone, it is with great shame that I have to admit that it took me nearly nine months of playing Cataclysm to notice that it is gone.

Dun dun DUNNN.

Oh alright, the mountains themselves are still there, but they don't count as a separate zone anymore (they are officially part of the Hillsbrad Foothills) and they seem to have been stripped of any and all content. I mean, it was obvious that the Alliance quests were going to go with the destruction of Southshore, but what about the Forsaken? Evidence suggests that just like with the Arathi Highlands, the developers simply ran out of time, because a Horde flight master and an orc NPC can be found standing in the middle of nowhere on the edge of Strahnbrad, suggesting that the place was supposed to become another quest hub. As it is, the quests in the Eastern half of Hillsbrad peter out somewhat quietly until you get sent on to Arathi to do the same quests there that you used to do before the Cataclysm. Strahnbrad and surroundings appear to have been forgotten.

When I first noticed this, I ran around the area a bit incredulously, trying to find some sort of sign that Blizzard had done something with it, but no such luck. Named quest mobs and the like have been removed, but otherwise the zone is still populated by the same generic mobs that have lived there forever (yetis, ogres and Syndicate). Not every mob in the game needs to have a purpose, and I'm perfectly fine with some of them just being there for flavour. But in this case it stung to remember the times when I had hunted yetis for their fur, killed ogres for a bounty and snuck into the ruins to reclaim lost treasures. When content just disappears, with nothing else to replace it, that makes me sad.

When I discovered to my great surprise that The Perenolde Tiara was still in the quest log of one of my lowbie Alliance alts, I felt a brief surge of hope. Had I missed something? Were there more quests still to do in the zone, for Alliance no less? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no. Even this one appears to have remained more due to an oversight than anything else, as the difficulty indicator is still tuned to the quest's old level range. By the time I sent my dwarf hunter to retrieve the tiara - while the quest was still orange in my log - it turned out that all the mobs in the area had already gone grey to her. Needless to say that completing the objective felt rather anticlimactic. I can't see many people going for this quest now, what with it being given in Stormwind Keep somewhat randomly and leading you to a zone far away from Alliance lands where all the mobs are grey.

I'd really love for Blizzard to actually finish their revamp of the old world before pushing us towards the next expansion, but I'm not holding my breath. Alas, Alterac, we hardly knew ye.

Firelands - Two Months Later

2011-09-06T00:13:00.005+02:00

My guild downed Alysrazor today, taking us to 5/7 in Firelands. I wasn't there. I can't really complain about that fact since I was supposed to be there but cancelled on short notice because I was feeling exhausted and ill.

Still, missing a first kill always stings a bit, even if I don't find them as exciting as I used to. The time I missed our Kael'thas first kill back in BC due to my PC breaking down was the only time something WoW-related ever reduced me to tears. I'm used to pretty much always being present for our firsts due to having impeccable attendance, but my Firelands track record is the worst it's ever been, with Beth'tilac and Rhyolith being the only bosses that I got to see go down for the first time. With all the others I only got to see them die after everyone else had already done it and it felt a lot less exciting. I'm not sure why that is, as I think that my attendance is still pretty good and I feel that I'm pulling my weight despite of holy priests apparently not being that great in Firelands, but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm just unlucky. It feels a bit weird either way.

On the whole, I don't think that Firelands will become a memorable tier for me, though I struggle to put my finger on the whys. Difficulty-wise Firelands is just right for my guild, as the normal modes have kept us busy at just the right pace, feeling neither too easy nor too hard. The boss fights certainly all have something unique about them, and even the trash is fairly interesting. I've actually felt inspired to take screenshots again too, even though I initially recoiled at the way the scenery gave me Molten Core flashbacks.

But somehow, something is just missing for me. I've seen the Firelands fights get described as "gimmicky", and I wonder whether that isn't part of the reason. Mind you, I don't think that gimmicky fights are automatically a bad thing, but my impression of Firelands is that each fight is very much about one or two people handling a special mechanic (which they'll usually either enjoy well enough or hate with a passion) and the rest of the fight is fairly vanilla.

Shannox: This is actually the most universally interesting boss I've seen so far and probably my favourite because he does have some mechanics that (almost) everyone has to pay attention to, such as Rageface's face rage (say that ten times fast without getting tongue-tied...) or the enrages tied to the boss's and the dogs' various health levels. Still, it always seemed to me that the Riplimb tank probably has the most interesting job on this fight. As a healer it's pretty much: heal tanks, step away from fire and traps, top off raid, spam like mad in the final AoE phase.

Beth'tilac: This one is all about going up and down the web in time. I consider myself lucky in that none of the other healers seem very keen on it and I quite enjoy it, so I get to do it almost every time I'm there and it keeps the fight interesting. If I'm not on the web however it's nothing but: heal tanks, top off the raid, and spam like mad in the final AoE phase, again.

Rhyolith: Steering the boss is what it's all about here, and our dps doesn't seem to like it much. Still, once again the gimmick is pretty much the only truly interesting thing about the fight. As a healer, I (you may have guessed it): heal tanks, step away from fire, top off the raid, spam like mad in the final AoE phase.

Baleroc: This one is an interesting fight for healers, but I don't like him as the buff stacking mechanic feels like Valithria Dreamwalker version 2.0 to me. Nothing like spamming your biggest and fastest single-target spells for big numbers for the entirety of the fight... especially if you're playing the class/spec combination that is currently the absolute worst at single-target healing. I'll take Chimaeron's tight spell control over stupid stuff like this any day.

And finally, Alysrazor: While I haven't seen her die yet, the fight basically seems to come down to - surprise, surprise - healing the tanks, stepping away from (multiple sources of) fire, topping off the raid and spamming like mad in the AoE phase. I used mind vision on our mage during some of the more quiet stretches to see how he was doing with the flying around and even though I'm not sure that it's something I'd enjoy doing myself, it definitely looked to me like this was once again supposed to be the fun part of the fight while everyone else just goes through the motions. Okay, that and the hatchling tanking maybe.

Before anyone says that all boss fights in WoW can be summed up the way I summed up my role on these Firelands bosses, that's definitely not true. There can be importance in positioning (something that has hardly mattered to healing at all so far in Firelands, beyond not personally standing in the fire and not being out of range of everyone else). There can be frequent changes between AoE and single target damage (only seen on Shannox so far). There can be interaction with other raid members. As it is, it's all been kind of same-y from a healing point of view.

Still, I'm not sure whether I'm not being too critical of the instance because like I said earlier in this post, there are a lot of good things about it. It's just that it seems to me that unless you get to be the special snowflake to handle the boss's unique mechanic, most of them aren't really all that interesting... or maybe it's just a healer thing. Tier eleven felt more engaging to me anyway.

I'd be interested in other people's thoughts.

Adventures in Stranglethorn Vale

2011-09-02T15:30:00.003+02:00

One of the last revamped low-level zones (not counting all the starter areas for the different races) that I had yet to investigate in any way, shape or form was Stranglethorn Vale. Not long ago I finally had a thorough look at it on my draenei warrior (I seem to have a lot of lowbie warriors it seems, they just never manage to get anywhere), and it was interesting.

Firstly, to put things into perspective, I was quite fond of the old Stranglethorn Vale (or "Strange-thorn vale" as I thought it was called initially) , though I wouldn't have listed it as one of my favourite zones. It's quite funny, considering that a friend who had been playing longer than me immediately told me upon entering the zone for the first time that it was an awful place and that on the PvP server he used to play on it was called "Ganklethorn Vale". Unsurprisingly, the purely PvE experience was very different. I remember having my first encounters with the opposite faction and actually helping them, because you know, trolls and tigers and stuff everywhere, man! I know how it is!

I generally remember Stranglethorn as a very social place. Seeing how it covered a huge level range back in the day (30-50, roughly), there were always a lot of people there, looking for help with one of the many group quests, or sitting in Booty Bay and asking whether anyone wanted to trade Green Hills of Stranglethorn pages (back when there were about a dozen of them instead of just one and the quest was a bit like a mini collectible card game).

However, I also understand why people hated Stranglethorn. For some of them, spending so much time in the same zone quickly made them grow tired of jungles and trolls. Quests constantly making you run up and down the entire zone over and over again (on foot, back when you didn't get a mount until forty) got tedious, and repeatedly being forced to run past mobs ten levels higher than you was generally a disaster waiting to happen. I do think that those things also added something to the game at the time, but I certainly understand why they annoyed people.

So how does the new Stranglethorn compare? I knew that it wasn't going to be a social experience for me and that I wouldn't spend nearly as much time in the same places as before, especially since the zone has now been split in two, but what else is there to know?

Northern Stranglethorn hasn't changed that much, on the whole. Most of the old quests are still there, even if they have all been streamlined in some form. Sometimes the quest text and story have changed, but you're essentially still doing the same things as before, like with the Kurzen quests: Kurzen himself is dead but you just kill his lackeys instead, basically. On the whole I was quite happy with this. Somehow, I always felt that Stranglethorn was one of those places where the "kill ten mobs" model just worked, and it still does.

The Nesingwary quests have some remote turn-ins now to save you from having to run back and forth between the different killing grounds and the quest NPCs. To be honest I didn't really think it was needed, considering that you don't have to stray that far from the hunter camp anymore anyway, but whatever. The lore justification for the remote hand-in was interesting however - instead of the quest givers constantly giving you new tasks to kill different kinds of tigers/panthers/raptors, they just tell you to prove yourself as a hunter and your character then "feels" that after killing ten young ones they should move on to the adults and so on. I just didn't think it made sense that my warrior magically "felt" that she should now go kill a named tiger that she realistically never even would have heard about.

The most interesting addition to Northern Stranglethorn is a new quest chain surrounding a little raptor hatchling that you find while in Kurzen's camp. It integrates quite seamlessly with the rest of the quests as the hatchling just kind of pops up and gives you a prompt related to what you're already doing. I was quite intrigued by where this story was going, and loved it when - SPOILERS INCOMING - I accidentally ended up resurrecting Bloodlord Mandokir. Damn low-levels and their resurrecting raid bosses. You'd think that I would have learned from the many times I accidentally helped with bringing back Hakkar back in old Tanaris.

What makes it even better though is that they make it personal by having Mandokir take your little raptor hatchling away. Nooo, not my pet! You then engage on an exciting and fascinating mission to get her back, only to fail right at the finish line, and you're left with nothing but a vague promise that you might be able to get her back if you manage to become strong enough to challenge Mandokir in Zul'Gurub directly. Indeed, if you go back there at 85 after having done this quest line, you get to rescue your baby, fifty-five levels later. Amazing.

Now, I can't really see my little warrior getting to that point any time soon, but this quest alone certainly made me want to level her a lot more. And I think that's great. If you read the user comments on the Wowhead page I linked above, you'll see that I wasn't the only one who had a very strong emotional reaction to this quest. And why not, it's got all the hallmarks of an epic quest line in WoW: it spans several levels, you have to overcome some serious obstacles on the way, you fail and suffer a setback, but when you eventually get to pick up your little Lashtail Hatchling it just feels all the sweeter.

I just couldn't help being somewhat surprised that Blizzard went through all this effort "just" for a mini pet. No offense to pet collectors, but non-combat pets don't exactly strike me as the type of content that yearns to have an epic quest chain attached to it. That's the kind of thing I used to expect from raiding and attunements. I guess this just proves that there is a real benefit to being a hipster in WoW and engaging in relatively niche activities like pet collecting. Whatever the developers want to make "mainstream" will inevitably end up getting declawed and nerfed because they are worried about anyone being put off by obstacles. However, as long as they don't create content with the expectation that everyone will do it, they can make it cool.

Maybe the loss of my pet raptor left me feeling a bit dispirited at the time, but ~~Southern~~ The Cape of Stranglethorn initially seemed considerably less interesting to me. That part of the zone never had as many iconic quests to begin with, and those that used to be memorable back in the day have long been stripped of what made them exciting.

Take Stranglethorn Fever, for example. Back in the day you needed to collect ten (low drop-rate) Gorilla Fangs to summon Mokk, and then he would come in with about a dozen apes accompanying him and wipe you out. Then you'd have to gather another ten fangs and try again, probably while asking for help in chat at the same time. Frustrating? Probably, but it was definitely memorable. Now it's just another quick kill quest.

Same with the quests to kill various giants given by Captain Smotts. I remember when you needed to have Barbecued Buzzard Wings to summon Negolash... you bet I was popular for having actually bothered to level cooking and having got the recipe in the Badlands! Funnily enough the pile of food that you now use to lure the giant still looks like Buzzard Wings when placed on the ground (I think they were even labelled as such if you hovered over them), even though it's supposedly something else.

None of these quests were bad. It's just that if, like me, you remembered having more fun with them back when they were more difficult, they seem a bit bland now.

So, I continued through the Cape of Stranglethorn, not finding anything particularly noteworthy, until there was a sudden and very noticeable shift in my questing as I was given a quest to infiltrate the Bloodsail Buccaneers for Baron Revilgaz. Suddenly everything was shiny and new and quests were varied and fun, making use of all the new tools that Blizzard has developed for a more interesting quest experience over the years. Most of it made me laugh, but at least one quest also made me feel quite distressed. It was good!

Finally it all ended with a big showdown between the Bloodsails and the Blackwater Raiders. I really enjoyed this as well, and this is one case where I felt that the devs really made an existing story a lot better by simply overhauling it big time. I didn't mind the old pirate-killing quests, but they always left me with the feeling that the Bloodsails weren't much more than a nuisance. In the new quest chain you actually get a real sense of them being a threat, and phasing is used to show Booty Bay under serious attack, which is when I took the screenshot at the top of this article.

Now, I've rambled a lot in this post. What's my final verdict? I think, all in all, both halves of Stranglethorn remain what they were to me before: not my absolute favourite zone, but solid entertainment. In revamping this area, Blizzard has managed to strike a good balance between preserving the old and introducing something new.

I'm still not entirely done with looking at the revamped old world, as I still have some starter zones left plus the view of some zones from Horde side, but I have at least a vague idea about most places now. One of these days I might have to write a more comprehensive summary of my impressions of the shattered world.

Pug Tidbits

2011-08-29T01:37:00.005+02:00

After taking a bit of a break from instancing for several weeks, I've finally started to hit the dungeon finder again, partly because I was starting to feel somewhat guilty about basically collecting no valour points on my main at all outside of raids, partly because I felt like seeing some low-level instances on my alts again after having levelled several of them purely through questing as of late. I've noticed that I generally seem to go through certain cycles in my play patterns, alternating between max-level and low-level play, instancing and questing, feeling very enthused about the game and feeling very burnt out.

Anyway, as usual many of my pugs didn't leave much of an impression either way, but here are some things that stood out:

Best Player

When I zoned into heroic Lost City of the Tol'vir, the bear tank called Bob immediately asked everyone to be patient with him because it was his first time tanking the instance. I told him not to worry, and as it turned out he didn't really have to ask us to be particularly patient because he did a great job anyway. It might have been his first time tanking the place, but he was clearly already familiar with tanking in general and knew the pulls and boss strategies of the instance inside out.

Since it was such a smooth and pleasant run, the entire group immediately requeued for another dungeon. This time we got Blackrock Caverns, which went slightly less smoothly due to no fault of Bob's, but he managed to save several bad situations through good cooldown usage. If only all tanks in LFG were like him...

Worst Player

Me! Okay, I probably wasn't the worst player among all the people I grouped with, but I've definitely had some serious herp derp moments in my last couple of runs. In the aforementioned BRC run I managed to aggro and die to one of the patrolling dragonkin just as the rest of the group had jumped down the slope to Corla and pulled two additional packs. Fortunately Bob managed to salvage the situation by shifting out of bear form and throwing me a combat res.

Then there was the Zul'Gurub run where, while trying to dodge Venoxis' poison maze, I managed to fall off his terrace and into the water, where I immediately died to the various mobs there. Fortunately the dps was very good and they managed to down the boss anyway, but I still felt like a huge dolt.

And then there was the Grim Batol run with the paladin tank who kept pulling as if he had ants in his pants, so that I could barely keep up with healing even while outgearing the instance by two tiers. I think this threw off my mojo right from the start, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when I managed to die to General Umbriss' Blitz. I just remember thinking: "Oh good, he's not targeting me with it, I can stay where I am... wait, he's still facing in my general direction, so I do have to - oh poo, I'm dead". Again the group managed to down him even with me dead (who needs healers anyway) and I was even rewarded with an achievement. Way to go!

Then the group skipped the last two trash packs in the inner circle of the city and I somehow managed to aggro one of them even though I usually never have problems running past them. Since everyone else had already charged way ahead while I was still looting a mob, I was the only one who died. They just continued to kill the next pack without me and said nothing while I corpse-ran back. In a way I almost found myself wishing that they would laugh at me or make some sort of snarky comment... somehow just being ignored and left behind felt even more humiliating, especially as a healer. I have to admit I felt a certain mix of glee and relief when the tank's rogue friend got himself blown up by one of the adds on Drahga, as it at least meant that I wasn't the only one who had made a stupid mistake during the run.

Player With The Best Attitude

On my low level draenei shaman I had a slightly messy but strangely enjoyable Dire Maul West run the other day, in which I ended up with a paladin tank who was retribution spec. No biggie in a lowbie instance as far as I'm concerned, as long as he knows what he's doing and isn't too squishy. He did do reasonably well at holding aggro, and healing him wasn't a problem either with the exception of a couple of bosses where he went splat, but the rest of the group still managed to beat them without wiping.

Still, he was clearly new to the instance, as he felt the urge to run back to the quest giver immediately every time he completed a quest objective and kept going the wrong way. He also might not have been able to speak English, as he never said anything in chat and more importantly never reacted to anything that was said in there either. All the party's well-meaning attempts to tell him "no, this way, over here" were in vain. Eventually we just gave up on trying to steer him and followed him during his meandering through random trash packs, because sooner or later there'd be nothing left but the boss anyway.

Now, all this might sound pretty bad, but somehow I still couldn't help liking the guy. Yes, I generally prefer to have some communication going on, but on the plus side he never complained about all the times he died either. In fact, he never even waited for a res and always released instantly and started running back, even if he had been the only one who had died. This was in fact another thing that convinced me that he must have been a newbie, because he clearly wasn't jaded or entitled - instead he was curious and driven. Death was merely a minor setback, and he was always happy to pick himself up again and try again. In a time where the game has made it so easy to drop any group activity at the drop of a hat without any negative consequences, that kind of perseverance impressed me. Here's to you, little newbie tank. Just keep working at it and you might go far in this game.

Player With The Worst Attitude

In heroic Shadowfang Keep I got a raid-geared bear tank who had some serious issues. After Baron Ashbury's first Asphyxiate I healed the party up to about thirty percent health, as that's more than sufficient to survive the occasional tick from his (dispellable) dot. But Mr Bear Tank didn't think so. He started to yell at me to heal more, then in all caps, then calling me a whore. I politely told him to calm down and that there was no need to top everyone off until near the final phase since the boss just kept putting people back down to one hit point anyway, but he wouldn't believe me.

He and his dps shaman friend then stopped attacking and interrupting the boss and just stood there, letting him heal back up to full repeatedly while the bear claimed to have problems with his mouse. I don't know, maybe it was true, but considering how worked up he had just got about me not topping people off it seemed more like a passive aggressive attempt to wipe us, especially since the shaman stopped too. Eventually they seemed to get bored of it though and we managed to burn the boss down. Then there was an awkward pause during which I can only guess he tried to kick me, but if he did it didn't work, so both he and his shaman friend then dropped group. Their replacements were more sensible fortunately.

Anyway, raging at people in the dungeon finder is generally never a good idea, but raging about people doing it wrong when in fact you are the one who doesn't seem to understand the mechanics just makes you look like an even bigger idiot.

Transmogrification = Content

2011-08-27T16:14:00.003+02:00

I know I said that I wasn't going to talk about the upcoming transmogrification feature at length, but since then something has come up that I would like to draw attention to.

Overall the reaction to this new addition has been overwhelmingly positive from what I've seen. Some people have expressed concerns, which is fair enough, but nobody seems to absolutely hate it. There's been one argument against the addition of cosmetic outfits though that really struck me as interesting: that it's "wasted" development time that could have been focused on "real" content instead.

Personally I think that saying the addition of transmogrification doesn't count as real content is similar to claiming that Lego isn't a real toy because it's just coloured bricks, or in other words: it's completely missing the point. No, the addition of a feature that allows you to change the appearance of your outfit is not the same kind of thing as adding a bunch of daily quests or a new raid. It's the developers handing us a tool and inviting us to engage our own imagination, and I think that's a great thing.

Syl wrote a post a few months ago, talking about how depressing it is that Blizzard seems to view WoW players purely as consumers these days. No wonder that people burn out or get bored so quickly, when all there is to do is to work your way through the pre-made story of the newest quest hub and then you're basically done with the game. That kind of thing is valuable, but it shouldn't be all there is. Even a theme park MMO needs some sandbox elements that allow players to go wild. And I do think that transmogrification might turn out to be just one such feature.

To be honest I'm rather bewildered by the prediction that once this feature comes out, everyone will just change into their favourite old set of gear and then nobody will wear anything else ever again. The WoW community may have many problems, but lack of creativity and passion from the side of the players is certainly not one of them. I think people will enjoy switching between different outfits to spice things up, and coming up with new combinations just to show off.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that regularly changing the look of your armour will be enjoyable to everyone, though I think you'd struggle to find a player who's never wished that they didn't have to display a certain piece of gear for the sake of its stats. (A former guildie of mine supposedly once said that he'd happily wear a turd on his head if it was an upgrade, but I think most people would prefer if they didn't have to.) Few features in the game appeal to absolutely everyone, and that's okay. But claiming that it doesn't add anything tangible to the game just because it doesn't really interest you personally is very narrow-minded.

I think that transmogrification is going to be huge and will literally change the face of Azeroth forever. It will add a whole new dimension of gameplay for people to engage in, trying to create and constantly readjust what they think would be the perfect look for their character. If that isn't a whole lot of new content then I honestly don't know what would be.

Hitting the skill cap

2011-08-25T12:59:00.003+02:00

I'm still having a blast in rated battlegrounds, but lately there's been some trouble in paradise. Basically, we seem to have hit our current skill cap as a group. We've been hovering around 1800 rating for weeks, sometimes a bit above and sometimes a bit below, but nobody has been able to hit Centurion yet. We've developed a pretty stable roster by now, so it's not newbies holding us back or anything, it's just us.

In principle, this shouldn't be a problem. Isn't that what a ranking system is all about, finding the "sweet spot" for everyone where they win and lose their games in roughly equal amounts? Only the best of the best can hope to simply work their way to the top and beat most opponents that they meet on the way, everyone else will always win some and lose some. There are two problems though.

Firstly, people have different levels of ambition. Myself, I'm honestly pretty damn happy that I got as high as Legionnaire. I'm not saying that I have no interest in improving my play any further, but I'm also pretty happy with what I've already got, because I was never really that amazing at PvP so having made it as far as we have already feels like quite an achievement to me. On the other hand we also have at least one member who has talked about how we really need to leave this "kindergarten" bracket of less than 2000 rating behind. That's quite a difference in attitude, to put it mildly.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see this kind of discussion arise, as everyone who's spent a significant amount of time raiding is likely familiar with conflicts of this kind. "Can we kick this guy already? That's the fifth time he's failed to the same mechanic, he's just holding us all back!" vs. "Can you tell Mr Righteous to chill the hell out? We're all learning, it takes some time, and we're progressing, even if it takes time!" I just didn't expect to encounter this kind of thing in PvP as well.

The other issue we have lies in the way we win and lose. Back when we had just started out and were constantly getting matched against teams with way higher ratings, I talked about how frustrating it is to just get steamrolled. The opposite applies as well though, there's comparatively little satisfaction in repeatedly beating opponents that don't put up much of a fight.

In principle it's okay to win some and to lose some, as long as you always feel that you stood a chance and that it was a close call because your enemy fought hard. Somehow that rarely seems to be the case for us though. It's got nothing to do with rating now either... it's about base-capping battlegrounds vs. flag-carrying ones.

For some reason we completely rock the house when it comes to base-capping. Whenever we get Battle of Gilneas, someone will chuckle and joke about how we've got this one in the bag already. According to my armoury page (which isn't entirely accurate, but it's got the gist of it), I've got a 73% win rate for Gilneas. Twin Peaks on the other hand I've only won 31% of the time. Ouch!

Flag-carrying battlegrounds are the complete opposite for us in performance. People groan as soon as they see the Twin Peaks loading screen in particular. We'll usually put up a decent fight until both sides have managed to grab the flag, but then the other team always manages to return theirs first and after that things just keep going downhill.

It's been a bit of a mystery to us. Obviously different kinds of battlegrounds require different tactics, but at the heart of it it's still all PvP, and it doesn't quite make sense that we are that much better at it in one environment than in another. And this is what makes it so frustrating, not being able to figure out what's wrong. When I wrote my big ode to rated battlegrounds, I praised them for their larger numbers putting less pressure on the individual to execute every single move correctly. Now it looks like this is exactly what's becoming our problem though, because with how many factors there are to consider, we can't quite figure out what it is that's holding us back. One person not blowing their cooldowns at the right time? On the wrong target? CC not being coordinated enough? Maybe a little bit of all of it, but how do you pinpoint these things in the middle of a crazy melee?

For now our battleground leader has ordered us to be more active in arena in hopes of encouraging better coordination on a smaller scale. I don't think that's a bad way to go about it, but it still leaves me a bit weary. I have actually taken up 2v2 arena again recently, but it's a crap combo that I play with a friend mostly for fun. If a minimum arena rating actually becomes a requirement to remain on the battleground team, I might just find myself getting booted soon.

And well, there's also the issue of time. Currently some of our members pretty much do nothing but PvP in game, so I guess for them spending a certain amount of time on arena is pretty normal. But for me PvP is just one part of my gametime parcel, as I also raid and like to dither around on alts. If it starts to require more than two to three nights a week of my time then I think I'll simply start to feel burnt out. I can't help but be reminded of the whole valour point capping debate, and the frustration people expressed at the thought of having to invest so much time into non-raiding activities just to keep raiding. Again this is something that I didn't expect to find in PvP, but being required to do X arena games just to stay in the rated battleground game is pretty similar really.

We'll see how it pans out I guess. I really want to keep going and improve, but after having become a lot more casual in my approach to raiding, I have no interest in becoming hardcore about PvP instead.

Imagining the new raid finder

2011-08-21T21:48:00.001+02:00

So many 4.3 news, so much to comment on... but I don't think I will talk about most of it. Some things I either don't have a very strong opinion on at the moment (such as the tanking changes) or I prefer to see how they play out in practice before raving about them too much (such as the transmogrification feature and void storage). However, there is one piece of news that immediately sent my mind reeling, and I'm surprised that it hasn't spurred more commentary so far: that Blizzard intends to include a raid finder akin to the dungeon finder in the next patch. Maybe everyone's brains just locked up in horror at the thought.

Here's how I imagine it will go:

First off, 25-mans will see a sudden revival. The main selling points of ten-mans are that you don't need to handle as many people and that it's easier to limit your group to your best friends. However, if the organisational part is handled by an automated system and you're going to group with nothing but strangers anyway, you might as well select the option that gives marginally more loot. Assuming that players of all roles will follow this logic to an equal extent, 25-mans should also have shorter queues, considering that the tanks to healers to damage dealers ratio is slightly more favourable in 25-mans.

Nonetheless, I expect queues to be an issue, more so than for five-mans. Or rather, I expect that they'll always be either fairly short (less than an hour, maybe even less than half an hour) or long enough to equal "not gonna happen". The reason for this is that due to the length of raids, people are a lot less likely to be interested in doing them at all times of day. If your faction just won Tol Barad and you want to do Baradin Hold, you'll get a group fairly quickly. (On a side note, if they do make it cross-server, which they probably will, how will it handle things like Baradin Hold? I assume that you'll only be able to queue while it's being held on your server.) Evenings in general are going to be popular as well. But if you queue up during anything but prime time, don't expect to get far.

Then comes the nitty gritty of the actual runs. Finally the system tells you that a group has been found! We all know how annoying it can be when you click your ready button in the dungeon finder and then slowly watch the group time out because one person was AFK. Now imagine this with ten or twenty-five people. Good luck not going mad while trying again and again!

Upon zoning in you'll probably discover that about half your healers are actually damage dealers. The problem of people signing up for a role that they don't actually intend to play just to get a faster queue is not new, but in five-mans it rarely turns out well for the deceiver because it's very obvious whether they are doing what they're supposed to do or not. But in a raid with six healers? I reckon that a lot of players will be willing to take their chances that nobody will notice.

If you do notice that someone has tried to "cheat" their way into the group, how is vote-kicking going to work in a raid? I imagine that getting ten to twenty-five people to agree on things is going to be quite hard.

Just like in the dungeon finder, I expect most people to zone in and not say a word. I can already picture tanks charging in with no consideration for the rest of the raid, just like they often do in five-mans... except that in a raid they'll end up dying that way, and then maybe drop group.

Most people will probably just stand around and wait for someone to tell them what to do, with maybe one or two going nuts with excitement about being in a raid with so many people, spamming chat, changing appearance and bouncing off the walls until they pull something - basically similar to what you see in the starting cave in Alterac Valley.

One or two experienced players are likely to speak up eventually and will try to get some sort of coordination going. People will ignore a lot of what is being said and maybe even go AFK. Just when the self-appointed leaders think that they're ready to pull, someone will drop group and need replacing. Eventually someone will start the fight and the entire raid will wipe horribly the moment the boss does his or her first special, as hardly anyone paid any attention to the strategy.

After the wipe, ninety percent of the raid will lie around on the floor, not bothering to release, while spamming the surviving mage or hunter with requests for a mass res. People will leave. New ones come in. Rinse and repeat for a while until the leader loses patience and the whole thing falls apart completely.

Cue lots of complaining on the forums about how raid finder groups are impossible, at which point the content will get nerfed like never before, because the guys at Blizzard are proud of their raid finder and want to make it a more enjoyable experience, and anyway, you clearly can't expect groups to talk to each other or try to coordinate through those complicated encounters!

Cynical, me? Maybe just a little.*

*Disclaimer: I don't think that a raid finder would be completely awful. For example I can see it being a nice convenience when it comes to running Baradin Hold, which many people do pug already anyway. However, generally raid content hasn't been designed for a team of random people who want to have as little interaction with each other as possible, so I foresee a lot of pain in the future if the devs once again try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I actually grouped for a group quest

2011-08-17T18:27:00.000+02:00

The revamped old world is not completely devoid of group quests, but there are only very few of them. Most zones don't have any at all, but sometimes there's a lone group quest tucked away somewhere on the side, detached from the main storyline so that it doesn't end up blocking your progress if you can't do it. I appreciate that from a gameplay point of view, but story-wise it doesn't really make any sense. So you're saying that I can practically win a war on my own in Stonetalon, but you think that I should ask for help with killing that big fish in the lake? Right. To make matters worse, these group quests are what they are only in name. While levelling my rogue I could solo every single one of them with ease, without heirlooms and often without even needing most of my cooldowns. When normal mobs are tuned to die after two or three special attacks, then doubling or even tripling their health to make them elite doesn't add much of a threat.

I was in for a surprise when I met Yetimus the Yeti Lord in Hillsbrad. He looked pretty intimidating alright, so I approached him with caution, but I wasn't prepared for just how much of a thrashing he was going to give my little undead hunter. Barely a few seconds after I had sent my pet in, he did such a massive knockback that my faithful demon dog ended up being hurled so far away that he actually despawned. Panicking, I tried to kite the monster, but even though he was susceptible to slows, he was still way too fast for me even while slowed, not to mention his considerable reach and ability to stun. Another couple of seconds later I found myself at the spirit healer.

Okay, that didn't quite go as planned, I thought, let's try that again. This time I managed to avoid my pet despawning, but I couldn't keep the little bugger alive with my piddly pet mending, and even though my damage was poor I kept pulling aggro off him, all the while barely even making a dent in the yeti's health. Life is hard when you're level twenty-six and only have a fraction of your class's full skill set to work with.

After I had died about three more times and got no closer to killing Yetimus, I decided that it was probably time to do the unthinkable and actually group up for a group quest. I did a quick /who Hillsbrad and saw four or five players in the correct level range - and this was during day time! I asked in general chat whether anyone was up for killing Yetimus and quickly got a reply from another hunter, and while I was waiting for her to make it over to the right area, a mage joined in as well. I made no secret out of my previous failure and told them that I was out for revenge.

When we were all in the right place and Yetimus wandered past again, I pulled him and we tried to nuke him down as fast as we could. I got very close to dying, especially as I got aggro again and then got knocked into a stray mountain lion to boot, but in the end I survived with a sliver of health left and the yeti was dead. Hurrah!

The mage thanked us and left, but the hunter asked whether I was up for more action, as there was another group quest available east of Tarren Mill: The Durnholde Challenge. There was a bit of dallying about as I tried to figure out where to pick up the quest and whether there were any prerequesites - oh how I missed that idle grouping!

Finally we went in and did the whole chain with no problems - these guys were no Yetimus for sure, but I still appreciated not having to fight them alone. The other hunter levelled up halfway through the chain as it gave a pretty good chunk of experience. Unlike the Yetimus quest, this one also had a useful item reward for a hunter, but that wasn't really the point. When I said my goodbyes at the end, I was happy.

People often look down on pugging as something for the desperate, those who can't find any friends to help them, because why else would you want to group with random strangers? Surely there is no benefit to working with people you don't know over those you do know. The truth is, it's hard to explain because there really isn't anything similar in real life. The best explanation I can think of is that having a positive grouping experience with random strangers is something quite... profound. When your friends help you out, it's something to be appreciated for sure, but it's also not really surprising because they are your friends after all. Getting help from someone you don't know on the other hand, even if it's not completely altruistic, is the online equivalent to reading one of those positive slice of life stories in the news - it's like a reassurance that, at the end of the day, the world is full of decent people and good things. Whether that's true in the big picture is a different matter, but even on a small scale it's something that creates fuzzy, warm feelings.

From a practical point of view, grouping like this also really helps to make you feel connected. Since I don't intend to level that particular character much further, I wasn't interested in making any deeper connections and was content to part ways once we'd all achieved our shared goals, but it was good to know that the option to interact with other people from the same server was there. If I had been a newbie or someone looking to reroll on a new server, I would have had a chance to make friends right there, ask them to do an instance, or inquire about their guild. That's really valuable when you're a lonely lowbie, levelling up on your own.

I wouldn't be surprised if Yetimus became something like the new Hogger, an NPC of legend that awes the lowbies and encourages them to group up and learn how to overcome a challenge. I do wish there were more mobs like him.

A retrospective of Cataclysm expectations

2011-08-14T22:54:00.003+02:00

Around this time two years ago, Cataclysm was revealed as WoW's third expansion at Blizzcon 2009. Now, Blizzcon 2011 (and thus presumably the official announcment of the next expansion) is still a few months away, but I thought that it would be fun to look back at how I reacted to the Cataclysm announcement back in the day, before we all go wild about Mists of Pandaria or whatever else it's going to be. You can read the whole post I wrote about my Cataclysm expectations here, but I'm going to quote the most important bits anyway.

Thrall abandoning the Horde? I'm glad that this one hasn't been confirmed as of yet as far as I'm aware.

Ah, I still had such high hopes for the Horde back then. Isn't it sad?

The new races are the feature that has been semi-official for longer than any of the others and I loved it from moment I heard about it.

I was really excited about worgen and goblins, more so about the latter than about the former, but still... and yet, this has probably turned out to be one of my biggest disappointments in this expansion. For starters, Blizzard didn't give us any additional character slots, so I could only create new alts on servers where I didn't have any friends, which was fairly off-putting. Then the new starter zones both ended up being rather disappointing to me personally. Gilneas's linearity rankled, though I've recently felt an itch to give it a second playthrough. And Kezan was just so over the top that it didn't even feel like Warcraft to me anymore.

To make matters worse, I ended up having major issues with the looks and animations of the new races. Or rather, I'm fine with the goblins' looks, but something about their animations keeps bugging me, though I can't really put my finger on what exactly it is. Maybe I'm just sizist, as I don't like playing gnomes either. The worgen are worse though, as I don't like their looks much and their animations just look atrocious to me, as if all their limbs were made of rubber. I talked about this in my post about the worgen starter area, but the way they run just really, really bothers me, to the point where I feel some annoyance every time I see a worgen run past me - I don't even have to be the one playing it - and that's an issue that I have with no other race. It's like a horde of Scooby Doos invaded Azeroth. /shudder.

My only hope is that I'll still get used to it. I actually remember really disliking the blood elves when Burning Crusade first came out, especially the females, but eventually I managed to mellow out a bit and tried out their starter zone on a male first... and well, as you can see on my side bar, I now have a female blood elf paladin at max level, and I certainly don't hate her.

The thought of already ditching all my Icecrown epics after only five levels doesn't sit quite right with me.

Hahaha! Little did I know that I would actually start ditching my Icecrown epics the moment I set foot into the first of the new zones. I'm still not sure how I feel about this extreme gear reset to be honest. It creates a bit of a difficulty hump for new characters in levelling gear, but on the other hand it allows them to catch up very quickly. Nonetheless, the scaling - not just of gear, but also of stats - from 80 to 85 just feels completely out of whack compared to the rest of the game. Already a level 85 character in decent gear has about five times the health that an 80 had back in ICC, and the expansion is less than a year old. I think I would have preferred it not to be quite so drastic. All my stats being in the thousands just feels weird.

I'm also intrigued by the new "path system" for character progression.

I think with this and the dance studio there's a definite lesson to be learned: trust at least one of the major expansion features to be scrapped before release.

I guess in my ideal world they'd add new quests while also incorporating some of the old ones in the new setting, maybe streamlining them somewhat in the process.

Actually, this is something that Blizzard did get right, even if I personally felt that the results were of somewhat mixed quality and didn't work equally well in all the zones. The "continuity problem" of some old quests having had consequences while other ones appear to have never happened is something that I've slowly learned to ignore, but there is still another issue:

The question would be how viable that would be, especially if we assume that the base levelling speed won't be changed - do people really need more quests that they'll just outlevel way too quickly anyway?

It's funny how that was a bit of a throwaway comment at the time, as I had little doubt that Blizzard would balance quest experience and levelling speed in some way, yet characters outlevelling their quests way too quickly has actually turned out to be one of the major problems of the revamped old world.

New High-Level Zones & More Raid Content than Ever Before - I feel a bit spoiled saying this, but this is a bit of a "duh", isn't it?

I've got to give credit where credit is due: I felt that they did deliver plenty of good raid content in the first tier of this expansion... but unfortunately the whole system of having multiple raids per tier seems to have gone out of the window again now, which is a shame in my opinion. And well, the amount of new high level zones wasn't that impressive either. It never feels like you have much choice about where to quest; your only option for variety during levelling is to avoid questing altogether and try to level by other means.

I'm definitely looking forward to trying out many of these new options [for race/class combinations], though the limited amount of character slots per realm will definitely end up being an issue for me.

Yep, also see my comments above about worgen and goblins. In actuality, the only new combos that I've tried out so far are human hunter, undead hunter and troll druid. There's a lot of untapped potential there for me, but as I said the limited character slots remain a deterrent for me.

If guild-changing suddenly has more meaningful effects than losing a chat channel and the tag over your name that could be the source of a lot of new drama... but I'm confident in Blizzard's ability to avoid the worst pitfalls that are bound to crop up with such a new system.

I'm actually not sure how I feel about the guild levelling system after more than six months of using it. The perks are alright, but on the other hand there are only a few that I actually miss when I'm playing on an unguilded character, and some, like the experience boosts that you can't turn off, are actually something that I actively want to avoid on lowbie alts.

And I'm not sure whether this system has actually made guilds more meaningful. Yes, it has given them a more important role in terms of gameplay, but to be honest I don't think that's really what guilds should be about. I also can't shake the feeling that this has made people more reluctant to change guilds, even if it's something they want to do, which I don't consider a good thing.

I don't PvP much these days so I can't claim to care much about these features, however the mention of "new battlegrounds with rated team play" in the trailer has me intrigued.

Rated battlegrounds didn't turn out to be what I expected either, as I didn't think that they would be something that required premade teams, but on the plus side they turned out to be a lot more fun than I had imagined and have actually turned into one of my favourite features of this expansion.

I really like the idea of a new secondary profession, simply because that means everyone will be able to get it - and, like the other secondary professions, it would most likely be somewhat optional.

At the start of the expansion archaeology didn't really feel entirely optional to me, considering that it could potentially result in items that were as powerful as raid gear, so not levelling it felt a bit like passing on potential gear upgrades. This has got better as the gear from it has become a bit outdated though - which is a good thing in my opinion. I do wonder how many characters have actually levelled their archaeology - it seems to me that it has become what fishing used to be, that annoying profession that you levelled on your main for the perks but then never touched on any of your alts. Fishing itself has become a lot more fun with the many dailies and fewer restrictions on how much skill you need to make successful catches, but archaeology on alts still feels pretty bleh to me.

Flying Mounts in Azeroth - Awesome. Not much more to say about that.

Actually, this is another thing that in my opinion turned out to not be as great as I had thought it would be. Soaring over the old world was interesting for maybe two weeks, then it just turned into the most convenient way of getting from A to B without having to pay attention to the scenery. I actually find myself enjoying my alts below sixty much more not just because of the new content, but also because they are glued to the ground and actually get to take in the changes in the landscape.

Now, you could read all this as a rant about how Cataclysm sucks etc., but I think that more than anything it's a warning not to get too caught up in the hype about a new expansion. The things that I got most disappointed about weren't necessarily the weakest aspects of the expansion but simply things about which I had built up too many expectations (e.g. "I'm sure levelling a goblin will be just as much fun as levelling a draenei was back in the day").

In a way, Cataclysm was also the expansion about which I was the most excited so far. When Burning Crusade came out I hadn't been playing that long yet and didn't really understand the ramifications of everything that was going to happen. Wrath was something that I did get excited about, but to be honest a lot of it was more about the prospect of levelling through it with my boyfriend (we had only just got together about two months before its release) than about the actual content. I knew little about Arthas and thus wasn't too concerned with his story.

But Cataclysm... I don't know! I think in a way I expected it to fix everything that I didn't like about the state of the game, which of course it didn't and couldn't do. Also, my boyfriend and I couldn't even start playing together at the same time since he had ordered a copy from Amazon and we were victims of their Big Fail of Christmas 2010. (He ended up cancelling his order and somehow it still ended up in our mailbox in May or so. Lolwut?) It just felt like a bit of a mess.

Whatever the next expansion will be, I'll try to just lean back and not think about it too much until it actually arrives. Hopefully I'll be able to get more enjoyment out of it that way.

Not so Forsaken anymore: how Sylvanas & co. surprised me in Silverpine

2011-08-11T18:01:00.006+02:00

MMO Melting Pot has a link to a post by Cynwise up today in which he discusses the Forsaken, why he considers them evil, and why he doesn't really like playing them. It's both interesting as well as conveniently timed for me, because I played through Silverpine Forest on my own undead hunter last night and was left with an urge to post about the experience and how it changed my view of the Forsaken in general. (Unlike previous "I quested in this zone" posts, this one has some very explicit spoilers. You have been warned.)

To start at the beginning, I used to feel ambivalent about the Forsaken. I didn't like them enough to play one of my own until I rolled my death knight, but I enjoyed their company and liked to spend time in their zones. They always struck me as the Azerothian equivalent of that misanthropic guy in your circle of friends whom you suspect you'd really dislike if you got to know him more closely, but as long as you keep him at a safe distance he makes for great company, because he's also clever, sarcastic and funny.

Looking at it a bit more closely and seriously, the Forsaken have always been giving quests that were considerably more evil than those that you got anywhere else. Yes, all factions ask you to kill people, but the Undercity was the only place where they made you think that you were actually helping the one you were going to get killed and considered this perfectly normal behaviour.

And yet, despite of this, I could never get myself to truly dislike them, probably because I was also feeling a bit sorry for them. They are not like other races, they aren't even really a "race" at all. They are sentient abominations, forced to exist in a sort of limbo between life and death where they are unable to truly enjoy anything and have no real purpose in ~~life~~ undeath. For every evil apothecary poisoning people for the hell of it, there was usually a quest about a sad Forsaken trying to recapture some of their lost humanity and failing. More than anything, they are simply some seriously messed up people.

Wrath of the Lich King was a big expansion for the Forsaken, because it went back to their roots and gave them purpose, reminding everyone of how it was the Lich King who was responsible for their current plight and that it made perfect sense for them to want revenge. But then the Wrathgate happened... and it was painful. I'll never forget the shivers that ran down my spine as I watched the cinematic for the first time and saw Putress appear, threatening Arthas with the wrath of the Forsaken (yay, here come our crazy but ass-kicking allies) - until he added "and death to the living" to the end of his speech (oh shit).

After that I felt that things kind of went downhill for the Forsaken. Before that I had always considered the apothecaries a sort of extremist group that wasn't necessarily representative of the undead as a whole, but the Wrathgate made it very clear that they were indeed the ones in charge. Sylvanas denied all responsibility afterwards, but I challenge you to find anyone who actually believed her story.

Now the Forsaken weren't just poor disgruntled monsters anymore, they were traitors. While it had been easy to feel at least some sympathy for them in the past whenever they seemed uncaring or unnecessarily cruel, this was personal, outright treachery and simply inexcusable. I was sad about this because it felt to me like this development really eliminated a lot of shades of grey from their character as a race and just left them as this purely evil people that couldn't be trusted even by their own allies.

As such I wasn't actually looking forward to seeing how their story would develop in Cataclysm, especially after I had heard reports about Sylvanas going mad with power and effectively becoming the new Lich King.

Let's just say, the new undead starting area was surprising.

Tirisfal Glades not so much, as it's retained a lot of the old starter quests; the experience has just been smoothed out considerably. Yes, there are some new quests and they are fun, but nothing that struck me as really out of the ordinary. The only thing I found notable was how different the reception of my new undead character felt compared to the old starter zone. Pre-Cataclysm, it basically said to a newly risen Forsaken: "Oh, you woke up too? Sucks to be us, let's try to make the best of it." Nowadays it says: "Welcome! We brought you back to life so you can serve the wonderful Lady Sylvanas!" The atmosphere is almost... friendly, like you're being inducted into a special club.

When you enter Silverpine, that's where things get really interesting. You immediately get to witness Sylvanas explaining her newest scheme of having Val'kyr intentionally raise new Forsaken to Garrosh, and her choice of words is fascinating. "I have solved the plight of the Forsaken," she says, and "as a race, we Forsaken are unable to procreate". I've seen people brush this off as her simply wanting to "produce" more soldiers for the Horde war effort, but to me those are not the words of a warlord talking about her cannon fodder. You want your people to procreate, Sylvanas? That sounds awfully... maternal.

A bit later you get to ride side by side with her as she explains the history of the Forsaken to you. Usually when your character gets to interact with an important NPC, this strikes me as a way of trying to make you feel more important: you're such a great hero that even the Warchief himself (or whoever) comes to have a chat with you. In this case I got the opposite impression though, namely that this conversation showed that Sylvanas is a leader who genuinely cares about her people, even a lowly schmuck like my level twelve hunter.

In a later quest, you get sent on a rescue mission to save the survivors of an ambush. Rescue mission? What? Are these the same Forsaken that asked me to mercilessly kill any of their number that were unlucky enough to get captured by the enemy in Dragonblight?

During another quest, you accompany a group of soldiers into a cave where they end up getting ambushed. Before I had time to properly process what was happening, the leader of the group shoved my character out of the blast radius, with his last words being that I should tell the Banshee Queen. The way I sat in front of my monitor in stunned confusion must have been a pretty good reflection of the way my character must have felt about this strange act of heroism. "But... I'm just the rookie, and yet he bothered to save me. I don't understand."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Forsaken have suddenly turned into a bunch of fluffy bunnies. They are still ruthless and cruel, but something has changed for sure. They don't just loathe everything and everyone anymore, including themselves. They stick together. They care about the survival of their people. Up until Wrath, it was all about them killing and bombing their way towards the Lich King, no matter the cost, but with Arthas dead, what was left for them to do? Lie down and die?

It seems that Sylvanas has decided to make the Forsaken a "proper" people. They are still undead and messed up, but they also want to have their own land, procreate and get some joy out of their existence, even if it's just from worshipping their Dark Lady. This is a huge change in my opinion, and one that makes them a thousand times easier to relate to. Sure, you can still hate their methods and that's fair enough, but at the end of the day their goals are now not so different from those of the other races. They just want their people to flourish, in their own undead way.

As if to drive the point home, the zone ends with you having to work with the new bosses from Shadowfang Keep for a while, and those guys are bastards. They combine all the worst traits of the old Forsaken philosophy, loathing not just their enemies, but also their allies and even themselves. During the aforementioned rescue mission, Lord Godfrey sometimes randomly pulls out a rifle and shoots the soldiers you just saved because he thinks that they are worthless. This is perfectly in line with old Forsaken quests (refer to the one in Dragonblight I linked above!) but as a player of a "new" Forsaken you can't help but hate him. You're being taught to care for your fellow undead, even if you don't care for anybody else, and you just don't treat them like that!

Later in Hillsbrad, there is a similar situation where you encounter a crazed apothecary for a while who has clearly gone off the deep end and is raising mindless zombies everywhere. I immediately felt uneasy when I saw his whole operation and started to wonder whether I had overestimated the "goodness" of the new Forsaken... until I found Master Apothecary Lydon locked away in a cage and together he and I went back to kick some butt and clean up the mess, because again, this was actually not acceptable by the Forsaken's new standards.

I certainly didn't expect the Forsaken to come out of the Cataclysm more likeable than ever, but there you go. This is my interpretation of their quests at least. I get the impression that a lot of people seem to think that Sylvanas is still scheming quietly about how to destroy all life on Azeroth and how to become the Ultimate Queen of Uber Evil, but I have to admit that I have trouble seeing that side of her, going by the way she behaves in game. Yeah, she hates Garrosh, but who doesn't? She is genuinely saddened by the loss of her Val'kyr companions, and when she deals with Crowley at the end of the Silverpine story, she honours their agreement to let his daughter go unharmed. I think that she just wants to see her people prosper, and while she definitely still has a bone or two to pick with certain people, I doubt that she's hell-bent on world (or even Horde) domination.

Dailies, what are they good for?

2011-08-10T15:57:00.006+02:00

I finished unlocking the last part of the Molten Front dailies the other day and got my Flameward Hippogryph in the mail, but I have to say, it felt rather unsatisfying. Malfurion sent me a letter to tell me how awesome I was, how I had helped to really strike fear into the hearts of Ragnaros's minions or something like that... but nothing looked different.

I talked about really liking the much-touted "personal phasing" before, but I have to admit I really expected a little more to happen until the end. Okay, the tree grows - great. More NPCs appear - fine. But that's it? It's hard to believe that we really made that much progress into the Firelands when the base still looks like it's on the verge of being overrun every day. And we keep helping the Druids of the Talon and the Shadow Wardens to push forward, yet every day they need to start over from scratch. I feel like Sisyphus, watching my boulder roll back down the hill every night. This is worse than not seeing the environment change at all: seeing it change for only a day and then it resets again, forcing me to start over from scratch. Rohan observes that it looks like the zone was designed for "proper" phasing, and I can't help but agree. The personal progression idea was neat, but I don't think that the way they implemented it here works very well.

Aside from the constant resets, it also doesn't really seem to go anywhere. I thought that there would be some sort of big showdown quest at the end, but the Leyara chain ends about halfway through the whole ordeal and then... nothing.

The linearity of the questing is also really starting to tick me off. I've got a couple of the achievements left to do that require you to do the Druid of the Talon side, but to access those quests you always have to go through the whole intro sequence of killing X fire elementals, saving Y wounded Hyjal defenders, going Into The Fire and so on and so forth, every damn day. Feels like a lot of busywork just to keep you away from the dailies that you really want to do. Whoever thought that making daily quests a long linear sequence instead of a big pool you can pick and choose from was a good idea deserves a smack over the head in my opinion. I don't know if I'll have the stamina to continue for much longer, seeing how there is nothing of interest to buy with the spare marks I'd get.

I kind of miss the times when dailies were just a convenient way to make money. There was little pressure to do any of them because there were always other and more efficient ways of making gold; it just depended on how you liked to play. Personally I was happy to work for the ogres of Ogri'la while I saved up for epic flying back in the day, because the alternative was trying to farm elementals as a healer with no dual spec, and playing Simon Says was a lot less stressful.

To be fair, Blizzard has shown that they can use dailies to tell exciting stories, whether it's a whole server slowly taking over the Isle of Quel'Danas through combined effort or one of your characters raising their very own mount in the jungles of Un'goro. The whole thing has to come to some sort of conclusion though, which the Molten Front dailies didn't, not really.

I wonder if the item rewards at least worked out for some people. The Argent Tournament never really told much of a story either, but it had so many reputations, titles, pets and mounts that everyone could find something to work towards there. (In fact, I know some people who still go back to do the dailies there even now.) The Molten Front had no gear to offer me as a holy priest, and while I bought a couple of pets and trinkets, I only really did that "because I could", basically. The vendor was already unlocked and the reward was right there. It wasn't something I specifically worked for though, so it felt quite meaningless.

In a nutshell, I thought that the Molten Front started out quite fun and promising, but the further I progressed, the more annoying and less rewarding it got. I guess if you've got a non-raiding alt for whom you'd like to buy a specific piece of gear from one of the vendors it might be worth working towards that, but other than that I see little reason to go back to the place.

Furbolgs and other friends

2011-08-05T23:45:00.007+02:00

After finishing my rogue's old world tour, I realised that there were only two zones left in Kalimdor that I hadn't looked at yet: Felwood and Winterspring. I hopped onto another roughly level appropriate alt (of which I seem to have a lot), my long abandoned male night elf warrior, and took him up there.

As it soon turned out, my idea of what was level appropriate for those zones wasn't correct anymore as the mobs in both were about five levels lower than they used to be, but they still gave me experience (just about) and I was already there, so I decided to just get on with it.

One of the most defining features of both Felwood and Winterspring are the furbolg: the infamously rep-grindy Timbermaw and their corrupted enemies, the Deadwood/Winterfall. They are all still around, but the Timbermaw reputation gains have been buffed massively. I remember that whenever I did the Felwood quests in the past, I would end up barely neutral with the Timbermaw by the time I got to their big tunnel, and maybe reach friendly in Winterspring. By the end of my questing this time around, with no extra mob grinding or anything, I was revered. Yowza. Makes me want to go back on my main to do those quests; with the reputation she already has, she should be able to get to exalted with no effort whatsoever.

Also, in what felt like an effort to make the whole "we have to kill our own kind because they've been corrupted" thing seem a little less dire, they added a couple of quests centred around two little furbolg children that get up to crazy hijinks. I actually thought that they were quite cute.

Overall, Felwood is another zone where I feel that Blizzard really managed to hit the spot while combining old and new. Aside from the additions mentioned above, the furbolg quests are still present. You still get asked to kill satyrs and other demons, and descend into the Shadow Hold to kick some Shadow Council butt. The only old quest that seemed to have gone without a trace and that I really missed was the escort to rescue ~~Sailor Moon~~ that night elf chick from the Shadow Hold and deal with the fate of Trey Lightforge. I always thought that it was quite touching, and the fact that their friend's NPC dialogue still talked about her being in Felwood to look for two lost friends really got my hopes up. I guess that's just a leftover that the developers forgot to clean up.

However, there are also loads of new and highly entertaining quests. There's the chain featuring the night elf mage and the imp (rainbow power!), the little talking tree whom you help to grow (I thought he was very cute, even if some of the things he said also sounded slightly creepy to me), and a cool quest featuring some Illidan lore. There's a new green quest hub established by the druids, as well as a worgen outpost (they seem to be really good at growing massive, old and twisted looking trees very fast). I'm guessing the Horde works for the goblins here. It's really a nice mix of new and old and I had a right blast levelling through this revamped zone.

Scrubbing dirty squirrels gives the words "cleansing the forest" a whole new meaning.

As I emerged into Winterspring, the fun continued pretty seamlessly. Again, the furbolg quests had been kept and tweaked only slightly, but pretty much everything else has seen changes of some sort, and only for the better as far as I'm concerned. Are We There, Yeti? still exists, but it's much, much more straightforward. The old quests to hunt for a couple of named mobs (they may have been Horde only, I can't remember for sure) have been transformed into a fully fledged hunting camp à la Nesingwary. This could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether you like killing dozens of bears, owls and frostsabers, but I had a real blast doing these. Much to my amusement I also found myself getting really hungry while reading the quest text - no, I don't really care for eating owls myself, but these guys sure were very convincing in their passion!

About halfway through my frostsaber carnage I ran into the local Wintersaber Trainer. Still covered in the gore of a dozen innocent kitties, my warrior walked up to the guy and assured him that sure, he loved sabers! I was then pleased to discover that Blizzard changed the Wintersaber rep grind to use the same model as the Ravasaur quests on Horde side, which I absolutely loved. In other words, you get a little cub that gives you a daily quest to feed it and you can watch it grow into a proper mount over time. Awww! It goes without saying that I was happy to pick that one up, even if my little cat is likely to grow into a very disturbed individual, considering that I spent the rest of that evening slaughtering more of its relatives.

I also loved what they did with the old E'ko system. I always thought that the way it used to be was pretty rubbish, having to carry that cache around, gathering a whole bunch of different items to combine for different buffs... keep in mind that the average character's bag space was considerably less back then than it is now and it was just too much of a pain to be worth the bother. Nowadays you just get a couple of quests explaining what E'ko is, and then you can randomly gain various buffs from killing the right creatures.

I also ended up discovering a part of the zone that has apparently been there since vanilla, but that I never even noticed in all my years of playing: the Ban'Thallow Barrow Den. Good job at making me feel like a noob again, Blizzard. And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way at all, I'm amazed that it can still happen after all these years!

If I had to criticise anything about the new Winterspring at all, it would be that it would have been nice if they had added another flight path closer to the Timbermaw Hold, but that's really a very minor thing.

On a concluding note, I ended up finding a disgusting oozeling in the aforementioned barrow den and immediately had to think of Tam's old post about the different stages of insanity he went through while trying to intentionally grind for one. Typical that someone like me, who doesn't care much about pets, would get one on an alt without even trying. I considered selling it since several thousand gold are still a decent amount of cash and I'm not that rich on that server, but then I thought that I didn't really need more money for anything either and just allowed my warrior to learn it. At least I'll have something tangible to remind myself of his adventures in Felwood and Winterspring, and they were definitely memorable!

Brief commentary on the latest Big Issues

2011-08-05T01:10:00.007+02:00

There've been several pieces of major WoW-related news in the past couple of days, though none of them have actually excited me much. Still, I thought I'd write down my thoughts on them at least in a very condensed form:

Diablo III RMT

So, apparently you'll be able to buy virtual items in Diablo III with real money. Wait, I've never played any of the previous Diablo games and have no interest in the next installment either, why should I care? Because WoW might end up going down the same road if the system turns out to be successful? Hm.

To be honest, I'm not too concerned about that. WoW is still quite different from Diablo from what I understand (many items are BoP, loot is shared in groups, there are different servers etc.) so I don't think that they'd be able to just port the system over quickly or easily even if it does turn out to be a success.

Though, for the record, I'm against RMT, micro-transactions and all that stuff. I just like to pay my subscription and then never have to worry about real money while immersing myself in the experience of being a troll in a dress.

Mists of Pandaria

MMO-Champion once again claims to know all about the next expansion before it's officially announced. Colour me sceptical, but I wouldn't put it beyond Blizzard to just be messing with our heads in this case. After all, they know that this is the kind of thing that people would look into for clues, and the Pandaren have always been a joke race, so an expansion centred around them would be the perfect fit for a practical joke.

Then again, I also thought that the early Cataclysm leaks were a bunch of bollocks, because the developers would never just destroy all their own work, right? And Garrosh becoming warchief? Lol...

If it does turn out to be a real expansion, I'm amazingly indifferent. I know some people are crazy about Pandaren, but as someone who's "only" a WoW fan, not a Blizzard fan, the entirety of my knowledge about this race can be summed up by what I know from Chen's Empty Keg, a quest that doesn't even exist anymore. There was a guy called Chen Stormstout, and he was a panda and liked to drink. Okay. I have to admit, I don't really care. Just bring it on I guess.

WoW losing another 300k subscribers

There are quite a few things that I'm not happy with in the game right now, but I grow tired of ranting even faster than I grow tired of the things that I ranted about to begin with! There are probably a lot of different reasons for the subscriber loss, but there are still plenty of people playing. It's not all bad. I do hope though that if Blizzard attempts to regain those lost subscribers, they won't do so by simply throwing more raid bosses and daily quests at people without doing anything else.

Tales from Southern Kalimdor

2011-08-02T19:11:00.001+02:00

My little human rogue finally completed her journey from the northern tip of Kalimdor down to the very south of the continent and hit level sixty. We last met her in Thousand Needles, so these are my impressions of what I saw of Tanaris, Un'goro and Silithus.

Tanaris

Tanaris is still a good zone, but I struggled to be truly enthusiastic about it because I loved the old Tanaris that much more. I always felt that it was a very evocative zone, making you truly feel like you were on the edge of a desert on the ass end of nowhere. The dunes south of Gadgetzan seemed to go on forever, and the goblins didn't give a rat's ass whether you were Horde or Alliance, as long as you didn't pick any fights while within their walls and helped them steal water from the waste wanderers and booze from the local pirates.

The new Tanaris feels smaller somehow, and it is, seeing how almost a quarter of the zone has been flooded by the Cataclysm. When I flew over the shallows where I used to farm waste wanderers, I felt sad at the sight of the area's emptiness. In general, the zone feels way too busy for a desert now though, with hordes of NPC archaeologists fighting over the various ruins and the Southsea pirates being taken on by an entire army. The Horde vs. Alliance conflict rears its ugly head in Gadgetzan as well, with a girl gnome and a goblin whining endlessly at Marin Noggenfogger that he should join their respective side already. You can't help but feel sorry for the man.

One thing I liked was that there is a sort of intro quest line to Zul'Farrak now, which explains why one of the quest givers you meet on the inside is the ghost of a dead troll. It just strikes me as slightly weird design to make quests like that now, when ninety percent of dungeon runners might never even set foot into the zone associated with the instance anymore.

Another thing I found notable in this zone was that after completing all the quests I could find, there were still several sub-zones that I hadn't even touched. This gives me hope that the Horde quests might not all be mirrors of the Alliance ones this time and might actually utilise different environments to tell different stories. I'm looking forward to seeing this one from the other side.

This quest text made me burst into uncontrollable giggles.

Un'goro Crater

Un'goro is a wonderful zone. I was always quite fond of it to begin with - if Tanaris was the desert at the ass end of the continent, then Un'goro was the metaphorical pimple on that ass, not to mention a wild and untamed jungle. Plus it used to have lots of quests that led you all over the zone and gave pretty nice XP.

The new Un'goro somehow managed to capture the charm of the old zone (the developers added a small extra quest hub but on the whole the area still feels like proper "adventuring territory"), while also updating it to Cataclysm standards and adding some new bits and pieces. Old quests feel familiar and slightly streamlined, but not to the point where it feels like you're just being led around by the nose. I actually ran into more than one little surprise that made me go "Oho, what's that?" while exploring.

For example I spotted a little mound of earth with a blue question mark above it in the now abandoned Marshal's Refuge. Of course I had to investigate it, and found it to be the burial site of Dadanga the kodo. Nooo, not Dadanga! I still remember gathering dozens of Bloodpetal sprouts for you and being sorely disappointed by the way you rewarded me with a pumpkin and some moonberry juice. I decided to accept the challenge issued by the new repeatable quest and honour her memory by depositing some Bloodpetal sprouts on her grave. This turned out to be harder than I expected since the damned things don't show up on the herb tracker anymore and you need some pretty keen eyes to spot green sprouts on green ground, but in the end I did it. After depositing my gift, I was rewarded with a little speed buff that lasted a whopping twenty minutes. Still the same old disappointing Dadanga, even in death... /sniff.

One old quest that I was surprised hadn't been removed is the one to rescue Ringo the goblin from Fireplume Ridge. I kind of assumed that the way you had to lead him back to camp yourself and keep sprinkling water on him every so often would have triggered the developers' "not fun enough" sense these days. I guess in a way it did, because while you still need to use the water, you can apparently also keep him going by slapping him every so often before he falls over. I never quite figured out how that was supposed to work though, as the response to my /slap emote seemed very delayed and hardly ever seemed to do any good. It felt like a pretty cruel way to "rescue" someone anyway.

My favourite new addition to the zone were the Maximillian of Northshire quests. I don't think there was a single one of them that didn't make me go: "What the...?" They are incredibly silly and funny, but still manage to not feel out of place. The fact that I was doing them on a rogue added an extra layer of hilarity, as knight Maximillian was not at all impressed by my roguish fighting methods, and would idly stand by as I stunlocked mobs to death. Then he would charge off towards the nearest elite before I could restealth and make me facepalm. I would say the zone is worth doing for his quests alone.

Silithus

Unfortunately, Silithus still sucks. They cleaned it up a bit and removed all those old raid quests and weird currency grinds, plus a couple of quests where I have no idea why they took them out. (The Spirits of Southwind was a rather haunting story in my opinion, and The Calling gave the most interesting bits of lore in the entire zone.) Then they smoothed out a couple of bumps in what was left over, such as adding a remote hand-in here and reducing the number of items needed there (the dwarves down south tell you that "conveniently" another adventurer already brought them the parts they needed from the other two silithid hives, so you only have to go down into the one right next to them)... but that's it. Grinding for encrypted texts is still boring. Killing fifteen dredge strikers just to get a follow-up to kill twenty dredge crushers still feels uninspired.

I found this particularly disappointing since I remembered seeing this video of the 4.1 PTR and fully expected there to be some new and exciting quests with phasing in them. But nope, looks like none of that actually made it into the live game. I guess Silithus was Kalimdor's Arathi Highlands, aka that last zone that the developers didn't find the time for in the end. It's a shame because the story behind the zone has so much potential... but at least with Silithus we're already used to it being a boring place.

Beware of the Great Bear in the sky

2011-08-01T00:26:00.007+02:00

I love it when the game makes fun of me for whining.

Wah, everything seems so mundane, nothing's even worth taking a screenshot of, yadda yadda yadda.

Then I fly towards the Whistling Grove to do Tho se Bears Up There and see this:

So, Shintar, how does that make you feel?

Um.

Er.

Screenshot!

Thanks, WoW, for making me laugh. Even if it's at glitchy graphics.

As an aside, I have no idea how that happened, other than that it seemed to be the bear cub that by boyfriend's character had already been holding up for some time, while waiting for me to finally stop being distracted and catch up. I guess they really get quite heavy after you hold them up for a while...

I like long queues and I cannot lie

2011-07-30T01:22:00.004+02:00

I think one more reason that I've been playing my hunter more lately is that I enjoy having slightly longer queues in the dungeon finder, even if dps queues are pretty short these days anyway. Yes, you read that right. I like to wait. I do not like instant or really short queues.

Am I mad? Maybe.

I understand why people like to have short queues. They have limited time to play and want to get to the content that interests them as quickly as possible. However, while I've generally adjusted to the dungeon finder like everyone else, this attitude of a dungeon being something that you do during your lunch break is still one that I can't quite wrap my head around. In my mind a dungeon should be (and in early WoW, it was) an epic adventure, and that takes time, including time for preparation beforehand. So I never queue for an instance unless I know that I've got plenty of time to spare, way more than the actual run should take up. That one time when I was late to work because I had agreed to heal a Halls of Stone run when I really didn't have the time for it was enough, thank you.

Joining the dungeon finder as a tank is still a bit of a culture shock to me every time. "Hm, I guess I could do a dungeon..." BAM! Here's your group! You're in the instance! Now gogogo! There's no "sure I'll tank the daily for you, just find us some more dps" and the associated idling around. No "I can tank a run for you, a bit later". It's now or never. It's kind of funny, because people complain about how everyone always expects the tank to lead, but the thing with the dungeon finder is, the tank is the leader before the party has even formed! Join up now and lots of people will follow you into a group (even if it's fully automated). Wait a little longer and everyone else in the queue has to wait too. It's more power than I ever wanted.

More importantly though, instant queues mean that running a dungeon or doing something else (such as questing for example) is always an either/or decision. Either you queue up for a dungeon and run it now, or you don't. You can't queue up now and join later. You can decide to do something else now and queue up later. But the moment you queue up, you instantly have to stop whatever else you've been doing.

The result of this is that I'm always struggling to get more than one thing done on my tanking characters, because I'm very wishy-washy at decision making. If I start questing with the intent of doing an instance later, I'll keep wondering when I'll find the right moment to queue up... but I'm in the middle of questing, I don't want to interrupt myself now! /whine. Then I just end up questing the whole evening and wonder where the time went. On the other end of the spectrum, I'll queue up for an instance as soon as I log on, then find myself back in Orgrimmar half an hour later and go: "Huh, what was I going to do again? Nothing important I guess, if I'm still sitting in Org. I can do another dungeon I guess..." Rinse and repeat, and I never even get out of the city.

Being a healer is not much better. Usually you'll have at least a few minutes of wait time, which gives you a chance to mentally prepare yourself for whatever lies ahead, but at the same time it's usually too little to get anything done properly, and the pop-up will appear at the most inconvenient moment, before you've even had time to finish taking care of your mail, or while you're in the middle of your first daily quest. This just leaves you wondering why you even bothered to start anything. Of course if you do not start anything while waiting, the wait time will grow longer and longer and longer while you tap your foot, waiting for something to happen already.

A queue of twenty minutes or more is a wonderful thing on the other hand. You can go out and actually get some things done, whether it be quests, farming crafting materials or working on your archaeology.

You could rightly argue that technically, there's no difference between me questing for twenty minutes and then joining a dungeon via an instant queue, or joining a twenty-minute queue and then questing for the duration of the wait time. The end result is the same! And the instant queue has the advantage that if you don't want to do quests or anything else, you'll never be left with spare time between dungeons where you have nothing to do. How efficient.

Unfortunately there's this thing called the human mind, and it likes to play tricks on us. I already explained my dilemma about whether I should join up to get an insta-party now, or later, or never, but on the other end of the spectrum there is waiting. Waiting is a funny thing, because technically it's not an activity, it's a state of mind. While you sit around and read or do whatever, you're thinking about something that you expect to happen soon, ready to stop your current activity in its favour. Yet somehow this still feels like something that we're doing actively, so if I'm waiting in the queue and doing some quests at the same time, I actually feel like I'm multi-tasking and consider myself wonderfully efficient. When there is no queue to wait in, I can only ever do one thing at a time. How sad.

Also, anticipation. I hardly need to explain how it makes everything you like just that little bit better. Now dungeon finder pugs may not always turn out to be great, but I wouldn't be queueing up for one if I didn't expect the experience to be enjoyable in some way, and the longer I wait for it, the more I get to be excited about it. Which is not very excited, I'm not that crazy. But a little. Ooh, only five minutes to go on the estimated wait time, any moment now!

The only WoW queues I don't like are those where the game can't even give me an estimate. It makes me fidgety. In the battleground queue, you have no way of telling how close the system is to actually getting a game together. Are we just one person away from having a Warsong Gulch match? Or have less than five people been in the queue for this for the entirety of the last hour? In the dungeon finder you get to see which roles can currently be filled by the system, but that doesn't make it much better. If you've ever had a really long wait where you saw people join up for different roles and then leave again (maybe because they were put in a different group), then you'll know that it's just another type of agony, making you wish you knew who that person who just got greyed out was, so you could reach out to them and beg them to stay for just five more minutes, you almost had a full party there...!

But generally? I'm cool with waiting in queues. It adds another dimension to the game where getting into groups instantly falls kind of flat for me.

Nostalgia and doubts

2011-07-28T14:15:00.001+02:00

My guild turned five years old the other day, which I considered a reason to celebrate. I've always found that "internet time" seems to operate under different principles than real time, meaning that things come and go much more quickly because it's very easy to put a new website up or to take an old one down. It's amazing for me to think of all the forums and community sites that I've been a part of over the years, the drastic changes they've undergone and how many of them have even vanished completely. With that in mind, a guild in an MMO surviving for five years is pretty damn good in my opinion, even if it's gone through a lot of changes during that time as well.

It's not all sunshine and roses however. While working on commemorating the occasion, I went through a lot of old screenshots and blog posts of mine, and it was a somewhat strange experience. Nostalgia is always bittersweet, happy memories combined with the knowledge that those events and people are in the past and gone forever. You can never go back to how it was; I know that. Yet still, looking at those memories captured in pictures and words, I did find myself wondering about why some things have changed.

For example I came across some (what I thought were) absolutely gorgeous screenshots of boss fights in action. "How come I never take pictures like that anymore?" I asked myself. The answer? Probably because I'm a ten-man healer now instead of a twenty-five-man damage dealer. Many of those pictures were taken while I was hugging the floor and people were still struggling to salvage a fight gone bad. I was only one of over a dozen dps, I was expendable for at least a while. This kind of thing never happens anymore. Healing ten-mans is srs business. If I die - or any other healer for that matter - we'll end up wiping pretty quickly, whether we want to or not. No time for distractions!

As much as I do love healing, I'm wondering whether spending some more time as dps again wouldn't be good for my sanity. I've been running random Zulroics on my hunter but no other characters lately - is that my subconscious trying to tell me something? And today a guildie invited me to join a Baradin Hold pug with my hunter and I was thrilled I tell you. Thrilled! Not having to worry about anything but blowing shit up? Sign me up!

But then, raiding as a whole seems to have lost a lot of its luster for me. I found an old blog entry about the first time my guild downed Magtheridon, and I quoted a guildie as describing the reaction on voice chat as similar to a "mass orgasm while trapped in a burning building". Compare that to our latest first kill, Beth'tilac: my boyfriend wasn't in the raid, just occasionally glancing over my shoulder from the sofa, until he suddenly said: "Oh, you got her down then!" He hadn't been able to tell because I hadn't had any kind of reaction to the kill. It's also a world of a difference compared to the nights when I'm doing rated battlegrounds, constantly giggling at some nonsense that's being talked about in chat in-between games, and keeping my eyes glued to the screen at the exclusion of everything else just to keep our flag carrier alive for a couple more seconds.

And the sad thing is, I don't even know why. Out of all the parts of WoW that I believe lost some of their appeal over time, raiding would probably be dead last. Yeah, personally I would have preferred tens and twenty-five-mans to remain separate, but Blizzard still makes some great encounters regardless. Yet somehow... something is missing. There's a definite feeling of going through the motions to it all - and not just with raiding actually.

Again, looking at those really old blog posts about how I used to spend my time in game... wow! No plans, just messing about. Log on, see if any friends are online, then do something together, even if it's just mucking about in Stranglethorn in some way. Nowadays it's: log on, do some solo activity to progress my character, log off again. I could wait for friends to do something together, but all too often that random dungeon or battleground button is too tempting.

I don't know how much of it is simply due to the game itself changing and how much is me, but it's certainly food for thought. I'm enjoying the game in its own way still, but while there is no going back in time, I still can't help but wonder whether I couldn't have more fun with it if I managed to return to my roots in at least some aspects. The problem is that it's hard to break established habits, and you can't be a true noob twice. You can't "un-know" what you already know about the game, such as all the rewards you're missing out on by choosing a less focused approach. But can you still try?

Random Firelands Dailies Thoughts

2011-07-23T00:07:00.007+02:00

So how is everyone doing with the new Firelands dailies? I have a couple of guildies who've been doing them religiously and have by now unlocked the second vendor or so; I'm not sure as I haven't quite been keeping up myself. I was trying to originally, but I prefer to team up with my boyfriend who doesn't feel like doing them every day, and once I realised that acquiring more marks of the world tree on my own would only cause us to get out of sync I gave up on it.

I quite like the dailies in Mount Hyjal, they are fun and reasonably varied. Sethria's Roost is becoming a bit of a social hangout as people like to team up and take out the mobs there together, seeing how the credit gets shared automatically and everyone gets their quests done more quickly that way. I found that with all the helpful NPCs that you get, you can actually solo the elites quite easily even as a healer, but it's slow and certain abilities can get quite annoying if your class/spec doesn't have any good means of countering them (for example an interrupt to prevent the Seething Pyrelords from putting their reflective shields up).

I do kind of wonder where all those NPC druids come from. Weren't druids supposed to be semi-rare once upon a time? Now there seem to be four of them for every player regardless of class... Also, I can't decide whether the random named NPCs that show up to help you are simply funny or bordering on ridiculous. They make funny quips while fighting, but I can't help but find it slightly weird that Mog'dorg the Wizened for example has come all the way from Blade's Edge Mountains just to help me with my dailies. People like Budd or the paladins from Eastern Plaguelands make sense to me, but... Chromie? I thought you'd be better than having to do dailies like some random schmuck!

I'm a bit undecided about the Molten Front itself. I've enjoyed watching the tree grow (the "personal phasing" works quite well as far as I'm concerned), and I like that the initial set of dailies are all very forgiving towards people who may not be very well-geared or questing in a non-dps spec. There are so many NPCs around and fighting that it's easy to pick and choose your battles even when it's busy. I think Burn Victims is also the first daily in the history of ever where being a healer actually gives you a slight advantage! On the other hand, the quests are fairly repetitive, with every day consisting of the same round of mob-killing and clicking on some sparklies on the ground. I don't mind plain old kill quests at all if I can construct my own story around them, but if they are supposed to be part of an epic pre-made story of how I single-handedly conquer the Firelands by doing daily quests (or something) then I expect a bit more.

The quests for the Shadow Wardens and the Druids of the Talon are a bit more challenging in terms of mob density and respawns; I wouldn't want to be caught out there on my own or I'd get mauled pretty quickly. I also find it a bit annoying that you have to do the first round of Molten Front dailies every day to be able to access the other two factions; it would be nice if you could simply pick and choose once you've unlocked them the first time.

How does the Forlorn Spire keep getting rebuilt every day anyway? This really strikes me as one of the worse quests to make a daily out of. I can't help but picture a bunch of Sons of Ragnaros or imps slaving away, doing nothing but rebuild that spire, day after day, and sighing in exasperation when those bloody druids tear it down yet again.

Druids of the Flame possibly have the most annoying mob sound effects ever. Every time I kill one, it feels as if I'm facing off against a miniature Sindragosa, and there are quite a lot of them... /twitch.

Enduring the Heat seriously traumatised me the first time I did it. Now that I know how to do it it's stupidly easy, but the first time I just kept wondering WTF was going on since I could hardly see anything for all the fire elementals piling on my head, fell into the lava and then struggled for ages to climb back out again.

Falling off Fireplume Peak and getting rescued by a druid who dumps you in a random place is fun exactly... once. Then you just want to be able to get on with it.

I've only had a brief look at what I'm working towards next, but talking to the lady standing next to the empty moonwell really made me thoughtful. From the way she talks about it, filling up the moonwell would have been a perfect excuse for a daily quest, transporting a bit of water through the portal every day, and maybe working some kind of enchantment to prevent it from evaporating. Instead, we are tasked with gathering some arbitrary currency, and once we pay her the right amount of marks, it'll all happen on its own. Somehow this doesn't feel very adventurer-like. Instead of actually doing the thing I want to do (fill up the moonwell), I "work" by killing mobs to earn enough currency to let someone else do it. Reminds me a lot of the "running heroics to get raid gear" debate.

Looking at the big picture, I'm also still undecided on how I feel about the system of daily tokens slowly unlocking new vendors that sell things for gold, instead of the vendors opening up fairly quickly and the player having to grind out tokens to buy their wares, as it was done at pretty much all previous daily quest hubs. I don't like that the current method encourages reading up outside the game quite so heavily. In-game you have no way of knowing which future vendor will actually sell something that you'll want, so if you just play and pick whatever you like the sound of, you may end up getting very disappointed and feeling like you wasted a lot of hours of token-grinding. (EDIT: As commenters have pointed out, you can in fact see the vendors' wares before unlocking them. Hooray!) On the other hand it feels less demanding, as there is a clear end in sight - unlocking all the vendors - whereas acquiring tokens as currency often left you feeling like you always needed more because there were just so many things to buy.

Bad in Blackrock

2011-07-16T23:33:00.006+02:00

I continue to be amazed at the current state of pugs for the old heroics. I honestly couldn't make up things as bizarre as the behaviour that some players display there. Good thing I was on my hunter on Friday night, feeling relatively unaffected by other people's failures, and in one of those moods where I was able to detach myself emotionally and just laugh at the whole situation from a distance.

Basically, I had queued up for an old random heroic because I didn't just want to run Zuls and nothing else, and because my hunter still has an old trinket for which about three possible drops in the old heroics would serve as good replacements. I ended up in Blackrock Caverns with a druid tank, accompanied by a priest healer from his guild, a mage and a dps warrior who did over 20k dps on the first pull. Clearly he was an experienced valour point farmer who was also aching for a bit of variety. He would soon regret it.

My spider sense started tingling as soon as the tank decided to pull the first boss with the vast majority of the trash in the room still alive. When I'd seen people try the same thing in the past, he had always called for help and pulled everything nearby into the fight regardless. This time however he didn't, the druid pulled the boss back into the tunnel and I thought "oh well, I guess it works after all". Then the boss suddenly turned around, ran back into the middle of the room to cast his chain spell, and landed us all smack in the middle of three different trash pulls. Mayhem ensued and we wiped.

The druid apologised, we chucked it up to the learning experience and ran back. This time we cleared the room beforehand and killed the boss without any further problems.

On Corla, the druid launched into a lengthy explanation of the fight even though nobody had asked for one and at least one person had asked to just pull already. He also explained it wrong, claiming that the transformation happened at 80 stacks, which we corrected him about. Eventually we started the fight, and the mage messed up despite of the explanation, causing us to wipe again. He apologised though and promised that he'd do it right next time. So he did. I took note of the warrior interrupting all of Corla's fear like clockwork.

When we approached Karsh Steelbender, the druid asked for tactics, claiming that he had never done this boss before. After his elaborate explanation of Corla, this didn't strike me as a very good sign. I misdirected the fire elementals on him when they were on the far side of the boss and explained the strategy. "Oh, I remember! I have done this before!" he exclaimed all of a sudden... and proceeded to pull the boss and just tank him next to the pillar. After a while the warrior ran to the other side and taunted the boss briefly to pull him through and melt his armour. After that the druid seemed to get the idea, though he still moved the boss in a fairly messy manner. We got add spawns several times, but the warrior just soloed them and they appeared to have been stealth-nerfed to not leave lava puddles upon death anymore, which made them a complete non-issue. Anyway, the boss died.

Up to this point I hadn't really considered the run bad. A bit bumpy perhaps, with the better players having to compensate for the worse ones, but that's not at all unusual in a pug. However, things were going to get a lot more interesting still. I foolishly hoped that I would be able to watch Castle in a few minutes, seeing how the last boss was just around the corner... oh, how wrong I was going to be.

We killed the elemental patrol and snuck past the first trash pack on the side by running along the wall. Then the druid asked me to trap the closest mob belonging to the second pack, so that we could "run past it". I probably should have known that this wasn't going to be a good idea, considering the druid's earlier displays of expertise, but with 4.2's crowd control changes, who knew? So I did as he asked, we walked past and I feigned for good measure. Then he pulled Beauty. The trap ran out and the entire mob pack joined the fight, causing us to wipe.

On second thought I realised that I had had a similar wipe to this one in Zul'Aman before, on a different character. I think it's highly ironic that a change that was introduced to make pugging less painful has ended up adding another way for people to wipe stupidly, though I guess I can't blame the players entirely for this one. After all it's very unintuitive for CC not to cause aggro when you cast it, but then cause aggro when it runs out. Sap doesn't do that, and people think that everything works exactly like sap now. Let this be a public service announcement that this is not the case.

Anyway, the funny thing is, the druid didn't even notice. While running back he just talked about how he was confused by the fact that the pups and Beauty aggroed all at once, and when I brought up the trash mobs joining in he was just bewildered. This is when the warrior decided to throw in the towel and left. Then the healer, who was the druid's friend, dropped as well. "Sorry guys," the druid said, "but my healer friend wants to do ZA/ZG so I'm going to leave too." I think I laughed out loud at the screen. If you can't even make it through BRC, you're not doing anyone a favour by queuing for a Zulroic instead.

The mage and I made it back to the trash pull in question and requeued. After about a minute we got a new druid tank in heroic tier eleven gear, another priest healer and a shadow priest. "Oh good," I thought, "this should be finished quickly then". We finished killing the trash. As I tried to move on, I noticed that I was taking damage because the healer hadn't bothered to dispel the shadow prison debuff, so I stopped and waited for it to wear off. Our tank didn't and kept running until he fell over and died at the entrance to Beauty's lair. /facepalm. Once again, heroic raid gear is no indicator of anything.

Meanwhile, the healer asked the mage to create a table. The mage told him that he didn't have reagents on him. The healer ignored this response and kept repeating his request, adding a swear here and there for good measure. The mage finally got him to acknowledge his response by repeating it in all caps. I think they tried to manually trade a stack of food after that, but the mage claimed that it didn't work. Eventually the priest just said "fine" and ported out to fetch some of his own drinks.

The rest of us sat around and waited. Finally the healer ported back into the instance and said "ok go", no less than three times - while he was still at the instance entrance. The tank didn't pay attention to the priest's actual location and just took him by his word. Of course we wiped with no heals. "I didn't mean go right now," the priest snarked in an exasperated tone. What the hell did he mean then? Who says "gogogo" when they don't actually want the tank to pull?

We ran back in and gathered up once again. Except... we were still missing our healer. He was dawdling around somewhere in the middle of the instance, claiming to be lost and demanding that someone should come and fetch him, though as soon as someone started moving he said that he had finally found his way.

When he arrived, we finally got to kill Beauty, though it was awkward and took ages. The druid didn't want any CC and just tanked everything, but nobody but me bothered to dps the adds. When I noticed this I eventually switched to Beauty as well, since me staying on the pups on my own wasn't going to achieve anything. Afterwards the healer chided us for having bad dps, saying that we really needed to pick up our game even if his healing was "grate" [sic].

On the next pull he then just let the tank die and dropped group mid-combat. Okaaay. Our next healer was a paladin called "Deathlol" (with some accents), which I thought was hilariously appropriate. With him we finally finished the instance. I offered to kite the adds on the last boss even though I wasn't very good at it, but apparently I've improved over time as we got the Ascendant Descening achievement. I also got a new bow, but my tv show was already halfway over by then. Two bosses and three trash pulls really shouldn't take over half an hour, but I guess you can't win them all.

Just Another Day in Tol Barad

2011-07-14T00:41:00.007+02:00

I've fallen in love with Tol Barad recently - not so much the PvP battle, which I join only rarely, but the zone itself (which includes the peninsula). I know, I'm very much behind the times, considering that it's all happening at the Molten Front these days. Nonetheless it was only recently that I realised that Tol Barad is a zone with a certain "old school" charm, reminding me more of what the game used to be like than some of the revamped low-level zones do these days.

For one thing, you can actually die in Tol Barad, and once again I'm not referring to PvP here. Presumably this is already becoming rarer and rarer, what with people having better gear available to them faster than a few months ago, but still... when I first started doing dailies in Tol Barad, I got my little green butt kicked by mobs quite a few times. I was questing in a healing spec, true, but for the better part of Wrath this hadn't been a problem, so it was still a shock to the system for me. Initially I was rather ticked off by this too - it doesn't matter how much I want the game to encourage grouping, when you're used to tackling content on your own and then it unexpectedly knocks you down a peg, that's off-putting. However, as it often goes with these things (for me at least), what frustrates me initially becomes all the more fun once I've mastered it, and this was the case with the Tol Barad dailies as well.

Then there's the fact that it's an outdoor zone where you can't fly. Don't get me wrong, flying mounts are great when you just want to get from one point to the other as quickly as possible, but if you're actually playing out there in the world, there is something to be said for experiencing it from the ground (as I already discovered over a year ago).

Varied terrain makes for great gameplay. Hands up if you've ever got yourself killed trying to ride past a load of densely packed mobs straight towards your quest objective, just to end up getting dismounted and mugged. (Or maybe that's just me...) Ever got caught off-guard by Tank because you couldn't move as fast underwater as he swims? Personally I love levitating off Largo's Overlook. I've also hurled myself off the bridge connecting the two islands and swam around to escape gankers that were trying to prevent people from returning to the peninsula right after a battle. All of these little things would never happen in that form if we could just have our multi-coloured dragons drop us off exactly where we want to be at any time.

Also, you actually get to meet people. With all the portals and teleports and phasing, I don't get to see much of the rest of my server other than whoever happens to be standing next to me when I log on in Orgrimmar. But in Tol Barad, people actually come together to do things other than read their mail, and it increases awareness of (what's left of) the server community. You remember the guild tag of the guy who stepped in to help you take down Problim. You happily wave at the former guildie whom you haven't seen in a long time, and he follows you around to skin the dead crocolisks you leave behind. Nothing invokes a feeling of "the good old days" for me like little interactions like that.

Finally, and this may sound a bit weird, I like Tol Barad because its quests are a little dull. No exciting adventures here, just lots and lots of quests to kill ten spiders/pirates/ghosts and gather eight hides/ghoul bits/rifles. Again, this is very reminiscent of vanilla WoW and makes the zone a great place to quest in if you just want to kill some time pressing your buttons, without having to worry about story, cut scenes, activating the right quest item or any of that fancy stuff. Just kill everything that moves and click on the sparkles.

The lore is also somewhat thin, and I actually find this amusing because it allows people to make up their own stories. As one of my guildies remarked, the quests tend to not really tell you anything about what you are supposed to do and why beyond "these things are in our way, so kill them". What is up with Rustberg Village? Why are we being sent to kill its poor villagers over and over? Every time I go there I just see people trying to build houses and catch some fish, races of the Alliance and the Horde living together in remarkable harmony. Or as one of my guildies put it: "I just see 'suspicious villagers'. I'd be suspicious too if someone kept stealing all my seabass every day!" Are we really the good guys here? /cue ominous music. For some reason little mysteries like that are way more entertaining to me in game than epic cut scenes.

I wonder if the Molten Front dailies will ever invoke similar feelings in me. From what I've seen of it so far, the Firelands look very different.

Point Madness

2011-07-11T18:25:00.005+02:00

I've expressed concerns in the past about the way the badge/point system is developing, and I have to say that the latest patch hasn't really been helping matters in my eyes.

First, there has been the recent debacle of the PvP season ten start. Now, there are several different things that went wrong with this, but let me briefly sum up the point that I consider the most annoying, in terms that someone who only ever plays PvE would understand. Imagine you've spent the last couple of months raiding and are now in full ilevel 359 gear or higher. Then Firelands comes out... and along with it, Blizzard releases a new tier of justice point vendor gear that is six ilevels higher than anything you're wearing, while telling you that this is what they intend you to wear before starting in Firelands. Would you relish the thought of grinding out over 22k justice points in five-mans before getting back to raiding? No? Well, this is pretty close to what happened to PvPers in the past week.

I'm currently feeling a little bit of trepidation when thinking about my first night of rated battlegrounds coming up tomorrow. I thought I was ready for the new season after having worked my way up towards a full set of gear in the previous one, but thanks to the aforementioned change every single piece of my gear is now worse than what's available from random battlegrounds at the moment. I really don't want to let my team down... but I honestly also don't have the stomach to grind out over 22k honour in randoms. All I can hope for is that more people feel the way I do and that we won't just be steamrolled by teams who've got all the new gear already. But it's a downer for sure.

All is not rosy in PvE either however. I read an interesting post at Kurn's Corner today, and while I won't go into detail about which parts of it I agree and disagree with, I did come away from it with a lot of interesting bits of information. For example I hadn't even done the maths to realise that killing all of tier twelve on ten-man normal mode would still give me less valour than doing random heroics. That's just depressing. Likewise I hadn't been aware that three out of the five new tier pieces will be available from vendors only, and aren't even included in the loot tables of any Firelands bosses. Again, I find that pretty sad considering that tier sets used to be the iconic pieces of raid loot. Now we won't even have the option of collecting our tier exclusively from boss drops. Kurn eventually concludes that boss loot isn't all that anymore, and that it's all in the valour points, which are easier to get via five-mans than via raiding. I do think that's kind of messed up.

This then leads to the inevitable idea that raiders have to farm five-mans to continue raiding. I have a couple of guildies who have been doing their seven Zuls a week since the patch, but personally I just shudder at the idea. I like doing five-mans, but not in a seven-days-a-week-and-for-months-on-end kind of way. In fact I dare say that my refusal to farm instances like crazy is part of why I still like them. I can't imagine that many players could keep up that kind of play style without eventually burning out on the content. I do feel sorry for people who feel that they have to play like that to be competitive, but personally I'll be quite happy to not be competitive in this case.

Aside from the issue of simply overdoing it, I reckon that right now is also a bad time for enjoyable randoms in general. I always have the best runs when the rewards have lost some of their shine already and people only really go back because they like dungeons. Grumpy made an impressive post the other day about just how bad some pugs can be right now and I've had similar experiences.

The first time I decided to brave a random heroic since the patch I did so on my shaman. I got heroic Stonecore, no biggie. The first pull went atrociously though; the tank didn't have aggro on half the mobs, nobody interrupted anything and there were some deaths as I frantically struggled to keep people alive through the madness. Afterwards more than one person (three of them were from the same server, I think they must have been buddies) immediately started to insult me, calling me a terrible healer and an idiot. Now sometimes rudeness like that can get to me, but in that case it was just so utterly ridiculous that I could only laugh. I said that there was only so much any healer could do if there was no control on the pull and that they could kick me if they wanted to. Of course they couldn't, because people like that already lost their vote-kick privileges aeons ago. The dps paladin respecced to holy to back up my oh-so-terrible healing and we continued with two healers. People still died! We even wiped once, with two healers doing overtime, because it was just that bad. I mostly hung around to see whether the other two would make any more smartass comments now that their mate couldn't keep them up either, but everyone was quiet. On Corborus we wiped even faster than I expected, as the tank barely even had aggro half the time and nobody dpsed the crystal shard adds so they blew up in everyone's face. At this point the other party member who wasn't part of the amazing trio left, and I followed his example - no deserter debuff and my cooldown was up so could requeue right away. Still, that must have been the worst group I've had since the Cataclysm hit, and that's saying something. Beware!

Anyway, where was I? Yes, valour points. You don't want to go crazy grinding them because you'll burn yourself out, you're putting yourself at an exceptionally high risk of getting grouped with rude and stupid puggers right now, and also... have you thought about 4.3 yet? There have been no news about that patch yet, but I reckon that it's going to be at least another six months away. Now, I did some maths and if I were to buy every single valour item that's useful to my main (that's assuming that no boss will ever drop any viable alternative for that slot), I'd need 9800 valour points, which is as much as you would have after grinding to the weekly cap ten weeks in a row. If you really did reach the cap every single week... this would then leave you with over three months of valour points going to waste (as a raider you'd still get some from boss kills after all). Does that really sound that appealing? I know it doesn't to me.

Firelands was designed to be beaten in tier eleven gear. Bringing my best to the raid, to me as a relatively casual raider, doesn't mean having to outgear the place from the start. There's nothing wrong with maxing out your valour points if you really enjoy it of course, but if it just feels like an annoying grind to you - remind yourself that you're in this to have fun. The Firelands bosses won't get any stronger in the time it takes you to gear up more slowly.

Which brings this back to the PvP note at the start of this post - I feel worse for the PvPers, because if you decide to say "screw the crazy grind" as a PvPer, there's still a chance that you'll run into opponents who have done it and who will hurt you all the more for having taken your time.

Miss Medicina's healing questionnaire revisited

2011-07-06T15:43:00.004+02:00

Remember Miss Medicina's healing questionnaire from about two years ago? No? Well, either way, Saunder from Non-Squishy Heals would like to revive it, and he asked me to fill it in as well. Why not, I thought, the game has changed quite a bit since then and it should be interesting to see whether my answers to the questions have changed as well compared to last time. So, without further ado:

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Shintar, holy priest.

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
With Shintar I mainly heal ten-man raids these days. Once a week I also do rated battlegrounds, and with 4.2's new valour items I might be coaxed into healing the occasional five-man as well, but generally I'm not keen on doing five-mans on my raiding character.

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
I'm really fond of the different holy words associated with Chakra. The instant heal on a short cooldown from Holy Word: Serenity is just awesome and I wouldn't want to have to do without it anymore, and the glowy floor caused by Holy Word: Sanctuary - while situational - is both visually impressive and fun to place. Also, they do feel kind of special for not being available to me at all times.

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Desperate Prayer. I actually specced into it for PvP but I've got it on some really convoluted keybinding that I can never remember when I would need it the most. Holy Nova is still not very useful as an actual healing tool, but it does a decent job at interrupting flag caps in PvP. That said, I have to say that Blizzard has done a really great job at making all the other healing spells viable for holy in some way or another this expansion, even after they added no less than three new ones. Body and Soul gives me a reason to cast the occasional shield even as holy, and even Lightwell has finally gained some acceptance. That's pretty damn impressive in my opinion.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
That we have lots of fun spells to play with and can produce a considerable amount of burst AoE healing.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
I may be imagining it, but I've got a vague feeling that we're starting to fall behind a bit in terms of mana regen. I healed a Zul'Aman run the other day and was running low after nearly every single trash pull. I'm fully raid geared, that really shouldn't be happening in a five-man! Maybe it was just that particular group, but I'm not sure. It seems to me that in raids the other healers also always have more mana left at the end of a fight than me.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I don't really know, as I haven't set foot in a 25-man in over a year! I would guess that holy priests still shine as raid healers.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
I find this one hard to answer because our current raid healing roster is pretty much all priests, all the time, so I haven't had much interaction with other healing classes in a while. I'm not sure if PvP counts, but I love it when a paladin has my back there, because I know they'll keep me up if I get focused. Then again, a lot of this is also about trust and mutual understanding between players, regardless of which class they play.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
See above. Though I have the vague feeling that druids are lagging behind a bit in terms of dealing with burst damage, and there seems to more of that than of regular AoE, which always makes me worry that if my own heal doesn't land in time, the druid's HoTs won't be able to keep up.

What is your worst habit as a healer?
I think my worst healing habit these days is being lazy about theorycraft and optimisation. I'm not sure how much of that is truly related to healing and how much is simply me getting tired of classes getting changed back and forth every couple of months (what, Holy Shield is an activated ability again? Come on) and me having to relearn everything, but the fact that healing is only ever about being "good enough" has certainly amplified it. Healing more can only ever go so far in making an encounter go more smoothly, because you can only heal as much damage as is being taken, so trying to optimise beyond that feels kind of pointless.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
This is still the same as two years ago: people being completely oblivious to what the healers are doing and just assuming that it's all easy. This includes things such as tanks never using any cooldowns and then wondering why they went splat, or people commenting that "healing is easy on this fight, right" while the entire raid gets drowned in waves of AoE. I don't expect praise for my job all the time, but some kind of acknowledgement that health bars don't keep themselves up and that someone does in fact have to work at keeping everyone alive would be nice every now and then.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yes. PvE healing strikes me as quite balanced at this time. That said, I'm actually miffed now that holy is the only healing spec that is not PvP viable (not that this prevents me from playing it anyway, but you know what I mean). I didn't mind while disc was only good for PvP and holy was only good for PvE, but now that discipline works for both I don't know why holy couldn't receive the same treatment.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
Whether people live, and numbers on Recount to see whether I carried my weight compared to the other healers. We don't bother with detailed combat logs anymore since nobody can be arsed to record and upload them.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
That holy is uncool because it doesn't focus on shiny bubbles.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
WTF do all these spells do? Chakra, what?

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
Without meaning to blow my own horn, I always have pretty high output with pretty low overheal. What I find more interesting these days however is just how many spells I use. On an average encounter I'll easily have a dozen different sources of healing, and with a pretty wide spread as well. This goes with what I said earlier about all holy priest spells being useful for something these days, and I take pride in being able to find the right niche for each spell.

Haste or Crit and why?
Crit is still crap for priests these days, despite of the recent buff to critical heal size, so it's no contest.

What healing class do you feel you understand least?
I have a level eighty-five of each healing class now, but the one I understand the least these days is definitely the paladin. With the dungeon finder queues and Call to Arms it's very tempting to run my own pally as a tank at all times, so I've hardly done any healing on her since 4.0. Paladins also used to make great healing alts because of how simple and straightforward they used to be, but these days there's holy power and a gazillion different procs, so whenever I do give healing on my paladin a try I just flail around a lot, unsure of what the hell I'm doing. This is not a criticism of the class at all by the way, I'm just saying that they need more dedication and time investment to be played correctly these days and I don't have that at the moment.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Healbot 4 life! Don't need anything else.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
Well, intellect is king for all healers these days, including holy priests. Spirit is the next big thing, and after that it's down to haste vs. mastery. I prefer haste and gem for it because I can feel the results of it more than I can extra mastery, which only really shows up on Recount as more healing done without any input from me. Still, the only things I reforge are crit (go away) or anything into spirit if the item doesn't already have spirit on it.

Now, Saunder also asked me to pass on the questionnaire love, preferably to people who play a different class than me, so I'm going to tag Vidyala, since she's back to being a holy paladin full time, and The Grumpy Elf - while he's mainly a hunter, he's been complaining about spending too much time healing as of late, so I'm sure he's got some insights about (shaman) healing to share.

The Day Tier 11 Died

2011-07-03T23:58:00.007+02:00

Tonight was my guild's first foray into tier 11 content since the patch. We had saved our old raid IDs that only had Al'Akir and Nefarian left alive, as those were the only two bosses that we hadn't managed to kill before the nerf. Al'Akir was a two-shot, to many exclamations of incredulity and some maniacal giggling from our guild leader. Before the patch, we had still been working on perfecting our phase two execution, though we had seen phase three a couple of times. A lot of the time the soft enrage caused by stacking Acid Rain had wiped us, when it got up to about sixteen stacks and was doing 8k damage per second to the entire raid. After the nerf, it doesn't stack anymore. At all. Sometimes it even dropped off completely. I felt completely superfluous as a healer, and was mostly standing around and twiddling my thumbs in-between the occasional Circle of Healing. That is not what I call a twenty percent nerf, Blizzard.

After our Al'Akir kill, we went down to Blackwing Descent to kill Nefarian. Unlike Al'Akir, we had never even attempted him before the patch, which I suspect helped my enjoyment of the fight a lot, since I didn't have a frame of reference for how things should have been, only a vague idea that a lot of small mistakes that people made and that were easily fixed with an extra heal here or there probably would have wiped the raid before the nerf. However, I couldn't know for sure. Also, because we were completely new to the fight, there were tactics to learn regardless, which was reasonably entertaining. Still, by the end of the night, Nef was dead as well. Everyone was quite happy to earn a new achievement, mount and title - including me - even if we were late to the party. Now we'll just try to get a couple more kills for the raiders who couldn't make it tonight, but otherwise we're completely free to focus on Firelands.

When the news about the big nerf to tier 11 in patch 4.2 came out a little over a month ago, I didn't make a post about it. Not because I didn't have an opinion about it, but because I felt that I had already expressed it well enough in a comment on this editorial at the MMO Melting Pot. (All the comments seem to have disappeared since then, but oh well.) Basically I was agreeing with Rebecca that the nerf wasn't a very good idea, as I still remembered the last time the devs implemented a raid nerf of such scale: patch 3.0.

Back then my guild was working its way through Black Temple and had just killed Mother Shahraz. After the patch we blew through the remaining Illidari Council in one or two nights and killed Illidan shortly afterwards. I remember healing through some insane AoE damage on the latter fight and thinking, "No way we can be doing this right, before the patch that would have wiped us three times over." In the end I was always left with a vague feeling of embarrassment in regards to finishing off that tier, because it just didn't feel like we had really earned it. To this day I always talk about how we made it up to Mother Shahraz in Black Temple, because anything that came afterwards didn't really count and just left me feeling empty.

I was worried that this would happen again with the tier 11 nerfs, and I think I was at least partially right. Killing Nefarian was still elating, because as I said we were all lacking a frame of reference, but I doubt that it will be a very memorable kill in the long run. Downing a boss after less than ten attempts simply doesn't make for a grand tale to tell the newbies about. Al'Akir was a complete downer for me though. The fact that the one mechanic that had made phase two interesting as a healer was culled completely and left me feeling unnecessary was depressing, and after all the work we had done to improve our performance before the patch, the actual kill felt like it took less effort than many of our previous wipes. Thank you, Blizzard, for reminding me once again how pointless it can be to even try in this game.

There was one positive side to the whole ordeal that I hadn't considered though: it allowed us to make our peace with tier 11 quickly and move on. In previous years we often suffered from internal disagreements about which bosses to prioritise if a new patch opened up better loot for less effort. Why "waste time" on Kael'thas if we could progress through Mount Hyjal and Black Temple instead? Why spend any more time in Ulduar and wipe on Yogg-Saron if Trial of the Crusader and the bloody daily heroic gave us better gear anyway? At least tier 11 is not presenting us with such a choice. (Going back for that one night hardly counts.)

This makes the situation somewhat different from 3.0 after all, because back then it was the end of the expansion and everything getting nerfed into stupidity was like a big "game over" sign. There was nowhere else to go. Now on the other hand we have the Firelands to dig our teeth into, and I'm actually looking forward to it. Let the trade pugs have fun in tier 11 if that's what the devs want. (One of my fellow raiders said that he cleared Bastion of Twilight on an alt in under an hour and that there were no wipes despite of lots of fails.)

Of course, we'll see what things look like in a few months. If we've killed Ragnaros by then and are only left with boring heroic modes, I might still find myself wishing that Blizzard had allowed us to finish tier 11 on our own time instead.

4.2 - First Impressions

2011-06-30T00:37:00.007+02:00

For some reason I always seem to come up with a whole lot of post ideas shortly before a major patch comes out, but then once the patch actually hits I can't think about anything but the new content and end up discarding them. So, to immediately get it out of my system, my initial thoughts on 4.2: (Don't read on if you're concerned about quest spoilers.)

I wonder how many people besides me immediately stopped at the character selection screen and started shuffling. Being able to change the order of your characters is one of those small quality of life changes that just feels like it's been overdue forever. I don't care about visually preserving the order in which I created my characters, I just want the ones I play more often to be on top, damn it! I was very happy to finally be able to do that.

Not everything in the new patch is for max-level characters only. One of my guildies immediately found this little gem for level tens and up for example, which rewards you with a balloon that counts as a non-combat pet and has a rather amusing ending if you hang around to watch after handing in the quest.

Probably not a patch feature, but my guildies only discovered today that doing Ahune in a guild group counts as a full dungeon run for the purposes of the weekly guild challenge. We swapped alts in and out to get goodie bags for all of them and earned over a million guild experience in about ten minutes. I'm not sure that's working as intended, but if it is that's a handy way of racking up the XP in a short amount of time.

Starting work on the new dailies in Hyjal didn't feel very exciting, but I guess it simply takes some time until you get to unlock more. We'll see what things will look like in a few weeks. For now, I don't consider it a problem.

Now, the Thrall quest line was a lot more interesting. I was surprised to see Nozdormu in humanoid form for the first time and immediately decided that he must be evil. Don't get me wrong...

... he looks pretty badass for a ~~man~~ ~~elf~~ dragon, but... he's got a goatee. An evil goatee. He clearly can't be up to anything good.

During the initial cinematic I couldn't help but giggle at Malfurion's reaction to the intruders basically being, "I cast roots on all of them!" Sorry mate, but I can see why Staghelm had trouble taking you seriously there.

The following quest takes you all over the world, to Uldum, Vashj'ir, Deepholm and the Firelands, which would feel quite epic except that Aggra magically teleports you everywhere. I really felt rather torn about this. Part of me was definitely glad that I didn't have to manually go to all those different places just for one quest, but on the other hand I didn't really feel as if I was going anywhere. That's the eternal dilemma with features like this, isn't it?

Blizzard's new phasing-but-not-quite worked very well in my opinion, as you could see all the other players around you and it felt busy, but the NPCs still changed for you personally, depending on which part of the quest you were on. I also thought that the mechanics of the elemental fighting quests were very well suited for the patch day crowds, as mob tagging wasn't really an issue and your "kill credit bar" or whatever you want to call it kept building up as long as you did at least some damage to some mobs. I can imagine it feeling a bit slow though if you end up doing it later when there aren't as many people around.

The only thing that really caused me any grief were other players, as lots of Alliance on my server decided to turn their PvP flag on, and as the elementals were dying in seconds and everyone was maniacally fighting to get a hit in, it was way too easy to hit another player by accident and get flagged without meaning to. I accidentally hit a draenei death knight with a smite during the Firelands portion of the chain myself, which promptly caused him to come over and gank me, so I lost my entire quest progression of what felt like several dozen kills (the bar resets if you die) and then had to take an enforced break of five minutes while waiting for my flag to wear off. Yeah, that wasn't that much fun. When I did the chain on my hunter, my pet randomly decided to go after an Ally as well, without any direction from me, and got me flagged this way, though I managed to escape death that time. It was still annoying. I guess one person's fun world PvP is another one's obstacle.

Also, was I the only one who wondered about Aggra's totems during the Firelands part of the chain? Where the hell does she keep totems that are twice as tall as a tauren? It's funny how some NPCs and items in WoW have increased in size over the years, for no apparent reason other than to make them more obviously visible to players. Most of the time I don't even think about it anymore and just accept that Tirion Fordring is a giant for example, but those totems gave me pause for some reason.

The entire quest chain gives Thrall some interesting characterisation in my opinion, as you basically find out about his most secret thoughts about a lot of issues. A lot of it wasn't exactly unexpected, but I was actually pleasantly surprised to hear that he's had doubts about Garrosh messing up the Horde as well.

And Aggra... well, I'm kind of in two minds about her. I haven't read The Shattering yet so I don't know how she gets introduced, but looking only at the game, she's basically this complete nobody that very obviously only gets shoved into our faces to be Thrall's love interest. I didn't mind her at first, but her new 4.2 voice really grated on my nerves, as it sounded unnecessarily sultry, whiny and somehow entirely un-orcish to me for some reason. On the other hand she's kind of cool, and manages to display some character even while under duress, occasionally snarking at Thrall even while she desperately fears for his life.

The only thing I didn't get was why the big ritual for which we were called to Hyjal in the first place wasn't completed after we saved Thrall. I thought it was supposed to be important?

The quest reward cloak you get at the end is very nice, though I couldn't help but feel like there was suddenly a certain cloak overload going on. Epic cloaks for justice points, cloaks from Ahune, cloaks from this quest, and did you see the first rep reward from the Avengers of Hyjal? Yep, more cloaks.

Speaking of the Avengers of Hyjal, in the evening my guild had its first Firelands raid. I took one step inside and immediately felt like I had ended up in Molten Core 2.0, with the only major difference being that it's open to the sky. But otherwise it's all there: flamewalkers, core hounds, molten giants - lots and lots and lots of them. I guess it's been a while since we last had a raid instance with silly amounts of trash, so fair enough. What with it being our first time, we didn't mind that much anyway because it was all new and amusing to find out about the mobs' different abilities, such as little turtles punting the tanks halfway across the instance.

Our raid leader decided that we should start off with Shannox, aka the guy whose face they pasted onto the tier twelve hunter helm. He doesn't actually appear until you've killed a certain minimum amount of trash, and then he keeps patrolling the entire zone, with each round taking about four minutes. This certainly made for a very different kind of boss fight, as we basically waited in the area that we had cleared out for the fight every time, discussing tactics until he came around again, and then everyone scrambled frantically to be ready immediately while the tanks had to make a good run for it to catch him in time since he moves quite fast. I can foresee a lot of whining about that on the forums and wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard ended up changing it. I think it would be a shame though, because while my first reaction was to find it quite annoying, it also feels a lot more dynamic. Why should all bosses just stand around, waiting for us to kill them?

We didn't make much progress on the fight, but considering that there are only seven bosses in there, I would have been disappointed anyway if the first one had fallen over immediately, on our first night of attempts.

A Halls of Origination story

2011-06-28T02:20:00.000+02:00

I just noticed that almost all of my posts this month have been of the more thoughtful variety, so I think it's about time to have a plain old pug story.

This morning I decided to queue up to tank a random heroic on my paladin since the Call to Arms for tanks was up. I know others have ranted about how much of a failure that system is, but on my server at least it's actually been working better than I expected, so that half of the time CtA isn't even active because the queues are short enough already. I was hoping to get Grim Batol so I could finally complete my Cataclysm Dungeon Hero achievement, but ended up in Halls of Origination instead. Oh well!

I immediately noticed that there was another Earthen Ringer in my group, a warlock called Spiffy (that wasn't actually his name, but it was something similar) who had in fact also been in my Ahune group only about five minutes ago. "Hello again, Spiffy!" I said happily, though I got no response.

Actually, let me go off on a tangent here right away, in regards to the changes to the dungeon finder that are supposed to make it more likely for you to get grouped with people from your own server. Personally I haven't seen it make much of a difference, but then Earthen Ring isn't exactly a high population server these days. Only when I'm tanking or healing do I occasionally get grouped with a dps from my home server, presumably because there's a pretty large pool of them to draw from.

However, what's been more interesting to me is who I don't get grouped with as often. I used to get grouped with people from Stormscale all the damn time for example, and they didn't have the best reputation. They practically seemed to own the dungeon finder in my battlegroup. Lately however I've hardly seen any trace of them - presumably they all get grouped with each other. I'm not sure whether that's actually made a difference to the quality of my pugs, but it does feel to me as if players from the smaller servers tend to be a bit more laid back.

Anyway, back to Halls of Origination. Zinn wrote a nice guide the other day on how to handle the first trash pull in there, and I completely managed to mess it up. Mobs were all over the place, but thankfully the rogue had been clever enough to sap one of them, which limited the ensuing chaos at least a little. Oh well. We progressed reasonably smoothly anyway, and killed the first boss without any problems.

At one point during the trash Spiffy lagged behind for a bit, and explained afterwards that he had been disconnected for a minute. The same thing had happened to him on Ahune earlier and almost left us with too little dps to avoid a third add phase, but he came back in time and it was fine, so I shrugged it off in this case as well. However, one of the other dpsers made a comment about wanting to kick him once their cooldown was up. I said nothing, but when the vote actually came up I voted no and it failed. Spiffy seemed a bit flustered, apologising for his connection problems and offering to leave if people wanted him gone. I told him that no, it was all right, and nobody argued. Sometimes it's good to be The Tank.

To go off on another tangent... kicking someone for disconnecting once on trash? Really? People really ought to put some more thought into these things. No wonder that there are so many complaints on the forums about the vote-kick cooldown being too long. I don't even have a cooldown, and I've never had a problem getting rid of someone who acted like a douche. I've even kicked multiple people in quick succession if they were a problem. However, fact of the matter is that in the vast majority of runs, I have no reason to kick anyone. Someone disconnecting briefly is not a reason. The system is working fine. If you've got a two hour cooldown on your vote-kick function, the problem is you. End rant.

Back to Halls of Origination, again! As we moved up to the elevator, I asked whether anyone wanted to do any of the optional bosses but didn't get a single answer. One could consider that rude, but I prefer to think that people were simply stunned into silence by a pug tank actually asking for their opinions. I told them that I took their silence as a no and made straight for the Vault of Lights.

On the trash pull in the hallway leading up to it I borked up once again and faceplanted, as the healer couldn't keep me up through the crazy damage I was taking. I immediately apologised, assured him that it wasn't his fault and told everyone else that they were doing a great job finishing off the rest of the mobs without me. I guess it's very obvious that I'm mainly a healer.

I was slightly worried about Spiffy disconnecting in the Vault of Lights and getting eaten by troggs, but nothing of the like happened. In fact, I don't think he disconnected again for the entire rest of the run. We killed Anraphret without any problems and finished with Rajh. I didn't actually look at Recount, but the dps seemed pretty low, considering that the latter went through two of his AoE phases before dying, while some groups can kill him before he even finishes the first. No matter, it was good enough.

Now, some people drop group as soon as they get the dungeon complete message and don't even wait for the loot rolls to finish, but I tend to hang around a bit for no real reason other than that I want to still be there in case anything unusual happens. Also, for some reason I don't like being the first person to leave - it's as if I need confirmation from someone else that we're truly done.

In this case this turned out to be a good thing, as I noticed that nobody else was leaving either and people started to move down the stairs back towards the centre of the floor. "Let's do the optional bosses!" someone suggested and I quietly shook my hands at my monitor in exasperation. Why did nobody say anything when I asked about this exact thing earlier? But hey, my offer still stood, so we ended up going back to do most of the instance after having officially completed the instance. Not something you do every day!

I half expected someone to drop out and leave us stranded and unable to replace them, but nobody did. It was only then that I noticed that the three people who weren't me or Spiffy were all from the same server and guild, which explained why they were so happy to stick together. How did I make it through the whole run without noticing that? For shame. At least it explained how my single vote had been enough to prevent Spiffy from being kicked.

Doing the optional bosses in Halls of Origination is always quite funny in my opinion, because you pretty much inevitably end up with someone who's way overgeared for the place but has no clue about the boss fights because they've only ever gone straight for Rajh. Setesh is and was very good in this regard, as I saw the feral druid clumsily going after the adds instead of attacking the boss for example. Again dps was low and my game was starting to lag from all the adds I was tanking but eventually he died after all and I laughed with relief.

They were even happy to go back downstairs and kill Ptah, as I had noticed that I didn't have the camel achievement on my pally. Of course then I ended up losing my camel just before the boss died, but such is life.

Overall this was one of those runs that made me feel really good. What friction there was ended up being resolved amiably, and the fact that the entire party happily stuck together to clear out the rest of the instance after Rajh was one of those things that always gives me hope that at least some WoW players still care about other things than simply getting the optimal amount of badges per minute.

I'm grateful for rated battlegrounds

2011-06-27T16:55:00.003+02:00

Rated battlegrounds have been getting some bad press lately: Gevlon advises you to quickly throw the match whenever you encounter a far superior opponent - which will happen a lot due to various problems with the matchmaking system - and Cynwise bristles at upcoming patch changes that are clearly meant to push people into rated battlegrounds instead of arena. I'm not here to argue either of these points, but I did feel like simply writing a positive post about rated battlegrounds, because I feel that - regardless of their faults - their mere existence has been a truly enriching addition to my WoW play.

I've said before that I'm a PvE player to the core. Out of the over three hundred posts on this blog, this is only the tenth one that carries the PvP tag. Overall my preferences haven't changed, but rated battlegrounds have shown me that PvP actually has a lot more to offer me than I thought it had.

I used to say that I prefer cooperation over competition, and I do, but just like PvE has competitive aspects (topping the damage metres, beating other guilds to a boss kill), PvP requires cooperation, namely between you and your team mates. The problem is that I rarely got to see any of the latter.

We like to moan about how the dungeon finder ruined WoW's community, but compared to the PvPers, us dungeon runners still have it made. PvP has been based on a dungeon finder model since freaking vanilla! I don't know what battlegrounds were like during the year or so during which they were same-server only, but ever since I first set foot into one myself in late vanilla, they've been cross-realm, meaning that you get thrown in with a bunch of random strangers who actually have very little interest in cooperating with you. In many ways that is actually worse than the dungeon finder because in a dungeon there's usually (most of the time anyway) at least some kind of agreement about the distribution of roles. Battlegrounds don't have even that, so if you queue up with the intention of being the flag carrier in Warsong Gulch or personally guarding the lumber mill in Arathi Basin, you might end up with a team that has a completely different idea of how the game should go.

Accordingly, random battlegrounds have had a reputation for being cesspits of stupidity and rude behaviour for as long as I can remember. Their only saving grace was that it was the same for both factions, so it was at least a fair fight, and that each match had a timer and would eventually end one way or the other regardless of how badly people were playing. (Or at least that's how it works these days. Anyone remember Warsong Gulch before timers? There's a reason I always hated that place.)

And the biggest bummer? There were no alternatives. In PvE, you can avoid the dungeon finder for the most part and just go raid with your friends instead. However, there was nothing comparable for PvP. Pre-mades existed of course, but they weren't actually supported by the game. There was no reward for playing with a fixed team other than getting to roflstomp a bunch of hapless opponents that were thrown together at random, and just like ganking lowbies that kind of thing never held any lasting appeal to me. Blizzard even tried to actively discourage queueing up in larger groups, and people had to make addons in an attempt to circumvent the developers' restrictions. WoW PvP was not designed as a game that encouraged camaraderie.

But then came arenas. And while I'm still not a huge fan of them, they certainly showed me for the first time that there was real fun to be had in pvping as a team. What with mostly playing healers, I already knew the rush of saving another player from the brink of death, but in arena I finally got to experience someone else doing the same thing for me. It was intense! More intense than most things I had done in PvE actually.

If you think about it, most PvE encounters are more about being a cog in a well-oiled machine than they are about actually interacting with other people. You'll have to agree on a basic battle plan of course, but spontaneous reactions to other players' actions are comparatively rare, such as when someone dies and needs to get a combat res. The encounters themselves are rarely about paying attention to the other players. One of my favourites in this regard has always been Lady Vashj's phase two. If you've never had the chance to do this fight, what happens is that she becomes immune to damage and in order to remove her shield you basically have to "play ball" with an item called tainted core that drops off certain elemental adds and roots you to the spot if you pick it up. I'm sure many people hated that mechanic, but personally I loved the hell out of it because it actually meant people had to pay attention to and react to each other instead of just the boss. Unfortunately, boss mechanics like that remain rare to this day.

In some way I'm still not sure why I actually don't like arenas more. I think that in some ways, they are simply too intense for me. I get really into the bonding experience they provide, but with how many people do you really want to be that close, week after week? I've only really played a significant amount of arena with one guy over the years, and we've been friends for years. We never had a problem chatting away about different things in-between matches, or not getting mad at each other if either of us messed up. I don't have the same faith in things working as well with someone who's only a loose acquaintance however, and how much of your time do you want to devote to private time with loose acquaintances anyway? So whenever my friend loses interest in the game, I lose interest in arena.

Also, if I'm being honest I always found arena a bit difficult myself. Players like to complain about the difficulty of raiding sometimes, but personally I've found that even a fairly low-ranked arena match tends to have much higher twitch requirements than a moderately difficult raid. In addition, optimisation requirements can get quite harsh in smaller groups, and it's easy to start feeling like you stand no chance simply because you're playing the "wrong" class. I hear that many people like to play arena casually but to me the mere idea is hard to fathom, considering the sheer amount of time you can end up spending with just a single person in a regular 2v2, and how much harsher the requirements for progression are compared to small group PvE content.

Now, after all this rambling... enter rated battlegrounds, and I finally have something that combines some of the best elements of PvE raiding and PvP in general into a fun new mix for me; so I get to enjoy the interactive nature of team PvP, but in a large group. In many ways, this has only worked to highlight for me just why I prefer playing WoW in larger groups.

For one thing, it creates a nice group atmosphere, where you can be social and have fun while still maintaining a certain distance. Since your enjoyment doesn't depend on the company of a single person, one player quitting the game doesn't necessarily ruin the whole activity for you, like it happened to me with arena. It also feels more justifiable to set aside a specific time to play together, as coordinating the schedules of so many people is hard enough as it is, and it carries none of the awkwardness of, "Oh god, why am I reserving time to play with this one guy I hardly know every single week?"

Also, larger numbers add complexity to a point where individual min-maxing and optimal play becomes less important because it doesn't make as much of a difference. If you lose a 2v2 arena match, it's got to be the fault of at least one of you somehow, whether you're playing the wrong spec, didn't hit your cooldown in time or attacked the wrong target, and the only way to get better is for one of you to up your individual performance. In a larger group things aren't as clear-cut a lot of the time, and while you obviously still want to work on improving yourself at all times, you don't have to feel as if every single loss is potentially your fault because you don't have enough resilience yet.

And that's why I'm grateful that Blizzard introduced rated battlegrounds. I think it's kind of bizarre that they are basically doing the opposite in PvP of what they've been doing in PvE, where raid sizes keep shrinking and the devs keep thinking of new ways to emulate group play without actually requiring any social interaction (dungeon finder, elite quests with NPC helpers etc.), whereas random battlegrounds become less and less important as Blizzard tries to encourage players to play nice with others in order to get better rewards.

If you're a PvE player who's disillusioned with the way group content is going, I'd recommend giving rated battlegrounds a try. You might be surprised by the experience. (Assuming that the matchmaking actually improves in the next patch, because I agree that just getting beaten into the ground by superior teams over and over again is not very fun.)

Redoing the 80-85 quests

2011-06-22T15:40:00.005+02:00

My focus in WoW is ever-changing as ever, and in the past few weeks or so I've mostly spent my time questing on my max-level alts. I've commented on the linearity of Cataclysm's questing in the past (and so have many others), and as a result have shied away from repeating many of the quests on my alts. I don't like reading the same book or watching the same film over and over. While my main has been a Loremaster of Cataclysm for a while now, my level eighty alts mostly levelled up by engaging in other activities: exploration, gathering, instances. I'd do the first couple of quests in each zone to unlock the portal in Orgrimmar, but afterwards I was happy to never look back.

Well, until recently that is, when I was looking at what ways I had left to progress my alts' gear without raiding and realised that my best options were really things like getting the Therazane shoulder enchants and working towards exalted reputation epics. And how do you get those things? By questing.

So I buckled down and started repeating zones. I've always been someone who at least skimmed all the quest text, even upon repetition, but with the new linearity even I just ignored most of it because I didn't really need a reminder of what I was supposed to do - it was obvious. In many ways it was also boring and tedious, though a couple of zones turned out to be not nearly as bad as I had expected, which was a pleasant surprise. I also couldn't help but be reminded of part of the original purpose of quests - to give players the feeling that they could achieve something even if they only had very limited play time - which is something that I've definitely benefited from when my real life week ended up being busier than I had anticipated.

Mount Hyjal actually turned out to have surprisingly high replay value for me. It's linear, but still less so than other zones. For example there's a point where you can decide to help out at the shrine of Aviana or take another one first. As I said in my initial review of the zone, the gameplay of the quests is varied and fun, and as far as the story goes it really feels like you are achieving something tangible, bringing the ancients back and reclaiming Hyjal bit by bit. I don't mind doing that again.

Vashj'ir on the other hand feels like a massive drag upon replay. I still stand by the good things that I said about it originally, but it really fails to impress a second time. The linearity of progression is very rigid: you spend fifteen minutes at a mini hub and then abandon it, never to return again. The story also doesn't hold up well when experienced a second time. In a nutshell it can be summed up as "you get shipwrecked and discover that the naga are working with the old gods", and it relies heavily on building up suspense about what's going to happen next. Working your way through 150 quests of "golly gosh, whatever are we going to do" when you already know exactly what's going to happen just doesn't cut it.

Deepholm is a lot like Hyjal in my eyes, with a story that emphasises that you're doing something worthwhile at every step of the way and thus feels worthy of repeating. My only problem is that the quests feel a bit too samey to me (it's all about killing earth elementals and twilight cultists really), so I tend to get bored halfway through and then the rest starts to drag a bit.

Uldum is the only zone that I've only managed to repeat once so far, and I think it's pretty much the cut scenes alone that are to blame for this. I don't mind the Ramkahen half of the quests (in fact, I love just hanging out with High Priest Amet and enjoying the view of the underwater world from inside the dam), but the Harrison Jones quest line with its constant clunky cinematics drives me absolutely bonkers. See You on the Other Side! says the quest, "follow me" says Harrison Jones, but then you don't get to do anything at all because clearly moving up the hill yourself is way too strenuous so they just show you a cut scene of your character running and you automatically reappear in the right spot. What the fricking frack. It was annoying the first time, but it only gets worse upon replaying.

Twilight Highlands was another pleasant surprise, but for different reasons than I expected. It has both slightly more lenient and more linear bits, so my enjoyment of those varied. It also had one quest that keeps annoying me in a new way every time I do it, due to having hidden quest requirements that aren't mentioned anywhere, and my characters having suffered repeated deaths due to the helpful NPCs despawning or getting lost whenever I needed them the most. However, one thing that really works in the Highlands' favour are the item rewards. Yes, all the zones shower you in quest rewards, but with how fast you level and how quickly the ilevels go up, many of them don't feel like significant upgrades and don't last very long. Twilight Highlands however offers the best rewards you can get before hitting max level instances, and it's a great way of getting characters up to speed that have fallen behind in terms of gear progression. I ended up taking both my shaman and my death knight through this zone in quick succession without feeling any annoyance at all, simply because getting both their gear sets up to speed for level 85 within an evening felt rewarding enough on its own.

Now, this is one of those topics where I'm really interested in other people's experiences. How many alts have you levelled to 85 yet (if any)? Did you repeat a lot of quests? If so, did you enjoy it? Which zones did you find the most fun to play through repeatedly?