Return to Icecrown Citadel

So everyone is gushing about the new content... and in the meantime, my guild went to raid ICC last night. Lolwut?

I mentioned before that I managed to complete my Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 player) achievement shortly after the Shattering, but not all of our raiders did so at the same time, and some were still missing one or two achievements by the time Cataclysm came out. We promised that we'd still get them their bone drakes too, regardless of the allure of the new content. And we did. I'm so glad.

To be honest I was slightly worried because I was sure that I wasn't the only one who wasn't terribly keen on going back to ICC now that we were finally out of it, on a purely personal level at least. However, part of well-working guild is generally that you occasionally have to sacrifice a little bit of your own fun for the good of the other members of the group. Seeing everyone be willing to make that sacrifice and help out with those last couple of drakes really made me hopeful for our future raiding adventures.

As a fun fact, we did not completely steamroll the content. The massive jump in stamina between eighty and eighty-five certainly trivialised some mechanics - for example I saw someone survive one of Sindragosa's frost blasts on heroic mode, which used to one-shot everyone, including tanks. However, going from close to the best gear for your level to quest greens, combined with the massively painful stat scaling, meant that our newly levelled damage dealers often had lower dps than before due to not having enough hit, and our healers ran out of mana after every other trash pull.

On heroic Putricide we even had a few wipes - due to a couple of problems really, but a lot of it was honestly healing fail I think, with all of us either running out of mana halfway through the fight or overcompensating badly (no, I can't heal you now, I need to conserve mana) so that people died. I considered it good practice though, and it was very noticeable that we improved significantly after each wipe.

For me personally I found that the biggest adjustment was to teach myself to not use Renew so much. I was already using Heal on the tank whenever possible, but whenever I saw raiders taking damage from the abomination's aura I was still way too quick to toss a Renew on them. It's just too expensive to use it like that all the time now, plus I was still casting it too early so the last ticks sometimes resulted in overhealing. Dare to let those health pools dip a bit, they sure are big enough for it now.

It was also a good opportunity for those of our raiders who decided to switch mains in Cataclysm to try out their new class in a raid environment where everything was pretty laid back. I for one just howled with laughter when our guild leader, who switched from rogue to disc priest, accidentally life-gripped one of the tanks during a trash fight...

Oh, and if you've ever considered levelling by doing old raids, just for the fun of it - don't bother. Raids have always suffered from an XP penalty, which in the case of ICC was just enough to cancel out the rested bonus I had, but with the recent XP nerfs the amount of experience we gained was just ludicrously low. I think I got 40 XP for killing Lady Deathwhisper. I can get that for picking two bloody Peacebloom.

Reunited with my holy half

After I ranted about the 4.0 changes to holy priests for the umpteenth time back in October, I did end up going through with my plan of switching to raiding with my resto druid until the end of the expansion. It was the right choice; I had fun again and our raids went very well. We even got Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 player) at last! Better late than never I say.

It wasn't until the other night that I finally dared to give my priest a whirl again, since we needed a dispeller for the Lich King fight. (On a side note, Blizzard restricting disease dispelling to only two classes has been such a nuisance on this fight. They should have changed Necrotic Plague's classification to magic or something.) I was hopeful that the changes to Chakra had improved things, but I was still a little uneasy.

Fortunately my fears turned out to be completely unfounded. The 4.0.3 changes have really made a massive difference and a lot of abilities sync up a lot better now.

For example I'm glad that they removed the Renew Chakra state. It was too good to use anything else a lot of the time, and doing nothing but spam Renew was boring. Not to mention that it tried to occupy the same niche as ProH Chakra, which was just awkward. The only thing I'll miss is Holy Word: Aspire, which I rather liked and would have loved to keep for Heal Chakra, instead of Holy Word: Serenity. A second HoT for tank healing would have been awesome.

The new thiry second cooldown on Chakra, combined with a thirty second duration, also helps a lot, because it allows you to have Chakra up at all times without weaving useless spells into your rotation just to extend your current Chakra state. The thirty second cooldown also makes it more realistically versatile - most bosses that switch between doing different kinds of damage don't take a whole minute to do so, meaning that with the one minute cooldown you sooner or later ended up with the completely wrong Chakra and nothing you could do about it. With the reduced cooldown I found that switching Chakra state to adjust to the fight actually felt fluid now instad of clunky (though I still realised every now and then that I chose the wrong one after a few casts - but that's just a matter of practice).

ProH Chakra getting activated by Prayer of Mending as well now is a godsend. No more spamming of unneeded ProHs just to boost my other AoE spells! The associated Holy Word: Sanctuary being on a longer cooldown made me a little sad at first, seeing how it's probably the coolest new spell that holy got with the talent revamp, but after a bit of consideration I decided that I actually like it. It makes it more of an extra healing boost that you use strategically at a certain point in time instead of something that you spam on the ground whenever the raid is clumped up and taking damage.

I even ended up using Heal every now and then! The throughput buff for priests was quite noticeable and Heal is actually on par with the other classes' cheap heals now. On fights with relatively low tank damage it's quite a useful way to preserve mana really. On heroic Deathbringer Saurfang for example my mana actually lasted longer than before 4.0, despite of the regen nerf, because I used a combination of Heal and rolling Renews (with the occasional Flash or Greater to cover spikes) until the soft enrage, which helped me save a lot of mana.

I'm so happy that being a priest is fun again! I feel ready to take priesting to the new level cap now and actually look forward to perfecting my use of Chakra and its associated abilities. (And never mind Archangel as holy, I'd probably rather go for something like this.)

Voices of Wrath

Back when I reviewed the Cataclysm cinematic, one of the negative points I mentioned was the fact that I didn't really care for Deathwing's voice. This then made me think about what I thought about WOTLK's voice acting in general, what I thought was good and what was... less good.

The latter doesn't take that long to sum up, as it only consists of two points really. The first one is simply Arthas himself. I didn't have a problem with his voice acting per se, but I swear that the pitch of his voice changed every single time he made an appearance. People joked about how sitting on the Frozen Throne all this time had given the guy a cold, but what it came down to in the end was that the voice of the major villain of the expansion changing all the time hurt immersion and generally gave the impression of Blizzard doing unusually shoddy work with him, as if the sound editor randomly came up with a new mix of settings every time they had to record more voice work for Arthas.

The second thing that I didn't like was that all the NPCs just talked too damn much. I know that certain upcoming MMOs are really priding themselves in the fact that they include a lot of voice work, but personally I don't think that this is a good thing. An MMO is not an audio book, is not a film, is not a single player game... it's not a medium where you should have to spend extended amounts of time just sitting back to listen. If a boss wants my attention they have to be snappy; otherwise I'm just going to tune their yapping out eventually, in order to focus on, you know, actually playing. (Gruul's "Come... and die" is one of my favourite lines to this day, simply for being short and to the point.)

For all the time that I've spent in ICC in the past year, I'd have trouble quoting most of the bosses from there, with the exception of Sindy's terribad "BETRAAAY you" line. I mean, I know that they talk a lot and I have a vague idea of what it's about, but what I really hear in my head is something like "Arthas blah blah Tirion blah blah Bolvar blah blah". Not really memorable to me at least.

That said, when they don't go into endless monologues, a lot of WOTLK's NPCs had some pretty good lines coupled with solid voice acting. My personal favourites from Wrath's five-man instances are:

1. Keristrasza: Finish it! Finish it! Kill me, or I swear by the Dragonqueen you'll never see daylight again!

I have a suspicion that her voice work was done by the same woman that did Sindragosa, only without the annoying screechiness, and she does a pretty good job at conveying emotion with her voice (maybe overacting just a little bit, but that's okay). Whatever you thought of Keristrasza's story in general, her last lines in the Nexus are a heart-wrenching mix of aggressive insanity (threatening to kill the players) and what's left of her original personality (swearing by the Dragonqueen and wanting her torment to end). I like all of her lines really, including the "Preserve? Why?" upon pulling her and her last words asking for the Life-Binder to preserve her after all.

2. Scourgelord Tyrannus: Rimefang! Trap them within the tunnel! Bury them alive!

Scourgelord Tyrannus is actually one of those characters that talk way too much, even if he has a very nice voice, but the above line shows that he can get to the point when he thinks it's urgent. I've been known to randomly call this one out whenever we're fighting Rimefang in ICC.

3. Skarvald the Constructor: Pagh! What sort of necromancer lets death stop him? I knew you were worthless!

I love this line for the simple reason that I've always felt that the Scourge's necromancers have a tendency to look a bit sissy, and Skarvald not only shares these feelings, he expresses them better than I ever could.

4. Ionar: Master... you have guests.

Ionar must be British or something, because that's quite the understatement when talking about people storming your castle and slaughtering everything in sight. Even in death he retains the elemental equivalent of a stiff upper lip, and I can dig that.

5. The Black Knight: No! I must not fail... again...

I always thought that the Black Knight was a bit of a weird character, because on the one hand he's supposed to be this really powerful Scourge lieutenant, but on the other hand he's very obviously a Monty Python joke. How do you reconcile these two images? Well, I thought his last words do a decent job at it, by showing that his constant getting up again is not a sign of overconfidence, but rather the last desperate attempt of someone who knows that he messed up before and can't afford to do so again. The way that last line is delivered is enough to actually make me feel sorry for him a little every time.

The "So bad it's good" award: Devourer of Souls: You dare look upon the host of souls?! I SHALL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE!

If you've ever done Forge of Souls, this needs no explanation. You just want to tell this guy to chill the hell out.

And my five favourite voices from WOTLK raids...

1. Sara/Yogg-Saron: I am the lucid dream. The monster in your nightmares. The fiend of a thousand faces. Cower before my true form. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH!

This phase-transitioning line is probably the single most amazing piece of voice acting I've ever heard in WoW. Even just playing it back in my head gives me the shivers. The transition from Sara's almost sensual voice to Yogg's fury is just so incredibly well done; it completely blew me away the first time I heard it.

2. Thorim: I remember you... In the mountains...

I never actually got what the fuss was about with this line. I remember our main tank and raid leader repeating it ad nauseam and I just didn't see the appeal, but the longer they went on, the more ingrained it became into my own brain. Then I found out that it had even become an internet meme and... well, now I can't help it anymore either. (Seriously, search YouTube for this phrase and you'll find loads more.)

3. XT-002 Deconstructor: New toys? For me? I promise I won't break them this time!

While having to hear XT's voice over and over again whenever I run past someone with the mini pet has demoted his voice from amusing to annoying for me, I still have to give credit where credit is due: I still remember pulling him for the first time and vent erupting into laughter upon hearing his squeaky voice - and I know we weren't the only guild that had this kind of reaction.

4. Lord Jaraxxus: You face Jaraxxus, eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

I suppose I have a bit of a thing for eredar lords, considering how many times I abused Malchezaar's lines to announce to people at large that they weren't facing our raid alone, but the legions we command! Jaraxxus has a similar kind of thing going on, and like Thorim he's made it to YouTube as well. Hard to get that out of your head again after a while.

5. Anub'Rekhan: I hear little hearts beating. Yesss... beating faster now. Soon the beating will stop.

Being a product recycled from Vanilla, Naxxramas wasn't exactly innovative and new in terms of voice acting, but bloody hell, Anub'Rekhan's voice is still amazing. Especially the line quoted above is just so creepy, delivered in a way that makes it very clear that the big bug won't just eat you, he's also perv enough to enjoy it in a very naughty way. /shudder

The "So bad it's good" award: Sindragosa: Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!

There couldn't really have been any other choice for this. There's just something about Sindy's voice that makes it grate so very, very badly, and you'll hate her for that alone - not to mention the many wipes that most of us will have gone through on this fight at some point. However, making a boss hated by the players is not entirely a bad thing, and if nothing else that BETRAAAY is very memorable. Though personally I almost prefer her intro line of: "You are fools to have come to this place! The icy winds of Northrend will consume your souls!" I now find myself wanting to continue any sentence that starts with "You are fools" with this line.

I wish I could stop ranting about holy priests, but I just can't

Tonight we finally went back into ICC for the first time since the patch, and I was curious to see how the new holy would perform in what's currently the closest thing to "current" content (even if it's nearly a year old by now). At heroic Lady Deathwhisper I finally ran into the mana problems that a commenter brought up in response to one of my previous posts. Up until then I hadn't really noticed much of a difference in my mana regeneration rate while running lower-tier content, so I was very surprised when I suddenly got a "not enough mana" message halfway through phase two. I hadn't popped my shadowfiend yet, so I did that and was okay for the rest of the fight, but it still felt strange considering how much I overgear the place and that we had the thirty percent buff up.

I suppose it's not crippling right now, but it still kind of irks me to be honest. I'm all for the slower healing model with nerfed mana regen that's been advertised for Cataclysm, but suddenly running out of mana on WOTLK fights that you've been doing easily for months feels kind of... unfair. Still, as I said, not an unsurmountable problem; I reckon it should be okay with slightly more careful mana management.

However, looking at the healing meters was outright depressing. I've been duo-healing with a resto druid for a while now and our output has always been very close to equal. I liked that, because it meant that we were both doing our jobs and nobody was being carried. However, since the patch he absolutely pwns me on the meters, doing about twenty-five percent more healing than me across the board. I feel like I've got a freaking brick tied around my neck and am bringing the whole raid down, and that we could be doing so much better if I brought my own resto druid instead. (It seems to be pretty much common consensus on the forums that resto druids are about a mile ahead of everyone else at the moment.)

And of course I still can't get over just how clunky my whole spell arsenal feels right now, what with the clumsiness of the Chakra states and so many talents having no synergy whatsoever. I could ignore the sudden mana issues and get over the throughput nerf if I was still having fun, but I swear holy priesting has never felt worse and less fun to me than it does now.

I decided to turn my attention to the forums to see how other priests felt and whether I could get any helpful advice. On the EU forums at least I found relatively little complaining, a few happy comments from people who absolutely love the new model, and a couple of concerns from others based on holy priests having the lowest mana regen of all healing classes right now and being absolutely terrible in level 85 raids on the current beta ("10khps behind and going oom still" as one poster put it").

On the US forums I found a similar thread bemoaning the current state of holy priests, where the poster was told off with arguments such as "it is you" and that "holy is fine". What I found interesting in this case however, was that one of those commenters backed her claim up with a link to World of Logs, which showed a twenty-five man raid where two supposedly holy priests were topping the healing meters. I was actually happy about this! There was hope after all; I'd just have to adjust my play style to follow the example of those amazing priests!

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bit of a sham. What the poster neglected to mention was that both priests had a discipline dual spec that they were using for the Lich King, and at the end of the night thirty percent of their healing done was made up by shield spam from that one fight, making the numbers of their oh-so-great holy performance look artificially inflated.

They did do well as holy on several fights though, so I investigated that, and it turns out that they mainly managed to get high numbers because there were no resto druids in the raid and they spammed Renew. I went to look at a couple of logs from other raid guilds on my server and found similar results. I found one log where a holy priest had topped the meters on a night of heroic Sindragosa attempts with no resto druid in the raid, but under any other circumstances holy performance was usually anywhere between lackluster and outright terrible.

So, in summary: holy priests are fine, if you can afford to just spam Renew and there's no resto druid in the raid. So much for increasing complexity and encouraging us to use our amazingly large toolbox, eh?

I have half a mind to just heal with my druid for the rest of this expansion. I'm not usually a "flavour of the month" person, but at the moment holy priesting doesn't just feel underpowered to me, it feels plain not fun.

I know it's not supposed to be balanced around level eighty content; I know they are still tweaking things for level 85 on the PTR as we speak, but well... considering I have all healing classes at eighty and they are all reasonably geared, I just see no reason to stick it out with one that I just don't enjoy right now. I still love the class for its many great spells and for representing the ultimate healer in WoW, but as it stands I think I'd be better off just giving it a rest until the developers figure out how to do holy priests some justice again - for my own sanity more than anything else.

(Oh, and I never cared much for disc in PvE, so I'm not keen on going down that route either, even if it's supposed to be reasonably powerful right now.)

How bad is the summer slump really?

It's widely agreed upon that WoW is not at its most popular at the moment. People are looking forward to Cataclysm, but the content currently in the game feels worn out. Is there anyone who wanted to see ICC and hasn't actually done so yet? It seems that there's little left to do if you aren't an altoholic or a dedicated achievement hunter. People are playing less and less.

Or are they? I mean, I have yet to see anyone disagree with the notion, but at the same time we don't seem to have anything solid to back it up. As far as I'm aware Blizzard hasn't released any information about their subscription numbers in quite a while, and anecdotal evidence of someone's guild going quiet doesn't really prove anything, does it? Dalaran still seems reasonably busy to me on my server, and while dungeon finder queues on my healers were instant the other day, that doesn't necessarily mean that fewer healers are running dungeons. (Maybe more people have switched to tanking instead?)

As we were discussing the summer slump in my guild, one of my guildies had the brilliant idea of using WoWProgress as an indicator of current raid activity. Raiding isn't all there is to do in the game, but it's definitely an important part. The statistics for my home realm Earthen Ring were an eye-opener for sure.

Let's start with the newest raid, the Ruby Sanctum. It's been out for one and a half months now, and only twelve guilds on my server have cleared it on 25-man, one of them on heroic. Considering that the site has records of no less than 91 Earthen Ring guilds killing bosses in 25-man ICC, that's a pretty poor turnout. Few people seem to care about Halion.

The ten-man stats paint a pretty similar picture. 31 guilds have successfully cleared the Sanctum on ten-man (two of them on heroic), but compared to the 110 guilds that have been active in ICC-10, that's pretty much nothing.

The ICC statistics themselves also show a very obvious slump in activity. Of the forty most progressed 25-man guilds, only eight have recorded any sort of progression in July or August (meaning a new boss kill or an achievement). Before the summer pretty much all of them had at least one progression kill a month, usually more. No less than sixteen of these "top" guilds haven't achieved anything remarkable since May or even earlier. It's unrealistic to think that they just hit a brick wall that they simply couldn't get past, all at the same time and at completely different points of progression. (Only five guilds are on 11/12 heroic.) They just don't seem to have the numbers and motivation to push on anymore.

Again, the ten-man picture is slightly less dire, presumably because these runs are easier to organise and can serve as a fallback for 25-man guilds that end up being short on numbers. But still: of the forty best guilds that are still progressing (that is to say, discounting the two that have killed the Lich King on heroic mode), less than half have killed anything new in July or August. Clearly interest in this format is currently on the decline as well, even if not quite as steeply as in the case of 25-man.

I do think that this is a strong indicator that in-game activity is on a sharp decline, at least on my server. Presumably the statistics for other servers paint a similar picture, though there might be variations of course.

Of course now I wonder how this compares to previous summers, or to the months before the release of the current expansion. I know my guild didn't fall apart the way it did recently back in previous summers, and before the release of WOTLK we were actually franticly trying to clear the Black Temple just before the final nerf. We didn't bother working on the Sunwell anymore after killing Illidan, but that drop in interest happened about two weeks before expansion release, not six months ahead of it. Too bad I don't have any numbers from other guilds for those times.

What are other people's experiences in that regard?

A slightly different view of Ulduar

Between going back to Ulduar for some achievements with my guildies, having this song stuck in my head and finding this article on WoW.com, I couldn't help but think about my own experiences with this raid instance. Many of the commenters on the WoW.com article called it Wrath's best raid, some even the best raid ever. While trying to decide whether I agreed or disagreed with that, I realised that I have quite a love/hate relationship with Ulduar.

To start with explaining the "hate" part, I'm really not that into the whole titan stuff. Everyone's got bits and pieces of lore that they like more than others, and for me the titans are one of those pieces that I don't particularly care about. I blame it on early trauma induced by endless Uldaman runs. To be fair, WOTLK managed to get me a little more interested in the subject than I was before, but still not massively.

Secondly, I experienced Ulduar as extremely dull from a visual point of view. After reading that sentence you're probably feeling a bit incredulous - Ulduar, of all places, looking dull? Let me explain: When I went back to Ulduar last Sunday, seeing it from my new PC for the first time, I was absolutely amazed when I first entered the central chamber and saw all that glass swirling up into the sky. It was beautiful. The problem is that while Ulduar was actually progression content and we were going there three times a week, I was still sitting behind my rickety old PC back in Austria that struggled to give me five frames per second during a twenty-five-man raid even with all the graphic settings turned down. Now, obviously that made every instance less interesting to look at than it could have been, but Ulduar was particularly bad because of its sheer size, which resulted in the limited viewing distance not even showing me the walls a lot of the time, so I was endlessly wandering through clouds of grey fog, which is not the most interesting way of spending a Sunday night. Even Trial of the Crusader was more fun to look at under those conditions, because at least I could make out the NPCs on the stands there.

Behold the glory of Ignis's room! Somewhere behind that wall of fog, presumably.

From a mechanical point of view, Ulduar was also the instance that really introduced the idea that the best way to make a fight hard for the healers was to have lots and lots of unavoidable raid damage. Naxxramas had that on Sapphiron, but that was only one fight. In Ulduar there were Ignis, Deconstructor, Kologarn and many more, with Hodir remaining many a healer's worst nightmare for months, and that's without even getting started on any hard modes. I already wrote a post about why I don't like the "crazy damage everywhere" mechanic, so I can't help being grumpy with Ulduar for starting this trend.

I also didn't really like the whole hard mode/achievement model. I explained my stance on this a bit at the end of this post: Zul'Aman had created very different expectations of what "hard mode" meant to me, and compared to the good old bear run everything that Ulduar had to offer in that regard just felt clumsy in comparison. For the most part "hard mode" didn't so much mean playing better as it meant being "intentionally stupid" and activating avoidable mechanics that would make the fight more difficult by hindering you. Not to mention the whole problem of some early hard modes being easier than the final bosses, which inevitably led to all kinds of arguments about what "progression" should focus on. It just felt like a major pain in the arse to be honest.

That said, I can understand why many people look back on the Ulduar hard modes with a certain fondness, mainly because everything that came afterwards was simply so much worse. Heroic TotC was nothing but an exercise in tedium and frustration. Heroic ICC has been a step up from that but still strikes me as a bit of a mixed bag, as the differences between the two modes, at least mechanics-wise, are still pretty minor on most fights. And heroic gunship is just a joke. If you can't think of a good "hard mode", does there have to be one? Ulduar didn't try to force it on absolutely every boss and that actually worked better - why not favour quality over quantity?

I still think that hard modes are a poor excuse for extra content, but Blizzard clearly considers the concept a success and it looks like it's here to stay. And well, when my choice is between just not raiding anything new at all after finishing all the normal modes and having at least a little bit of variety by trying heroic difficulty, I'll go with the latter. I can still wish for more varied and interesting hard mode fights though, and Ulduar was actually better at that than any of its successors.

Ulduar generally had a pretty interesting variety of fights, with Yogg-Saron still being my favourite WOTLK raid boss. The Lich King's not bad either, but from a healer's point of view that fight is too unforgiving and too scripted. Big speech at the start, big speech at the end, the rest of the time you try to stab Arthas in the kneecaps while also doing some running around and dealing with adds. Yogg was no pushover either, but missing one global cooldown wouldn't immediately wipe the raid, and he gave me a much bigger sense of excitement - dodging clouds and add spawns as we tried to bring down the mysterious Sara, plunging into the brain of the old god as he revealed himself, trying to fight off the deadly tentacles outside until he was finally vulnerable enough to be killed - if you could make it without being overwhelmed by the reinforcements he called in.

Actually, I think Ulduar as a whole felt more like an adventure, more organic than any of the other Wrath raids. All the bosses seemed to be there for a reason, and the whole place just felt "right". Why of course, Freya would live in a lush little paradise where frost lotus grows naturally. And a great inventor like Mimiron wouldn't just be content to sit in a little room, he had to build his own considerably-sized lab connected to the main complex by a train! Also, anyone remember when Sara would occasionally emit ear-splitting cries for help? (I don't know if she still does it.) I remember the first time she did that to us it made the whole raid jump, it was just that sudden and unexpected. But what's a good dungeon without surprises?

All in all I would agree with rating Ulduar as WOTLK's best raid. ICC is pretty good too, but the bosses seem a bit more random to me and as I said the hard modes are quite a mixed bag. I think everyone was just absolutely thrilled by it because the previous raid instance being TotC had really lowered everyone's expectations. (You know something's out of whack when you first enter a new instance and everyone goes "hurrah, there's trash" and means it.)

All in all I still liked Zul'Aman and Karazhan better though.

My stance on GearScore

There's been some discussion about GearScore in the blogosphere lately (again), and I feel that I finally have something to add on the subject. I never felt like I was in a position to comment when it came up previously because I simply never had to deal with it. Yes, on my server that blasted addon is blissfully underused. People know it of course and I'm guessing that quite a few players have it installed as well, but GearScore number values are generally not used as an entry requirement for pugs. People might ask for achievements sometimes, sure, but as far as gear goes most pug advertisements that I see in general chat still just ask for a gear check in front of the north bank or something similar, which has the added advantage of being a test to see whether the potential pug applicant is actually interested enough to put more effort in than just sending a whisper.

Now on the server where I recently levelled my two old Alliance characters to eighty, things are entirely different. I remember feeling bewildered when I first saw all these pug adverts asking for arbitrary numbers, but I still wasn't curious enough to actually install the addon just to find out what the numbers actually meant. Then an article on wow.com led me to wtfismygearscore.com, a nice way of getting at least a rough idea of how GearScore works without actually having to support the addon yourself. So I found out that my freshly dinged eighties were barely above 3000, while my fully ICC25-geared priest had surpassed 6000, and my TotC10-geared hunter sat at 5000. Using that as a guideline, I found that almost all the numbers that people asked for were fairly unreasonable, like 5000+ for a TotC10 run, which pretty much implied that you were only welcome if you didn't want any drops from there anymore. I just shrugged it off however, since I didn't intend to raid with my alts on that server anyway.

But then... I somehow still ended up doing VoA with my priest, killed Flame Leviathan and Malygos for the weekly, and even cleared the first wing of ICC with no real trouble. And that even though her GearScore only just hit 4600 with two new items from ICC. The thing was, as I was wandering around Dalaran going about my business, I occasionally spotted pug adverts in trade that didn't ask for achievements and GearScore numbers. And even though I don't like the addon myself, I couldn't help but wonder about them initially, because if everyone on the server uses it for pugs, what's up with the people who don't? Are they such noobs that they don't know what achievements and GearScore are all about? Or utterly desperate because they can't find anyone else? Well, the latter is sometimes true for runs in progress, but otherwise I noticed that the ones starting pug raids without any silly linking requirements are usually simply people who don't like GearScore either and are so confident in their own abilities that they aren't that worried about other people's performance. And oddly enough that attracts people with a similar mindset and you end up with fairly competent raids anyway. (Though you usually also get at least one guy who has absolutely no clue, makes blatant mistakes and then dies halfway through the fight.)

Larísa compared raiding and GearScore to relationships in her last post, saying that demanding a high number from a pugger was akin to only wanting to check out the really hot people on the dancefloor while you're out clubbing or whatever. I think that's a pretty apt comparison. Like that kind of dating, GearScore is very superficial. As someone who's never been superficially attractive in real life and struggled with that for a couple of years as well, this is something that I dislike. In all fairness though, it's not the end of the world either. If you don't want to be judged like that, you don't have to - not to date in real life and not to pug raids in WoW. Simply seek out people with a similar mindset. In real life I found internet forums about subjects that interested me and met great people there. In the same vein, if GearScore mania in the game bothers you, you can transfer off to a server where it's not as rampant (because it's certainly not the same everywhere) or generally keep your eye out for runs that don't bother with it. Trust me, they are there even on the most GS-crazy servers; you just have to be attentive to the wording of the adverts.

On a sidenote, doing the first wing of ICC as Alliance for a change was vaguely amusing. When we made our way to the gunship I couldn't help feeling slightly confused by how we were going the "wrong" way, and why were we killing the friendly Horde NPCs? Oh wait... During the gunship battle my boyfriend looked over my shoulder and made funny noises whenever Saurfang yelled at his axe throwers to "hurl faster". Then when we got to Saurfang the younger I got ready for a brief break during the endless speech, but as it turns out on Alliance side Muradin Bronzebeard basically just goes "charge" and Saurfang goes "lol dwarves" and then combat starts. They have a longer NPC roleplay at the end to make up for it, but at least that one's easy to skip if you've already seen it twelve thousand times. I'm not a big fan of Blizzard playing up the conflict between the Horde and Alliance, but having even slightly different content for both sides definitely adds something interesting to the mix.

Looking back at Wrath raiding as a healer

On Monday Larísa made what I thought was a very interesting post ranking the WOTLK raid bosses by difficulty. I immediately thought about how I would rank them myself, since I experienced a lot of them in quite a different way from everyone's favourite pigtailed gnome. From a healer's point of view I couldn't believe that she ranked Festergut as one of the easiest bosses of the expansion for example... However, after thinking about it some more I realised that me making such a list would be a bit long and full of boring repetition, seeing how my likes and dislikes in regards to raid bosses are mostly the same across the board, whether we're talking about Naxxramas or ICC. So I decided that I would rather make a general post about mechanics and fights in this expansion that I thought were fun to heal and ones that weren't.

Making choices: Yes, please.

Let's start with the good stuff, with encounters that I thought were both challenging and fun to heal. One feature that I liked a lot was that of being forced to make intelligent choices while healing: using different spells throughout the fight, timing large heals and cooldowns properly, choosing the right targets. Examples of this kind of thinking were Loatheb in Naxxramas, Ignis and Mimiron in Ulduar to an extent and Lord Jaraxxus in Trial of the Crusader. In ICC Deathbringer Saurfang, Professor Putricide and the Lich King offered some interesting challenges in terms of choosing the right spells for the job.

The only sad thing is that this is something that has to be pointed out as special at all. Unfortunately some of our healing spells have become too smart for our own good in this expansion. Yes, Circle of Healing and Wild Growth, I'm looking at you. Has Chain Heal always been raidwide too? I didn't know much about shamans before WOTLK. Anyway, if multiple people in the raid are taking damage these days it's almost a no-brainer to use one of these spells, just target someone and everyone will get healed (or at least as many people as you can heal at once). It's great to be powerful, but it's also kind of boring. I want to have to pay more attention to who needs healing and when, and switch between different spells more often. Supposedly Cataclysm is going back to that; let's hope that it's true.

Do split the party!

A mechanic that wasn't exactly new in Wrath but that I saw used more often than in BC anyway was that of "splitting the party" - that is to say physically forcing the raid apart into smaller groups that have to tackle tasks independently. Prime examples of this were Gothik the Harvester and the Four Horsemen in Naxxramas, Thorim and Yogg-Saron in Ulduar (and to a lesser extent the Assembly of Iron), the Twin Val'kyr in TotC if you did them "properly" with two tanks, and in a way Valithria Dreamwalker in ICC.

I like this mechanic because it enforces a certain personal responsibility (the healers in the arena can't help you in Thorim's gauntlet, you have to be able to do it yourself) without relying on gimmick abilities that require fast reactions or you'll wipe the raid (coughdefilecough). Splitting the raid in different groups than the traditional tanks, melee, ranged and healers also increases overall group cohesion and encourages you to pay more attention to what part people in other roles than your own are playing. Or in other words, it allows you to work with a small team while still facing off against the boss as a large raid, which is a nice way of allowing everyone's contributions to be acknowledged while preserving the epic feel of bigger numbers.

I'm not just a healbot, you know.

When I'm a healer I want to focus on healing and not on dpsing, but nonetheless the way some fights won't let me do anything but spam healing spells non-stop can get kind of boring at times. Kudos to the few fights that let me use other spells on my bars on occasion by having periods where raid damage is low and I can make myself useful by dispelling debuffs or casting a holy fire or smite during a dps race. Examples of this include Loatheb's aura, Razorscale's ground phase, Deconstructor's heart phase, and Yogg-Saron's phase two where I pretty much always did more dispelling and tentacle-smiting than actual healing.

Environmental awareness: a double-edged sword

As Tobold has been complaining for a long time, WOTLK raids are very focused on generic environment-related tasks like moving out of the fire instead of class-related skills. I'm actually not sure how I feel about that as a healer. On the one hand it's nice to be pulled out of my world of green bars occasionally and be forced to pay attention to what the boss is actually doing, and mastering the art of keeping an eye on everyone's health while also moving to the right place is an achievement to be proud of. On the other hand I feel that some fights in this expansion have been pushing things a bit too far. Sindragosa and the Lich King in particular are quite movement-intensive and extremely unforgiving of even one person standing a few feet too far to the left or whatever. Which is hard enough for your regular old dpser, but as a healer I sometimes feel like I'm about to go cross-eyed, trying to keep an eye on my position at all times while also dishing out heals and monitoring debuffs at all times. Give me a break.

Undecided: vehicle fights

People have talked about vehicle fights until they were blue in the face, but what always perturbed me a little was the way they often defy the usual role distribution. In Malygos's phase three, anyone can switch between dealing damage or healing at the drop of a hat. On Flame Leviathan there are no healers at all - or dedicated tanks for that matter. Switching to a different role can be fun I guess, and FL is probably the most popular weekly raid ever since you can make a raid out of ten people of any spec and class. But on the other hand... I like being a healer, damn it, and I don't appreciate being shoehorned into another role just like that. (Don't view that as a contradiction to what I said before about wanting to do more than cast healing spells by the way. I want to be able to use as many different abilities as possible, but within the boundaries of my chosen role.)

Oh, and speaking of shoehorning, enough of every other boss fight being tuned for a different number of healers. I thought dual-spec was meant to liberate us, not force us to maintain two gear sets because everyone expects us to be able to fulfill another role on a whim. If I sign up to heal a raid then healing is what I want to do.

Spam spam spammedy spam

The one thing that has been typical for WOTLK raids from a healer's point of view more than anything else is how many fights are designed with the idea that healers should be casting spells non-stop. Cataclysm is supposed to move away from that model again by bringing mana regeneration back into play, but we'll see how well that pans out. Either way I'd appreciate simply not casting a spell for a few seconds being a valid option again, because at the moment it simply isn't in raids. With a nearly inexhaustible mana pool, what's the worst that can happen if you keep casting non-stop? You'll do a lot of overhealing, but that's no skin off your back. What's the worst that can happen if you do stop casting because the tank appears to be at full health anyway? His health suddenly plummets so quickly that you don't even have time to think about starting to cast again. Non-stop healing it is then! Meh.

What's this? I'm taking damage?

Somewhat related to this is how Blizzard has started to use "massive indiscriminate raid damage" as a way of making fights harder, as it can only be healed through by spamming non-stop. You won't even have to worry about overheal a lot of the time. And I dislike it.

At first it was just Sapphiron in Naxxramas giving me nightmares. In Ulduar already a lot of fights had the whole raid taking damage, if not always all the time: Ignis's flame jets, Deconstructor's tantrums, Kologarn's shockwave, Steelbreaker's high voltage, Hodir's frozen blows, Mimiron's heat wave. Then we got the Twin Valk'yr in TotC, whose raid damage output made everyone's eyes bulge at first; same again in Anub'arak's phase three. And in ICC we finally got gems such as Festergut, Blood Queen Lana'thel and Sindragosa with their insane damage auras that more or less last throughout the entire fight.

They make things difficult, but not interesting - only frustrating. I remember needing a break from raiding for a week after nearly losing it during some Festergut attempts during which I was one of only two raid healers for a raid of twenty-five. There isn't even enough time to make conscious decisions when targetting a different group with your AoE heal every time. You either get it right every time, instinctively or due to sheer luck, or people will die and you wipe.

And what's worse in a way: It trains everyone else in the raid to not pay attention to their own health bar. When you have just a particularly damage-heavy phase during a fight, you can at least ask people to save their survival cooldowns for that, but if the damage is there all the time... it might as well not be there at all in the eyes of the dps, because there's nothing they can do about it anyway. They pretty much have to completely let go of all responsibility for their own health and trust their healers to take care of it all on their own. Which is kind of flattering in a way I suppose... but it also creates a certain rift between the healers and everyone else. I remember when we first went for the Blood Queen and our raid leader explained all her core abilities, such as the whole vampire thing. Guess what nobody even mentioned? Shroud of sorrow. 'cause you know, scoff, that's just a healer thing, they'll take care of it. When people died over and over again because the healers just couldn't keep up initially, everyone else was just bewildered.

"Taking damage" should never be the default state of a boss fight, because it breeds bad habits and makes healers cry. That is all.

A grudge against Prince Keleseth

That's what I'm afraid I've developed on my paladin. I didn't really have any issues with the Blood Prince Council while learning the fight as a healer - it was a pretty confusing encounter at first, and keeping the tanks alive was a considerable challenge initially, but there wasn't anything that I absolutely hated about it.

Then, one day, I went up against them with my pally's pretty casual ten-man group. Until then, I had never seen Prince Keleseth, aka "the caster boss", get tanked by anything other than a caster, usually a warlock. However, that night we had a warlock who really didn't want to be burdened with the job and insisted that I should be doing it instead. Supposedly the protection paladin in his main's raid group always did it and made it look really easy, so I should have no problem with it either. Rrright. Suffice to say that I failed pretty hard, and people's vague pieces of advice didn't really help either. "Just taunt the orbs!" I was told for example, but whenever I taunted them I just got an immune message and they ignored me. So much for that. I felt kind of crappy about my failure, especially as the warlock kept emphasising how easy it was supposed to be, but I wasn't the only one messing things up so it wasn't too bad. We never got the princes down that night though.

Fast forward a few months and I've joined a more progression-focused ten-man group. My little paladin gets to see a lot of new bosses for the first time, but I know the fights well enough from a healer's point of view so it's not too difficult to figure out what I have to do as a tank. Except when we get to the Blood Princes and I'm once again expected to tank Keleseth. I warn them that I had a really hard time the last time I tried, but they push me into doing it anyway. One rogue in particular keeps whispering me saying that it's a piece of cake, he does it on his druid all the time and so on and so forth. Once again I fail. The rogue's whispers become harassing enough that I eventually put him on ignore. In the end we swap roles and the warrior tank does a really amazing job at juggling the orbs while I just tank the other two dudes. Still, I feel bad for letting people down.

This week we went back in there again and I immediately started to sweat as we got to the blood wing. We only had one caster that night, a mage, and were going to try heroic mode to boot. Guess who was asked to tank Keleseth again, despite of the repeated failures? Yeah. In fairness, I think I actually did a lot better than on my previous attempts, but I still died to massive empowered shadow lances every time as I couldn't keep myself surrounded by a stable number of shadow balloons. Eventually we switched tanking assignments back around again and just did it on normal mode. Nobody ragged on me this time and the raid leader even made a point of saying that acknowledging that I wasn't good at this wasn't the same as saying "I suck", but I still felt bad about it anyway.

Tam did some musing not long ago about how sometimes when you fail very badly at a boss fight you become more and more panicked with every new attempt and eventually the sheer terror of messing up again becomes worse than any actual lack of skill. I think I'm in that place now. Part of me almost wishes myself back to the other group - they weren't as good, but that also meant that failing myself didn't make me feel nearly as terrible. When you're in a ten-man group with a bunch of twenty-five-man raiders on their mains who are tapping their feet because they want to get past the farm boss, being the noob who wipes the raid over and over because she hasn't got the hang of her role in that fight yet is particularly painful, so I don't blame them for quickly looking for alternative solutions. On the other hand I have no way of actually getting better that way, and the more often I kill the Blood Princes the more embarrassing it becomes to come back to them and have to admit that I can't handle the task people expect me to fulfil.

The thing is, after tonight's attempts tanking Keleseth as a protection paladin actually felt more doable to me than ever before, but I think I'd still need a couple more tries to actually get it right. (I remember when we were first learning the fight, the ranged orb tanks needed some time to get into the groove as well, but I'm too late to the party to be given the benefit of patience at this point.) I wish this was something you could practise outside of an actual raid!

For the record, these are the observations I have made on tanking Keleseth as a protection paladin so far:

-While he's not empowered, it's fairly easy to generate aggro at range by using Hammer of Wrath on cooldown. Once his health goes up things become more difficult however, as just standing still to whack him isn't really an option and I can only throw the occasional judgement on him. Not sure what else I could do.

-Hand of Reckoning does work on the orbs, but in a somewhat finicky manner. If an orb doesn't currently have a target and you hit it with this taunt, it will do its holy damage and get the orb's attention. If it already does have a target however, say because it was attracted to someone else's healing aggro, then it looks like it won't even do damage, and since it's immune to taunting the only thing you can do to get its attention is to actually hit it with a proper attack. Le suck.

-Just gathering up enough orbs is the part where I failed and I'm not even sure why. I'd get four or five by the time Keleseth got empowered, but as I looked around for more they'd suddenly be gone all at once and I'd die to a massive empowered shadow lance. I can't help but wonder if some of them weren't killed by accident or even pulled off me by someone else - I was repeatedly told that this never happens but I have seen it happen in the past. That said, once I had a couple of orbs on me I also found it hard to spot the newly spawned ones in the big mass of identical-looking balloons, as I couldn't really tell at a glance which ones I already had aggro on and on which I didn't, so maybe I was just too slow there.

If anyone's got any tips for this particular task (and no, "this is so easy", "how can you fail at that", "l2p noob" and the like don't count), your advice is welcome.

I killed the Lich King and all I got was this lousy title

Tonight I killed the Lich King.

No, this is not a jubilant bragging post; in fact it's the opposite. I was very disappointed by the whole experience, and while I didn't say anything about it right after the raid (since everyone else in the group seemed to be very happy with the kill and I didn't want to rain on anyone's parade), I do need to vent somewhere.

Basically the whole thing left me almost completely cold. Maybe because we were on the frozen throne? /rimshot. But no really, the biggest emotional reaction that the fight got out of me was me laughing out loud when I saw the popup asking me whether I wanted to accept Terenas Menethil's resurrection. The rest of the time I just stared at the events unfolding on my screen and felt vaguely disappointed. There are a couple of reasons for this:

My alt is not my main

The thing that stung more than anything I think is that I got the Kingslayer title on an alt before getting it on my main. It's not just any old alt, it's my "main" alt, the one with whom I've been running ten-mans pretty regularly since Trial of the Crusader, but still an alt. At the same time I've been working on the Lich King fight with my main as well, my main who has much better gear, while playing the class that is closer to my heart than any others, playing a role at which I am much better than I am at tanking (which is what I did on the kill tonight)... but still that wasn't good enough. It leaves me with a certain bitterness that I find hard to explain somehow.

One-shots are very anticlimatic

Don't get me wrong, before tonight we spent many hours spread out over several weeks practising the fight, wiping a lot and improving only relatively slowly. But tonight we went in and killed him on the first attempt, and regardless of how much we practised in the weeks before, it just felt kind of wrong to me. The last boss of the expansion strikes me as someone who should go down after a night filled with blood and sweat, close to the end of the raid, after you just had a one-percent wipe on the attempt before. Those are the boss kills that feel truly glorious and make everyone erupt in cheers on Vent. Downing the Lich King with relatively little effort on the first attempt of the night didn't make me feel heroic; it just left me feeling slightly confused and wondering whether that was really all there was to it.

Welcome to the Tirion Fordring show

If you don't want to be spoiled about what happens towards the end of the fight (not after), don't read this bit. Basically I already knew that the fight would effectively end once Arthas' health reached ten percent, but I didn't know what exactly would happen after that. I didn't think it would affect my feelings about the fight negatively because I remember reaching the ten-percent mark on Archimonde on Mount Hyjal as something that felt extremely exciting at the time even if it meant that we had already won. Basically lots of wisps show up, you become immune to damage and pwn him for the last ten percent - awesome. I thought the Lich King fight would have something similar, but no.

What happens is that the whole raid dies for no reason and Arthas laughs about how he's going to resurrect all of us as scourge now. Then Tirion finally decides to break out of the ice and kicks his arse, while the ghost of Terenas Menethil graciously decides to give everyone a res so they can assist Tirion. I don't think I've ever seen a boss fight that made me feel less heroic in my entire life. Basically what it comes down to is that all that struggling with val'kyrs and defiles was utterly pointless as the Lich King was only playing with us anyway, as evidenced by the fact that he one-shots us all when he grows tired of the game. Good thing that Tirion was there to save us all, huh? I don't mind fighting alongside friendly NPCs, but Mr Fordring really just makes the whole raid look like a bunch of tools. Couldn't he have saved us those repair bills and asked the light to get him out of that ice block sooner? It would have saved everyone a lot of hassle. Bah.

The video at the end just makes no bloody sense

Then it's all over and you get to see a special cinematic, cool. Originally I wanted to avoid watching it until I actually got to kill the Lich King myself, but I kind of spoiled myself by accident when the monument in the middle of Dalaran went up and I went "ooh, what's that", clicking on it like a clueless fool. I wasn't too impressed by the video but didn't want to be too judgemental in case I was missing some context from the actual fight. Now that I've seen it... nope, there's nothing missing, it still makes no bloody sense. I can only agree with everything that Chastity from Righteous Orbs said in this post a few months ago. "Okay, this was kind of stupid," is not really what I wanted my final thoughts about the end-of-expansion boss to be.

So yeah. My alt is a Kingslayer, woo. Yogg-Saron excited me a lot more.

Valithria Dreamwalker - why I'm disappointed

So my raid force recently downed upped Valithria Dreamwalker both on ten-man and twenty-five-man. Everywhere I looked that fight had been touted as "the healer fight", a fight on which healers in raid forces all over the world would finally get their chance to stand in the spotlight. Maybe that made me expect too much from it, but fact of the matter is that I simply ended up feeling disappointed by the fight, for a variety of reasons.

Confusing raid composition is confusing

First off, I simply have to question how sensible it is to create a single raid boss in a large raid instance that requires healing instead of dpsing. For every other fight in the game you want to bring just enough tanks and healers to get the job done, that is to say as few as possible, and then fill the rest of your raid spots with damage dealers. More dps = boss goes down faster = win. On a boss that requires healing up instead of killing, this suddenly gets reversed. You only want to have just enough dps to keep the adds under control, but as many healers as possible. More healing = fight finishes faster = win. I see two problems with this.

Firstly I'm simply afraid that many people might not get it, not because they are dumb, but because they didn't give the problem too much thought and it's so counter-intuitive. I boggled when our raid leader announced that we'd only have six healers on our first attempt, and other people chimed in with comments about how the people doing the Tankspot video had also managed to do it with only six healers, as if that was something to be proud of - it's not; it only means that you'll draw out the fight to its maximum length before hitting the soft enrage. It's like suggesting that maybe we could do Festergut with only fifteen dpsers while using eight healers... I don't know, maybe we could, but why would we want to? I can only imagine what a nightmare that fight would be in a pug: "You can two-heal this, right?" Maybe we could, but it would also be utterly missing the point!

However, even leaving the issue of understanding aside, fights which favour a completely different raid composition than the rest of the instance simply suck. I know dual specs have alleviated the problem somewhat, but they shouldn't be required. Nobody liked suddenly needing five tanks in the middle of SSC back in the day and WOTLK had given me hope that the developers had learned from that and moved on. Pushing through most of ICC with five healers and then suddenly facing a fight where you want tons of them is neither fun nor good design in my opinion.

DPS by any other name...

One thing I like about healing is that it plays very differently from doing damage. I won't go into the whys and hows, and certainly won't claim that one or the other is harder or more fun... but me, I like healing, and I like it the way it is. The problem I have with Valithria is that unless you are on raid healing (which is business as usual), it doesn't really feel like healing to me, even if you are pushing your healing buttons. There is no target switching, no on the fly decision-making, no watching for damage spikes... all you do is target Valithria and then spam your highest single-target HPS rotation until she's healed up, as if you were a dpser in a tank-and-spank fight. Worse yet, dps rotations these days are generally designed to be somewhat interesting, but high HPS on a single target doesn't involve using more than one or two healing spells. Bo-ring. I signed up as a healer because I enjoy healing, not because I want to play pretend-dps with my healing spells. When we finally downed upped her, the healer who seemed the giddiest was a shaman who has restoration as his off-spec and makes no bones about not liking it very much. But oh, in this fight healing is so much fun, look at the big HPS numbers! I think that says enough really.

Lost in space

When the Oculus discussion was making the rounds, Miss Medicina made several interesting posts highlighting one of the things she dislikes the most about that instance: having to navigate in three dimensions. For me personally this hadn't been a problem at the time, neither during Malygos phase three, nor in the Oculus itself. To be fair though, what I did there was often still effectively two-dimensional movement, along the lines of "straight up, then straight left".

Now Valithria, she truly is one to instil hatred of three-dimensional movement in you. Most healers will have to take portals into the Emerald Dream throughout the fight, where they fly around and have to burst through green clouds to buff themselves. It's like some 3D Mario or Sonic game. And I think it stinks! This is of course my completely subjective opinion and I'm sure there are people out there who love it, but to me it's just another one of those weird gimmicks. Hey, I just flew right through that cloud, why didn't it pop? Up a bit? Down a bit? Oh look, my timer in the dream has run out again, aaargh. It's annoying.

Do we need healer fights?

I guess I have to give Blizzard credit for having good intentions with the Valithria fight, but at least for this healer they completely failed at actually making it an enjoyable "healer fight". But you know what? I don't think we need them anyway. Sometimes it's easy to feel underappreciated as a healer, but to an extent it's part of the job. If you want to be able to brag about your awesome performance all the time, you probably shouldn't be a healer, because that's really not what it's all about.

Also, personally I found that my favourite raid fights in the game so far were those that challenge healers simply in the same way as everyone else, by requiring awareness and good teamwork. Give me more of those and I'll be happy.

Pondering those five percent

Last night my guild had its first raid with the buff. On a sidenote, what's the Alliance version called? And does it produce similarly amusing reactions along the lines of "Has Garrosh always been in Icecrown Citadel or am I going mad?" and "Can I stab him?".

Opinions on the buff are strongly divided, both in the blogosphere and in my guild. Just before we started clearing trash last night, my boyfriend whispered two different people, asking them what they thought of the buff. One said that being able to do five percent more damage sounded cool, the other one thought that it sucked and felt like using a cheat code. I'm a bit unsure what to think of it myself.

First off, I'm not against nerfing content after some time to allow more people to have a shot at it. I remember back in BC when they removed the attunement requirements for Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. My guild's twenty-five-man raiding progress was still quite shaky at that point, and for us that particular nerf was simply awesome, because I'm not sure we ever would have got into those raids at all otherwise. We just weren't that organised yet, and running all the raiders through the attunement quest chain would have been beyond our abilities I think. Thus that nerf had no downsides for us, it was a hundred percent beneficial in that it allowed us to access content that we wouldn't have seen otherwise.

By the time the same thing was done to Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, things were a bit different. We were still trying to down Kael'thas, and felt a bit ashamed when we started working on the first couple of MH bosses as well because it felt like we were unfairly skipping content. We did keep working on Kael at the same time though and eventually got him down, which fortunately ended all arguments about the matter.

When the infamous patch 3.0 hit and gave everyone access to the WOTLK talent trees while also nerfing all raid bosses by thirty percent, we had just downed Mother Shahraz in BT. We continued to take down the Illidari Council and Illidan after the nerf and still had fun, but not without that nagging feeling that it didn't quite count in the same way. I remember watching the raid take huge wads of damage on Illidan while I spammed my suddenly stupidly overpowered raid-wide circle of healing, and thinking "We are doing this completely wrong, if it wasn't for the nerf, people getting hit by those fires would be obliterated." We still achieved something, it just wasn't quite the same - there was always this nagging feeling that if Blizzard had only let us, we could have taken down those last two fights the normal way as well, given enough time. However, WOTLK was just around the corner and in all honesty we wouldn't have kept raiding BT after the expansion release, so we kind of shrugged it off.

And now we have the buff in ICC. What makes this one interesting and different are two things really:
1. It's optional, and
2. It's incremental.

In regards to point one, I feel a bit sorry for Blizzard because it's one of those things where you just can't win. If they hadn't added the option to turn it off, people would be complaining about having it forced on them, and why couldn't they allow the more hardcore guilds to raid without it if they wanted to? Now they've given us exactly that, and already people are wishing that they didn't have any choice, because it just leads to guilds arguing about whether they should use it or not.

There's also complaining about the fact that choosing any option one way or the other isn't recognised in any way, with some players suggesting that there should have been different achievements depending on whether you did things with or without the buff. Now, aside from the fact that this would be a bit of a logistical nightmare, considering that the buff increases over time so you'd need like seven different achievements for killing each boss (Saurfang with five percent, Blood Queen with twenty percent etc.), I also think that it's simply asking a bit too much of the achievement system. I mean, it also doesn't differentiate between whether you cleared the Deadmines at level fifteen or eighty, or whether you killed Marrowgar with a full raid or while five people were disconnected. I remember when killing Archimonde was an achievement without anyone actually having any text pop up that said "wow, an achievement". It just was. Not using the buff works the same way and I'm okay with that.

One thing I find interesting (and that others have commented on as well) is the fact that the buff is opt-out instead of opt-in, which means that it's on by default. It's interesting because it sends the message that Blizzard wants people to consider having the buff turned on the default option, while turning it off is a sort of hard mode. If you had to actively sign up for the buff, it would feel more like not having it is the normal way to go, while activating it is a conscious choice for "easy mode". This is a purely semantic distinction as the buff would still be the same, but that kind of thing matters to people. I would think that a lot of middle-of-the-road guilds especially must be quite torn about whether using the buff is hurting their cred or just means playing the game as intended.

The fact that it's incremental is a bit weird as well. I can see the logic behind it of course, as it should allow everyone to progress without feeling that content has been nerfed too hard. It buffs you just enough to get you past the wall you're currently hitting, and by the time you hit the next wall even with the buff, it increases some more just to let you overcome that next obstacle.

However, it also adds another dimension to the "should we raid with or without it" question. A guild that thinks that it should theoretically be able to clear ICC without any buffs might accept a five percent buff to make things go faster, but if it's ten percent a few weeks later, then what? Personally I'm quite inclined to accept a five percent boost for the time being, but I feel like it's leading me down a slippery slope, because a few weeks later it will be ten percent, then fifteen and so on... do I want to accept that boost as well or possibly set us back a boss kill or two by suddenly turning the buff off completely after all?

All in all, I find myself asking a lot of questions without being able to come up with definite answers. I think at the end of the day I value "seeing content" more than the perceived difficulty of the encounter, so I'm inclined to leave the buff on to help us progress, regardless of the slippery slope it might lead me down. Last night we killed Putricide for the second time - with the buff. And even though our first kill had been without it, we still struggled while having the buff to help us last night. Without it we might not have made it at all yesterday, but would that have made it a better raid night? I don't think so.

On the other hand I can understand why some of my fellow raiders might feel hurt in their pride if they think that we should be able to do it all "unbuffed". I'll cast my vote pro-buff if it comes down to it, but if the raid's final decision is to turn it off, I think I'll be able to accept that as well.

I rather like Icecrown Citadel and its difficulty

I realised the other day that considering how much time I spend raiding in WoW, I actually blog very little about it. The thing with raiding is, there are basically two kinds of articles you can write about it: how-to guides, which I personally don't care about, or stories about truly amazing boss kills or wipes, which I like well enough but in all honesty they don't happen that often. If you've been raiding with the same guild for years, and things mostly go well week after week, that's simply not very exciting to write about. You go in, wipe some, eventually the boss dies and some people get loot. The end.

However, I do think it's worth mentioning how things are going for us in Icecrown Citadel - they are going well - and that I like it. The boss fights are reasonably fun, they are varied enough that the difficulty isn't always decided by the healers' ability to spam their biggest heals, and well... the difficulty in general just feels right.

I don't know how other people feel about facing a new raid boss, and I reckon that opinions on this might vary a lot depending on how much and how "hardcore" you play, but me personally - I want a new raid boss to wipe the raid on the first attempt, and hard. I remember facing off against Jaraxxus in Trial of the Crusader for the first time, one-shotting him and being deeply disappointed. When a monster is so big and bad that it requires ten or even twenty-five people to kill, then it should also present me with a challenge that is worthwhile of assembling such a big group in the first place. I've said this before in regards to five-mans: I don't mind spending some time preparing things for a game-related task, but then said task should also take some time, otherwise I just spent more time assembling a group than actually playing with said group, and that stinks.

On the other end of the spectrum, things being too hard isn't fun either. I hated Trial of the Grand Crusader, especially on twenty-five-man because we spent so much time wiping in there without making any progress, it felt silly. People will probably disagree about how much is too much, but I'm sure everyone has their personal pain threshold which, if surpassed, will make them decide that "this just isn't fun anymore". Heroic Northrend Beasts and the Faction Champions certainly helped me find mine.

Now Icecrown Citadel on the other hand has felt pretty damn perfect in terms of difficulty so far, to me anyway. I think we wiped three times on Marrowgar the first time we tried him, which was more satisfying than one-shotting him, but still easy enough that he works well as an entrance boss. You don't expect the guy guarding the door to be that hard.

Deathbringer Saurfang took us a night or two until we found the right strategy to deal with the add spawns, and he challenged the healers nicely with tough but smart healing requirements (as opposed to mad spam fests). Basically a worthy boss for the end of a wing, but still not too terribly tough, considering that said wing is the first one of the instance.

The Plagueworks were a massive step up in diffculty in my eyes, and while we've downed both Festergut and Rotface, it wasn't without struggling considerably and we're still far from being able to replicate the experience reliably. Putricide seems hard enough that I don't think we'll be able to down him on twenty-five-man anytime soon, but this is where the beauty of the multi-wing design comes in.

Last night for example our raid leader decided that instead of going back to the Plagueworks and trying to down Rotface again (Festergut was already dead), we'd have a look at the Crimson Hall. Trying to down the Blood Prince Council was absolutely manic and I quickly lost track of how many times we wiped. As a raid healer I didn't have much of a clue what was going on a lot of the time to be honest, but I still tried my best and judging by how our attempts were getting better and better (in-between some total failures) we seemed to be making progress.

At the end of the night, already having gone past our usual raid end time, with everyone tired and mostly just wanting to get things done and over with, we finally downed the Princes on the nineteenth try (according to the log), and my priest is now an Orb Whisperer. It felt wonderfully satisfying.

So yeah, I'm rather liking Icecrown Citadel so far, and I'm looking forward to working some more on the later bosses as well as to actually having options. Good work, Blizz.

Icecrown gating and difficulty

There's been a lot of hubbub in the blogosphere about the news that the release of Icecrown Citadel will be slowly staggered and that people will only have limited amounts of attempts on several bosses even on normal mode. I understand that the top raid guilds are annoyed by this, but personally I don't think it will affect me much. My guild is not the kind to push for server firsts, and if running out of attempts forces us to stop for the week or to go back and farm Trial of the Crusader some more, so be it. Waiting a few more weeks to kill the Lich King won't make or break the game for me.

What amuses me slightly about this whole development is that it's basically a sign of Blizzard doing some massive backpedaling from their initial WOTLK raiding policy. Personally I thought that BC raiding was fine with its continual increase in difficulty and attunement requirements, but for some reason the developers thought that things needed to change and that it would be a good idea to make all the WOTLK starter raids super easy and immediately accessible to everyone. The result? People cleared everything really quickly and then asked: "What now?"

Seeing that this wasn't working as planned, Ulduar was designed to be harder again and to keep players busy for longer, though judging by how quickly some of the encounters were nerfed again, Blizzard soon had regrets about that too.

Along comes Trial of the Crusader, going back to super easy mode (though with a "make this really difficult" switch for the hardcore raiders), but not releasing all the bosses at once to make sure that nobody cleared the whole instance in the first week. And now we get more of the same in Icecrown, trying to make everything really accessible, yet at the same time not immediately accessible, like it used to be in BC because of attunements.

The difference with this new system is that it basically rewards long periods of inactivity. In BC things went like this: Want to kill Prince Malchezaar? Better get cracking and work on that Karazhan attunement! In Icecrown it will be: Want to kill Arthas? Well, wait a couple of weeks and he'll be unlocked automatically. Wait even longer and you'll get a powerful buff to defeat him more easily! It's like... rested XP for raids, except that there's no choice to keep going unrested. I think Blizzard have overshot their goal of appealing to the casual player if they make content that actively prevents you from playing more.

Also, it leaves me concerned about the difficulty of normal mode Icecrown. Surely if it offered a decent challenge you wouldn't have to erect such heavy artificial barriers to hold people back? Hard modes or not, if normal mode Arthas turns out to be as much of a pushover as Anub'arak, I'll be disappointed.

Anyone remember how at the start of WOTLK, Blizzard said that they would make the tiers coming after Naxx progressively harder when people complained that Naxx & Co. were too easy? They said that they just wanted to make things a bit more accessible overall, which I thought was fair enough, considering the insane difficulty of Sunwell at the end of BC. Ulduar lived up to that promise, but with the release of Trial of the Champion it all went out the window again. Sure, Trial requires somewhat better gear than Naxx (to make sure that your tank doesn't go splat on Gormok and your dps can kill Anub'arak before he enrages), but mechanics-wise it's a huge step backwards from Ulduar again and pretty much on par with Naxx. The impression I got from this is that Blizzard has kind of stopped caring about logical raid progression and just makes everything really easy so everyone can do it, adding a "really difficult" option for the hardcore, and leaving all the middle-of-the-road raiders in some kind of black hole where the normal modes offer no challenge and the hard modes are too hard. I guess we'll all just have to level some more alts instead then?