Point Madness

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.

Friday Night Fever

Since I was very enthusiastic about getting back into WoW, I threw myself into a bunch of pugs last night, and - as if through a miracle - there was at least one aspect about each of them that made me happy.

Things started in heroic Stonecore with my hunter. The run wasn't exactly amazing, but we actually had a tank who was friendly and talked to the rest of the party instead of just silently ploughing through things. When we wiped on Ozruk, nobody got mad and instead we discussed what went wrong. When we wiped a second time, the dps death knight said, "okay, can someone explain to me how I avoid getting killed here because clearly I'm not getting it", and everyone piped up with helpful explanations. People being happy to teach others and willing to discuss strategy? Be still, my heart.

Then I decided to tackle my biggest challenge for the evening: since I was home alone and had plenty of time, I was going to tank a Zul heroic pug on my druid. Lady RNG decided to put me into Zul'Gurub. Admittedly the run didn't start out too great: we had a couple of wipes on trash and people kept dropping out. However, I had pretty much expected this and wasn't really fazed by it. I was the tank, I knew this place, and I was going to finish the instance. I didn't care if other people chickened out at the drop of a hat, after all I could always requeue for replacements. (My favourite was the healer who rage-quit after I pulled a named trash mob that most of the party - including the guy himself - needed for their quest but that he didn't want to kill for some reason. I mean, seriously?)

As we approached Mandokir, the group finally started to settle down. We now had a paladin healer who confessed that it was his first time in the instance but who did a fabulous job anyway, a dps warrior from my server with whom I bonded quite quickly ("Earthen Ring pug power!"), a hunter and... I forget what the last dpser was, either a warlock or a shadow priest. We killed the next couple of bosses without any major problems and I got a nice pair of new healing leggings.

Jin'do was where things eventually got hairy and we had a couple of wipes. They didn't feel too bad to me though, if that makes sense, as we always got pretty close to beating the encounter and there didn't seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with what people were doing. We only had to reset phase one once, after the paladin had stood outside of the deadzone and died, which he sheepishly explained with a friend distracting him at the worst possible moment. Most of us just laughed it off.

The hunter however started to get increasingly cranky, always blaming the healer for everything that went wrong. Finally he declared that the next attempt was going to be his last one and that the paladin should better not mess this one up. Then the hunter himself botched it by standing in the wrong place and wasting a body slam, and we wiped again. He raged some more, but I just said, "Wasn't this going to be your last attempt?" He responded by shouting "fine, do it without me then" and left the group. We got another hunter as replacement, and downed the boss easily on the next attempt. Funny how it's always the pompous gits who end up holding everyone else back. Jin'do rewarded me with a nice new tanking weapon as well, which was welcome as I had had terrible luck with heroic weapon drops and was still using an ilevel 333 blue.

Still, that run had taken over two hours and I wanted something more relaxing now, so I decided to tank one of the old heroics on my paladin next. I got dropped into heroic Throne of the Tides, with the rest of the party already zoned in at the entrance, which gave me the impression that their previous tank had left as soon as he saw where he had landed. What is it with tanks dropping from that one as soon as they see it? I've definitely noticed that one happening quite a lot. And it's not even a particularly hard instance or anything... When the rest of the party started chatting, I noticed that they were all in the same guild. I commented on this as a positive fact and they joked that I should wait with getting too excited until I saw their dps. I didn't care though, I was just happy to be playing with a group of people who were bound to be interested in working together.

We killed the boss that most pugs skip since one of the guildies still had the quest to save Erunak, and he was very pleased. I had fun educating the mage about the wonders of spellsteal when applied to the swell buff. On the last boss things got kind of messy when I died just before the last sapper was killed (not sure whose fault it was really) and at least one of the dpsers had trouble targetting the giant squid. In the end everyone was dead except for the warlock, who easily took care of Ozumat's remaining health and stayed alive through massive self-heals. I also got rewarded with a new chest for my healing gear, which was a nice cherry on top of what had already been a very pleasant run filled with friendly banter.

Up next I ran a quick normal with my shaman. We got Grim Batol and it was a pretty smooth and uneventful run. What impressed me at the end however was that there were two need rolls on each of the two drops from the last boss, but then both winners traded the item to the other person because "it's your main spec" and "I think this is better for you than for me". Quite a change from the usual greed and selfishness that has people needing on stuff they don't even want just for the gold.

I decided to finish up the night with a random heroic on my death knight. (Fun fact: I started gearing up my shaman and my death knight at the same time, but while my death knight has been running heroics for some time now, my shaman is still stuck in normals because even though I'd technically be allowed to queue her for heroics, I'm still having such massive mana issues that I simply don't dare. The joys of being a tank or healer vs. being a damage dealer...) I got Stonecore again, and while this run wasn't as good as the previous ones, it was still alright. I got another upgrade and saw the Reins of the Vitreous Stone Drake drop for the third time or so, though I didn't win them.

There was one funny moment when we managed to get nearly everything in the hallway behind Corborus at once, everyone but the tank and healer died, and mere moments after the healer had resed the warlock afterwards, the poor guy got killed again by a bunch of Rock Borers that spawned right on top of him. He started swearing in all caps and for a moment I wasn't sure what to think since it sounded pretty angry to me, but then everyone just started laughing like crazy and eventually I couldn't help it either. Let me tell you, it's a pretty strange feeling to sit in front of your PC and giggle at your screen like a lunatic...

That concluded my night of pugging and in all honesty, I was pretty damn satisfied. It's good to have that kind of experience every now and then, considering how much doom and gloom about the state of the WoW community is going around, just to remind you that it's actually not all that bad.

State of the dungeon finder

I still haven't dared to brave the dungeon finder for a random heroic on my own, but I'm slowly trying to wean myself from only running with guild groups. To be honest I kind of have to - unsurprisingly, the tanks have finished their heroic gearing before anyone else, and I'm pretty sure that even some of the tanking alts have overtaken me on gear progression by now... either way the number of guildies that are interested in joining a heroic group is going down each day, and being able to get a full guild run together is rapidly becoming a luxury. I don't see that as an entirely bad thing though, as I've said in the past that - unlike many other players - I do like pugs. I think at the moment the main thing that still scares me a little is that I haven't done all the heroic dungeons yet, and I'm terrified of having my "first time" with a bad group. Once I know what to expect I'm usually a lot more confident.

Nonetheless, I'm working on it. Initially I only ran with full guild groups; then we had some runs where we pugged one person. The players we got were all very good and we didn't have any problems with them. From there I dared to take it to runs where it was three guildies vs. two puggers. We only got one completely hopeless dps at one point, but after we kicked him it was smooth sailing again. And last night I finally braved the dungeon finder with only a single guildie of mine by my side, an elemental shaman.

We got Vortex Pinnacle, which I hadn't done on heroic before, so I was slightly nervous even though I had heard that it was definitely one of the easier heroics. Fortunately my shaman friend was an absolute star, assigning crowd control on trash and patiently explaining fight mechanics to me and the tank, who hadn't done the instance before either. The dps did their job admirably, using crowd control, interrupts and doing good damage.

The tank was kind of an interesting case. As I mentioned, he admitted that it was his first time in there, but he didn't say so up front. In fact, he charged into the first pull with no crowd control and I immediately broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what that kind of tanking was going to mean for the rest of the run. However, my shammy friend nagged him about marks, so he set some... and then didn't really follow them himself. Again he was asked about this, at which point he finally admitted that he didn't really know what he was doing, and could someone else please mark for him? No problem! I'm just glad that he fessed up.

On those pulls with the tol'vir in the anti-magic field he was advised to make a line-of-sight pull... and had apparently no idea what that meant, as he charged right in anyway. We lived through it, but I couldn't help but wonder whether the tank hadn't just outed himself as a Wrath baby, as anyone that learned the ropes before WOTLK would have known what doing a LOS pull meant. Still, aside from that our tank did very well, used his tools appropriately and generally came across as a genuinely nice fellow. We had a pretty smooth run in the end, with only two wipes on the second boss as some of us had to get used to dodging the tornadoes first. It makes me hopeful for my future pugs; I'll just have to remember to also keep an open mind and to encourage communication like my shaman friend did.

Now, normal pugs are something that I've been doing aplenty, mostly on my druid. Unfortunately they've largely been less fun than my heroics. There is less wiping, mind you, though people have become a bit more tolerant of it even in normals, but the attitudes are rarely pleasant.

Especially in the low-level instances, that is Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides, you'll often run into people that behave as if they've freshly stepped out of a WOTLK heroic and haven't got a clue about what's changed this expansion. "Gogogo"-ing, pulling for the tank, you name it. This isn't helped by the fact that BRC in particular seems somewhat undertuned on normal mode so that you can completely ignore many boss mechanics, such as Corla's zealots and the crepuscular veil of Obsidius's adds.

As you go up in levels this gets a bit better and people will at least wait for the tank to pull, but crowd control is still something that nobody really bothers with. On some pulls it really doesn't matter; on others it means that the healer has to do overtime and then hope that the tank is willing to wait for mana before charging into the next group.

Boss mechanics, interestingly enough, are something I've had few problems with on normal. Occasionally someone will mess up because they didn't know what to do and didn't ask for an explanation either, but even if that leads to a wipe it's usually not a problem to do it right next time. Sometimes the one who messed up will rage-quit because clearly the rest of the group sucks and wiped him, but then you'll only have an even easier time with his replacment, so you still win. Today in Grim Batol I had a warrior who seemed to consider it hilarious to intentionally do the wrong thing on bosses (such as charging Drahga's elemental add to make it explode or running all over the place during Erudax' shadow gale) and we still made it through.

The thing that has really been bugging me in my normal runs however is the incredible loot greed. For example I was healing a normal Stonecore run where the party repeatedly commented favourably on how I had managed to heal through some very sticky situations when we got multiple trash groups at once - and then when Azil dropped her healing trinket, the mage took it and left. /sigh. Why are classes with no healing spells even allowed to roll on trinkets with a healing proc?

Today in Grim Batol, a similar scene. Drahga drops his spirit cloak and the warlock wins the roll over me. I call him out on it and he says that it was better than "the crap cloak" he had - he was wearing the same cloak as me actually, another drop with spirit on it. Maybe he should try rolling on dps gear for a change? In a funny twist of fate, I then won the caster trinket off the last boss which works for both damage dealers and healers, and suddenly the lock offered to trade me the cloak for the trinket. So let me get this straight, you roll on a healer cloak - which you shouldn't have done in the first place - and then graciously offer to trade it to me in exchange for an item that you want as well? How about NO? Is this some sick new kind of loot whoring strategy, needing on everything you can in hopes of being able to use it as a bargaining chip against your competition later on? "Oh hey, I'll trade you that item I ninjaed from you earlier if you give me this drop now..." What will they come up with next?

Likewise I was tanking a normal BRC run today, when I saw a mage roll against the healer on a spirit ring, the healer won, and then the mage got all pouty because the healer had already won some other healing loot earlier as well. Yes, because if someone gets lucky with drops for their class/role, you obviously should try to take some of their loot away just to spite them. What.

I miss the times when people were able to be genuinely happy for someone else getting a great item for their class and spec instead of greedily trying to grab everything that the system will let them roll on just because it has a single useful stat for them on it.

What have other people's pugging experiences been like?