Delving in Season 2

After the rough start I had with delves at The War Within's launch, I slowly warmed up to them over time, and have in fact been really getting into them this season. I completed the seasonal reward track much faster than last time, and also got Brann to the new level cap of 80, after not even hitting the previous companion level cap during Season 1. I'm currently working my way towards the achievement to complete all delves on tier 11 as every role. Tank's all done, dps is mostly there, and healer still has a way to go, but it's only a matter of time.

Blizzard took an (in my opinion) interesting approach to the new season with delves. While they added two new ones, and they are bountiful more often than the old ones, the old delves are still just as valid as a means for gearing up. I still remember when they added the two revamped troll dungeons back in Cataclysm and how burnt out people got on them due to the reward structure encouraging you to run just those two dungeons over and over again. It's nice to see that the devs have learned from some mistakes over the years.

In fact, they put a surprising amount of effort into giving the old delves a seasonal refresh as well, by adding lots of new (mostly goblin-themed) variants to them. I'm still not sure whether I've already seen them all, as Blizz made the strange decision to just add them to the existing "stories" achievements without requiring you to actually tick them off if you already completed the achievement in Season 1. I guess it makes sense to not make achievement hunters lose points (even if temporarily) but as someone who primarily views achievements as a way of keeping track of what I've done and what I haven't, the lack of an actual new achievement to track has been rather unhelpful.

They also made some changes to various delve mechanics, seemingly in an effort to make them less annoying based on player feedback from Season 1, but I've mostly got mixed feelings about those. The addition of the goblin vendor to the underwater delves who sells you underwater breathing for a hefty markup feels like a tacit admission that the "run through air bubbles to keep breathing" mechanic is not very fun and that people just bought underwater breathing potions to simply negate the whole mechanic anyway. It's still much cheaper to bring your own potions than to pay for the goblin's services, but it's helpful if you find yourself running out of consumables due to deaths or simply find yourself at the entrance of the delve realising that you forgot to buy potions entirely.

The way candles and totems were changed from an item you carry with you to a consumable buff that you plop down where you want them to sit feels like an adjustment to the reality that people were always dropping the candle/totem anyway to be able to move freely during combat, but I miss being able to pick it up again for moving, as the new system basically forces you to move in the dark/through poison a lot, which I'm not a fan of.

I also dislike what they've done to the spores in Fungal Folly and Mycomancer Cavern. I actually really liked the way they were a risk vs. reward mechanic in Season 1, where I actually enjoyed aggroing them and dragging them onto enemies to use them as an additional source of damage. Now they are no longer attackable or move, plus their damage to mobs has been dramatically reduced (if they even still do any at all), so they are just a nuisance that means you can't stand still for too long in certain spots.

And the new web mechanics in the Nerubian delves are just more annoying all around, whether it's the little unkillable egg things that you have to keep hitting every so often or else they'll cover the whole floor in webs again, or the respawning flying web spreaders that you can't fully prevent from dropping webs on you at the most inconvenient times.

Of course, the biggest change to delves this season is that Brann was given a tank role. I'm still not entirely clear on why he was only able to support you as dps or healer in Season 1 anyway. I thought it was very telling when I saw someone comment in a discussion about this topic that duh, he can't be a tank because that would completely trivialise the content. This is amusing to me because it does align with my own perception that tanks in modern WoW are way too overpowered. However, I didn't think it was a sufficient explanation because the devs seemed to have similar concerns about healer Brann and worked around those by making it so that he does relatively little direct healing but instead just plops down all these healing potions that the player has to actively pick up.

It's interesting to see WoW wrestling with these sorts of companion issues when I've mainly been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for the last thirteen years, which has had permanent companions since launch. The SWTOR devs did seemingly also have concerns about companions being overpowered at launch, as healer companions were originally much more limited in what they could do. Specifically they were pretty good at rolling heal-over-time abilities on multiple players at once, but their biggest burst heal put a debuff on the player that prevented that person from receiving another burst heal for fifteen seconds or however long it was, meaning that companion healing was very hobbled compared to that of an actual player. After they threw all of that out the window with the big companion revamp of the 4.0 expansion, healer companions in particular did indeed become very OP, and it's been a long-running complaint that this makes content too easy/prevents new players from learning how to play because their healer comp will just heal them through absolutely everything.

Anyway, I digress - let's return to tank Brann. I tried him out relatively early on and my first impression was mostly positive. It certainly was a lot more fun when doing delves as a healer to actually be able to stand there and heal than to constantly kite and hit self-preservation cooldowns because everything's always aggroed on you no matter what. He did seem to take a lot of damage, way more than a player tank would take under the same circumstances, but I figured that was fine as a way of making the healer work for it in a way that aligned with their play style.

Then Blizz decided to nerf him massively, increasing his damage taken by 60% (among other things) because the spec had "simply proven to be too powerful when players hang back and just focus on healing him" aka when you simply play a healer as intended. This was a massive facepalm moment, though they did roll some of those changes back later on I think.

Either way, I've actually found that tank Brann's biggest issue aren't damage numbers but that his general behaviour can simply be extremely erratic and buggy at times. When he works as designed, you aggro a couple of mobs, he rounds them up around himself, and you spam heals on his rapidly dropping health bar until all enemies are dead.

In reality though, I've found that pretty much in every other delve, there'll be a situation where he rounds up the mobs you pulled but then decides to charge off into the next group of mobs... and the next one... and the next one... until you've aggroed way too many enemies and end up wiping. Playing a priest, I've tried to use Leap of Faith on him on those occasions to pull him back, but he immediately runs off again and there's nothing you can do to stop him. At first I took this in stride and joked about how he was training you up for bag pugs, but it's happened so often now, it really feels like this should be something that should be avoidable. In dps and heal mode, there are safeguards in place so that if/when Brann decides to randomly drop an AoE on a new mob group you didn't even want to pull, they just ignore it unless you engage them in combat yourself. I'm not sure why tank Brann is allowed to pull all over the place and doesn't follow the same model.

In rarer but no less infuriating instances, he'll do the exact opposite and just decide not to do anything at all. Just this morning I did a Tak-Rethan Abyss, and on the last boss, Brann just refused to engage for some reason. He somehow held aggro, but barely took any damage and did absolutely none himself. Do you have any idea how long it takes to kill a tier 11 boss with a lot of movement requirements by yourself as a holy priest?! The fight lasted for about fifteen minutes until my concentration finally failed me, I stepped on a mushroom and got one-shot. I then changed Brann's role to dps and on the next attempt we killed it just fine, but not until after I'd subjected my husband to a lot of ranting about what an absolute maniac and "bearded menace" tank Brann was.

I can only hope that Blizzard will be able to fine-tune his performance over time, or even better, that they'll give us some means of actually controlling him in the future. I presume that there are additional concerns here that this might make him too OP or be abusable in some way, but being unable to stop him from pulling or to make him attack when you're in a fight and he just twiddles his thumbs is way worse in my opinion.

When You're the Bad Pug (in RFD)

Last Sunday I healed a Razorfen Downs pug with my undead priest in Season of Discovery. It went... awkwardly.

I felt chipper enough when I first joined the group - I was filling the last spot, so we were immediately ready to go. The group had been listed for several dungeons, so I asked what the ultimate destination was meant to be and was told that it was Razorfen Downs. I could see that several people were already on their way to the entrance, and the tank was a warlock, which meant that I could simply await a summon, which was nice as I was very far away.

The tank asked whether we were all okay with doing the escort quest after the first boss, and I said "sure". I mostly took it as a given that the escort and its associated boss encounter would be included in an RFD run, but there's nothing wrong with making sure that everyone's on the same page! The warlock wasn't appeased that easily though - he insisted that each individual member confirmed in writing in the chat that they were okay with doing the escort, and that they would wait for everyone to hand in the previous quest before picking up the next one (the actual escort). A rather unexpected degree of paranoia I guess, but I wasn't put off just yet because I was well aware of how much of a pain that escort could be. (I mentioned it in this post from 2011!)

Anyway, eventually a summon arrived for me, and the moment I loaded in, someone shared the quest you can pick up just outside the instance with me. I thanked everyone around me and started buffing everyone with fortitude, something that still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD. I hadn't even buffed everyone yet when the tank was already off to the races - and thus began half an hour of me frantically chasing after him, trying to sit down to drink every now and then but barely getting above 20% of my mana at any given time.

At one point before we even got inside the instance, the tank died because he had charged so far off, I hadn't stood a snowball's chance in hell at getting in range of him in time. He put "mb" in the chat but didn't seem to learn a lesson from it as he still didn't slow down in any way the moment he was back on his feet. Eventually I did put "oom" in chat myself because I really wanted a moment to drink, but this still wasn't enough to stop the tank. One of the dpsers took pity on me and handed me a mana potion though. At one point we spotted a chest and a few people rolled on it - I won but again didn't have time to actually grab it because the tank was running and pulling again and I had to race after him in turn to keep him alive.

When we reached Belnistrasz, the tank was very firm that we should all "just accept, don't talk". Frazzled as I was from the constant running and barely being able to keep up, I quickly accepted the first quest, hit complete and then accepted the second quest, which immediately started the NPC running. "Who hit accept?!" the tank roared, and it took me a moment to process what had even happened. He'd said to just accept, not talk, which was what I'd done... but then I opened my quest log and could see that I was the only person on the escort quest. It was only then that it came back to me that of course, that's why it was so annoying, because there is no separate dialogue option to start the escort, it immediately starts the moment you accept the quest. Why had he said "just accept, don't talk" then though...?

Anyway, the tank kept demanding to know who'd ruined everything while we ran back to the entrance to reset the instance. I wanted to be honest and confess, but he seemed so mad, and someone else piped up with a comment along the lines "somebody probably had auto-accept on" (in an addon). I of course had no such addon installed, but the temptation of blaming an unspecified person's addon was just too great and I said nothing.

When we got outside, the tank again made each of us confirm individually that we didn't have any auto-accept function on (anymore) before resetting the instance. As we fought our way through the same bunch of pig people a second time, he also kept putting "alfa" in chat repeatedly. I didn't know what that meant, but already racked with guilt and nervous as I was, I worried that I was missing something important and eventually asked whether that was a SoD thing. Someone simply said yes and the tank repeated "alfa" a few more times. But who was he talking to? I searched Wowhead for "alfa" on my second screen and got no useful results. Was I doing something else wrong now? Fortunately it eventually turned out that it was the shaman he'd been pestering, namely for the buff "Spirit of the Alpha".

Anyway, we got back to Belnistraz again, and it was once again emphatically repeated not to start the escort quest until the tank officially called for it. I meekly hung my head and waited. When I noticed level-up type sparkles around people's heads as others handed in the pre-quest, I started to sweat again. What if people were paying attention and noticed that I wasn't visibly completing the pre-quest just now? Would that give away my bad deed from earlier? However, even as I wondered about that, I suddenly got the pop-up to say that someone else had started the escort quest and whether I wanted to accept it too. I clicked yes of course, and there was once again raging about how someone hadn't waited, though at least I knew it wasn't me this time. There was also no threat of a reset as only one guy had been unable to pick up the escort, and the tank was like "screw that one guy" I guess.

The silver lining of the run was that the boss at the end of the escort dropped Scroll of Shadowfiend for me, which I took with some delight. I had no idea you could even earn extra non-rune abilities like that too!

Anyway, we continued the run as before, crazy rushing included. One of the bosses dropped a really nice caster cloak, but I saw the tank roll need so I passed, guilty conscience still gnawing at me, plus I had got the distinct impression that this tank had very strong opinions about getting what he wanted.

He also died two more times on trash, even though I was able to keep everyone else alive. He hadn't run out of range either, I just... wasn't able to keep him up? He seemed to take crazy amounts of damage sometimes, but I have no experience with warlock tanks so I couldn't judge whether this was normal or whether he was effectively doing the warlock equivalent of tanking in battle stance and without a shield when you're under-levelled for the dungeon. I just felt like I was failing as a healer, even though nobody said anything. At one point after I'd resed him again, he just stood there for a minute not moving, and I imagined him telling his guild mates about how trash the healer in his RFD run was.

Eventually we got to the end of the dungeon. We ran past another chest, which nobody but me even attempted to roll for this time, so I just looted it after everyone else had left. Amnennar the Coldbringer dropped his Coldrage Dagger, on which the rogue in the party rolled need... but so did the warlock, and he was the one who won. The rogue just put a ":/" in chat, understandably not pleased with a caster needing on a melee weapon. I felt bad for him, but that last incident also made me feel a bit better about my own failures, knowing that the warlock wasn't just bossy and in a hurry but also a ninja. Didn't need to feel quite so bad about him dying then I guess.

I hearthed back to Undercity and did my quest hand-ins. I then opened the group finder one more time just to see what else was happening, and saw that the warlock was already in the process of forming another group for Scarlet Monastery, this time with a druid healer that was only level 33. I silently wished that guy good luck in my head and logged off for the day.

Experimenting with Alts in War Within

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't sure what class I wanted to play as my main in War Within. Fortunately, the fact that I had one of each at level 70 by the time the expansion launched (largely thanks to MoP Remix and the Radiant Echoes event) meant that I had a lot of choice. One month in, I'm honestly still not sure which class I'd like to play more than any other, but I've had time to do a bit of exploring at least, as this expansion is very alt-friendly even if you're only playing on a relatively slow and casual level.

Preservation Evoker

For all the options I had, I still decided to go down the path of least resistance for my first character. She was my main in Dragonflight; it seemed easiest to just keep rolling along with her for now. Hopefully it shouldn't be too tough to switch focus to a different character later on if I feel like it.

She was the character on whom I did the main storyline, and the husband and I are still working our way through the side quests at a slower pace when there isn't anything else going on that takes priority in that moment.

The hero talent choices for Preservation Evoker are between Chronowarden (more bronze magic) and Flameshaper (more fire magic). I chose the former because it seemed more passive and I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to put extra abilities on her bar just for the sake of having more buttons to press, but it's honestly been kind of boring. I think it makes my Living Flame glow a bit differently? But other than that it really feels like a big nothingburger. In some ways that's a good thing since I was worried about hero talents adding too much additional complexity, but on the other hand it's also a little disappointing, especially since I've seen on some of my alts that these can be a lot more fun.

My evoker is also a skinner/leatherworker and I was kind of surprised by how engaged I've been with crafting so far this expansion. I thought the Dragonflight profession revamp was a bit of a miss, but Blizzard made some changes to the system this time around that, while small, have been pretty impactful. For example they added NPC ("Patron") crafting orders, meaning you can finally interact with the crafting order system even if there are never any public orders up for things that you can actually make. There's also a new button for concentration, which is kind of hilarious to me because I believe this is a mechanic that was already added in Dragonflight, but I just couldn't find it/see how to use it (and I didn't care enough to research it). Now there's suddenly this button and I can press it and it does things! Just goes to show the importance of a good user interface I guess.

All in all, I'm still feeling a bit mixed about evoker though. I healed some dungeons for my friends and had a decent enough time, but... the TWW talent revamp has given me some new buttons to use that I keep forgetting to press because they don't feel particularly fun. Also, with the new expansion and having to gear up again, I feel extremely weak doing anything by myself in the open world right now, which can make even the easiest of world quests feel like utter tedium. The class feels surprisingly squishy for a mail-wearer, my self-healing seems poor in relation to my health pool right now, and my damage output is just absolutely pathetic. I don't expect to do a lot of damage as a healer, but evoker just feels so bad at it right now, and the lack of any AoE that's not on a long cooldown is particularly noticeable. If I pull more than one mob at a time, I always feel like I'm at risk of dying from boredom before actually killing any of my opponents.

Protection Warrior

This is in particularly stark contrast to my Protection Warrior, who is one of my newest alts (levelled during Remix) and was my second character to 80. Like all my alts, she's been levelling without doing the story, just by doing a mix of other activities like dungeons, world events and professions.

This probably won't surprise anyone who's got experience with the current retail game, but as someone with a more "classic" mindset, it still blows my mind that speccing tank is basically the best way to play the game as a casual soloer nowadays. Sure, you'll be slower at killing things than someone specced into dps (though still a lot faster than a healer), but you're also really good at AoE and near-indestructible. Wherever you go, you can just round up everything in sight and then slowly AoE it down at virtually no risk to yourself.

Is there a tough rare in front of you, or a heroic world quest with lots of elites? Never a problem, you just go in anyway. Worst case, you'll be there a long time, taking things down slowly by yourself, but most of the time some damage dealer will come by and be like "oh neat, a pile of controlled mobs that I can put AoE on for kill credit with zero risk to my health", which speeds things up considerably and effectively makes a tank the best class to solo on because you're both decently powerful and never have to wait for help from other people.

There was this one elite world quest I did in Azj-Kahet which granted one of those temporary ability buttons and for some reason it didn't appear in its usual spot but covered my health bar instead, meaning I couldn't see my own health anymore. While I tanked a big group of mobs, now and then the edges of my screen would start flashing red, which is when I knew it was time to hit a cooldown, and soon things were fine again. It just seemed ridiculous how easy it is to get by this way.

I have done some actual tanking as well, even if it was all normal mode dungeons. I tanked the Rookery at least half a dozen times to help get some guildies levelled up for example. This was decent fun and kind of reminded me of when I used to do a fair amount of tanking on my paladin and druid back in Wrath and Cata, even if the gameplay is somewhat different nowadays. Threat is pretty much a non-issue if people aren't being stupid and AoEing things you haven't even touched yet (though they often will do just that), and it's really only about how to best round up groups of mobs efficiently and being able to gauge how much you can pull without killing the rest of your group. Your own survival generally isn't a problem at this level, the more likely issue is that you end up pulling too many mobs with randomly targeted or AoE attacks, causing the damage on the dps and healer to become overwhelming.

For all of that, I'm not 100% sold on tanking as my new calling either. The main downside I see is just the amount of focus it requires. As described above, it's not exactly hard (on the level we are doing it on), but it does require you to be switched on for the entirety of the run in a way that dps and even healing doesn't in easier content. It's something that would probably get better with practice, but I'm still not sure how much time and energy I really want to commit to it.

Oh, and I went down the Colossus hero talent tree, which gives me an extra ability with a medium cooldown that always makes it look like my character is flailing about wildly. Not sure I'd really call that my warrior class fantasy, but I do like the way that hero talent tree is generally about ramping up your damage output over time, making you hit harder and harder as time goes on, as that's something that synergises quite well with a tank's longer kill times.

Holy Priest

My lightforged holy priest is a character I created during Shadowlands and which I've always kept on the back burner since then, never spending too much time on her but also never leaving her too far behind. I still feel a strong affiliation with the class that gave this blog its name, but neither shadow nor discipline appeal to me nowadays. Holy supposedly isn't very good at the moment either, but I have had decent fun healing some alt dungeons with her and playing whack-a-mole with all the different heal buttons.

The thing that has stood out to me with this character is that unlike my evoker, she still feels decent fun to solo on, even as a healer. Now, she's still levelling, so her power levels will continue to go down some more before they go up again, but the dps toolkit just feels more fun than that of the evoker in general. Putting Shadow Word: Pain on every enemy, spreading Holy Fire and popping a Holy Nova whenever it's in its fully empowered state is just entertaining, even if it's not the fastest way to kill things. If I stick with healing, there's a chance I might end up using this character more instead of the evoker.

Holy priest hero talents are again a bit of a dud as far as I'm concerned. Oracle is all about complicated buff management and was what initially made me feel absolutely terrified of hero talents when I heard it being discussed in a podcast prior to the expansion, so I was definitely not going to go for that one. That left me with Archon, which kind of seems to be focused on Halo, an AoE with a long-ish cooldown for a heal and that isn't among my favourites. What can you do?

Frost Death Knight

At some point I felt that I really needed to level a damage dealer just to see what mob kill times are actually supposed to be like for the average player, and I was going back and forth between prioritising this character or my hunter. The death knight eventually won out due to professions, as she's a herbalist/scribe, while the hunter is another skinner/leatherworker.

So this is one of the characters I only revived after the Warband patch and levelled during Radiant Echoes. She lives on my original Horde server and I remember not being overly fond of death knights back in the day, though the class grew on me a little over time and I even recall tanking some dungeons.

I mostly felt inspired to play her in War Within by the fact that her dps rotation seemed incredibly easy, with very few buttons to press (as having too many buttons to press just to do damage is one of my main issues with modern WoW's gameplay).

What did take me by surprise (after my previous experiences with hero talents) was how incredibly fun the Rider of the Apocalypse hero talent tree is. It basically allows you to fight from your ground mount in the open world and passively summons important death knight NPCs to help you out occasionally. I reckon that this is probably not the ideal choice for dungeons, but while just out and about doing world quests it's incredibly fun, even if it feels a bit ridiculous to have Highlord Darion Mograine show up to help you kill a random worm or bear. The mounted speed is also really great for rounding up mobs to AoE or to escape a fight you really can't be bothered with. My husband always complains that lack of mobility is the main thing he dislikes about his death knight, and this talent just counters that in a great way (in the open world at least).

Though one "mobility" issue remains... while questing as a duo with me on my evoker and my husband on his death knight, something that occurred more than once was that we'd fall down/off somewhere and while I'd glide gracefully to a safe landing, he'd go splat next to me and need a revive. I always made fun of him for that, but playing my own death knight, I quickly learned that it's basically a vibe for this class. As mentioned before, mine is also a herbalist, so it didn't take long for me to "discover" that those special flowers that knock you back and whose knockback can't be countered made their way over from the Dragon Isles - which is my way of saying that my first two deaths in Khaz Algar were both to being punted to my death by a herb while picking flowers on the Isle of Dorn. I guess you get used to it as a death knight.

Finally, I had a fun encounter on this character while questing one night: As mentioned, she's on my old Horde server, and I tend to forget that for all the cross-server stuff, if you're just out and about, you're still more likely to see people from the same server as you than complete randoms. So my eyes went wide when I actually ran into a troll priest whose name I recognised from fifteen years ago or however long it's been. I whispered him with something like "Nice to still see familiar faces around when coming back after a long absence!" to which his response was simply "That's just a polite way of saying we're getting old", which made me laugh.

I'm the Tank! Or Am I?

My druid got her swift flight form this weekend, and originally I meant to make this a post about the awesomeness of the quest chain required to unlock it. However, after a quick search of the blog archives, I found that I already made a post to that effect almost twelve years ago. This was during Wrath, when you could already get the skill directly from the trainer if you wanted, but the quest chain was still in game as a piece of optional content.

My druid has been getting all my love lately as she's my most recent character to 70, and as my paladin is approaching the point of being as kitted out as she's going to get outside of progression raids, focusing on the druid seemed like the next logical step. She's also still a tank, so I've been doing a fair amount of bear tanking (though there've also been some dungeons where I got to tag along as cat).

On Saturday I took her to our weekly community Gruul/Mag run for the first time and it was pretty fun, even if I didn't get any loot. I was the least geared of the three tanks, so it made sense that I was given the easy jobs... but on High King Maulgar the main tank died and it was up to me to taunt him and save the raid!

To top it off, something similar happened on Magtheridon afterwards: One of the much better geared paladins in attendance was supposed to tank him, and I was told to only build some threat "just in case" (as sudden tank death is not uncommon on this boss due to how hard he hits). I did as I was told, happily mangling away at one of his legs and trying to stay ahead of the dps on threat but not really expecting it to be important, when suddenly the tank went squish here as well, and I found myself yelling for people to heal me on voice while I was trying to manoeuvrer Mags away from the cube I'd stood next to. I then proceeded to tank him for the rest of the fight and felt very proud.

Of course, in case that got my ego too inflated, I tanked heroic Sethekk Halls for my flight form quest right after and I must have died five or six times in that (and only about half of those were wipes). That put things into perspective for sure.

As a result of all this, I've found myself thinking about tanking a lot. In WoW at least, it's something that's been tied to a lot of anxiety for as long as I can remember... both for the people actually playing the role and those complaining that they can never find a tank. It's never been my main focus, but I did do a fair amount of it over the years... yet I could remember little of how I felt about it.

Consulting the blog archives for past me's thoughts was certainly enlightening... and not just because it was like slowly watching a frog boil, as my standards for what I expected of my group mates declined over time. It's funny to look at posts like this one from 2010 for example, titled "An exemplary UP pug", in which I excitedly recount the tale of wiping twice in heroic Utgarde Pinnacle without anyone rage-quitting and only one guy insulting me a bit! The height of positive social interactions in an MMO, everyone!

On the subject of tanking in specific, I found this quote from a post about tanking in early Cata enlightening: "I was a pretty decent tank in late Burning Crusade, but two years of racing through Wrath heroics while AoEing everything and calling that tanking has left its mark on me." So I was a decent tank in late BC, eh? I do remember kind of liking tanking on my feral druid, though I seem to have little evidence of it other than old screenshots demonstrating how hard it can be to see anything while tanking certain bosses...

Exhibit A, dated October 2008.

My feeling right now is that I do like tanking in BC in a similar way to the way I like healing. With the lack of AoE aggro generating abilities, it's not dissimilar to the whack-a-mole of healing in dungeons. Use mangle on this mob, taunt a second, stun a third... whatever's needed to keep them all off the squishy people. What makes it more demanding is mainly that it's not a direct UI interaction, but that you have to actually operate in three-dimensional space, making sure you're in range for a taunt, at just the right distance for a charge, and so on and so forth. Plus there's a general expectation for the tank to take the lead and do the marking and kill order/CC assignments - which again, I don't really mind, but it does require additional mental effort that results in me feeling tired more quickly after spending some time tanking dungeons.

Oddly though, the thing that bothers me the most about tanking right now is that I'm always at the mercy of people who might not care. For me, both tanking and healing are caring roles in the sense that they are about helping and protecting the rest of your party, and the more I care about them and they care about me, the more satisfying it is. (I know it's kind of a cliché that healers are more caring and therefore favoured by women and blah de blah... I'm not speaking for anyone else, just how it works for me.)

The thing is, in our little group of "dungeon regulars", almost everyone has a tanking alt, but I'm the only person who's willing to heal. This means that whenever I'm tanking, the healer will have to come from the outside. Sometimes it's a guildie and it's generally okay (though it can still be a bit anxiety-inducing if I don't know the person that well and they behave in - to me - erratic ways, such as the priest who absent-mindedly decided to wander ahead of me into the last room in heroic Slave Pens, body-pulling both groups of crabs and nearly wiping us), but pugs can be completely hit and miss.

The priest healing us through heroic Sethekk Halls for example was a pug and clearly not impressed. He died on the first pull when a big heal got him aggro on a mob and it hit him before I could taunt it back, something for which I immediately apologised, because even though he was a stranger, I cared and felt bad. But all the subsequent times I died (and I mean when it happened to only me, and the rest of the group survived just fine), he seemed more annoyed with me than anything. I mean, I may well be projecting - I know it's a tough dungeon to heal, and didn't want to complain. But I certainly didn't feel the love when I slowly watched my health bar deplete sometimes with no incoming heals for what felt like ages, just to go splat yet again and then see the rest of the group finish off the pull or boss without me.

So I'm kind of torn about staying a bear on my druid... I like having a tanking alt available when needed, and I do quite enjoy tanking in some ways, but there's also a big part of me that's considering simply going tree so that I can focus on healing people I like, and not having to entrust my (virtual) life to strangers all the time. Plus in one of those "that's just typical" situations, my attempts at gearing my druid have coincided with several other people suddenly deciding that they want to work on their tanking alts now, so that we'll have e.g. four tank sign-ups for Kara and no healers. It's just awkward all around.

Alts in Outland

Considering that I went into Classic BC with four characters at the old level cap and how gung-ho I felt about the expansion at first, I didn't think it was going to take me this long to level more than one character to 70, yet here we are. On Saturday I finally hit level 70 on my mage.

One reason I struggled to work up enough enthusiasm to level my alts was that I'd forgotten just how samey the 60-70 experience feels in BC. Sure, there's enough content there that you could technically mix it up a bit by e.g. skipping straight ahead to Zangarmarsh and mostly ignoring the quests in Hellfire Peninsula, but it's most of those quests that give the best rewards to help get you started in Outland, so do you really want to skip them? But then doing the same few quest chains over and over within the course of only a couple of months gets old pretty quickly.

I would have expected that my natural tendencies would push me towards getting either a tank or a healer up next, for their utility in group content but well... that turned out to be more complicated than expected - more on that in a bit. The mage had the advantage that I could farm and quest with ease even while keeping an eye out for dungeon groups, but more than anything else, her professions were an incentive to work on her before any of my other alts. Specifically, I really wanted to level her tailoring to be able to upgrade my bags across all my characters without having to pay anyone any money, and while her enchanting is still very behind, I at least got it high enough to be able to disenchant Outland greens and blues and keep myself supplied with my own enchanting materials.

Even so, her actual progress in terms of levels happened in fits and spurts, meaning big pushes followed by periods of complete inactivity, the latest of which had set in just after she'd hit level 69. Interestingly, what ended up finally motivating me to get that last level was the fact that last Thursday, on her 13th Prince kill, my hunter finally got her Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix - meaning that in terms of loot, she's now more or less done with Kara. But I want to have an excuse to keep running it without contributing to all the loot getting sharded! So I ground out that last level on my mage at last so that she can be my replacement in tier four going forward... after all, Blizzard went ahead and took out the Kara attunement early (yes, even though we're only in phase two you can already get in there by having someone else open the gate for you), so it really was just about hitting the level cap, not even necessarily about completing my own attunement.

My holy pally and feral druid are both still level 62 and in somewhat of a weird place. Since Sarelle was the alt on which I raided Naxx, I naturally assumed that she would be my next priority after Tir, but healers were actually somewhat in overabundance right after the Dark Portal opened. I blame the 40-man raids... because if you look at their group make-up and then were to split them up into nothing but five-man groups, you'd actually end up with about the right amount of dps, but too few tanks and too many healers. That's why our little dungeon group on launch night ran with not one but two healers... so there really was no demand for healer alts on top of that.

In addition, the nerfs to holy paladins and buffs for all the other healing classes meant that they also feel somewhat less fun to play than in Classic, relatively speaking. I mean, you look at something like a healing druid getting tree form and compare it to holy pallies getting a mana cost reduction cooldown that only slightly compensates for the fact that their mana regen was hit with a massive nerf bat to begin with, and... yeah.

My feral druid on the other hand has had very different but no less interesting problems. Tanks are always in demand, right? The thing is, I tanked one dungeon for my guildies and it was strictly speaking a success... there were no wipes and I'm not sure we even had a single death, but aggro was all over the place and my health kept bouncing up and down like a yo-yo because I was so badly geared. (Having only hit 60 during the pre-patch, my druid was the least geared of all my alts.) This ultimately left me feeling bad about the whole experience and I vowed to myself to not tank another dungeon until I'd got some gear upgrades from Outland quests, plus I also specced out of my hybrid spec into full feral to get the extra threat generation from Mangle.

And that's... where I'm still sitting now. Her gear is much better already, but I'm still hesitant to tank again. I'm not afraid of tanking in principle, but tanking roles in BC have also shifted from how they were in Classic, and at least when it comes to dungeons, paladins are very much the flavour of the month expansion. It's not that warriors and druids can't do the job, or even that I'd think a group that has been "LF tank" for a while wouldn't be happy to take any class, but warrior and druid tanks have to work so much harder than pallies to keep aggro and of course the dps don't like waiting two seconds to give you time to build threat, so it makes for an unsatisfying experience all around and I'm actually not sure I want to deal with that.

Maybe you're reading these last few paragraphs and find yourself wondering: Why not just swap roles? Make the druid my healer and the paladin my tank? And indeed, why not? It would certainly solve a lot of my gameplay issues... but at the same time it doesn't mesh with the identities I envisioned for either of these characters, and that's still something that matters to me too, so I don't know. It's a slightly awkward situation.

The Trinity in Vanilla WoW

Liore revived one of the classics of MMO discussion this past week, the question of whether the "holy trinity" of classes being divided into tanks, healers and dps is a good or a bad thing. I'm on her side on this matter as I personally love to heal, though I'm also a fan of leaving room for additional roles such as support or crowd control. I just don't like it when people whine about the trinity without having any realistic/appealing suggestions for how to do things differently.

Anyway, I don't actually want to dive into the question of whether the trinity is a good or a bad thing myself, but seeing so many people get involved in discussing the subject made me want to talk about the differences I've observed on Kronos in regards to trinity gameplay compared to more modern MMOs.

The thing that I've found the most striking is that people are often extremely flexible. Calls like "LF2M" will go out without specifying any roles. Anyone is welcome! You still need a dedicated tank and healer, but getting a group together takes effort in itself and people are willing to be flexible to make the process easier. Warriors may like to do damage, but I've yet to meet one that didn't also have a shield in his or her bag and was willing to assume the tanking role if that was what's needed to get the run going. Likewise druids and paladins may not like being pigeonholed into the healing role, but they are often happy to do it for a five-man nonetheless.

I have a suspicion that the sort of crowd that is attracted to private Vanilla WoW servers may be unusually skewed towards people who are willing to make compromises and take on responsibility in order to make a group succeed - the amount of comments I've heard about characters being levelled as tanks or healers is astounding (and I'm a prot/holy hybrid myself).

But it's not just that - Vanilla WoW was also both not very demanding of tanks and healers while levelling, while at the same time being extremely generous towards hybrids (hybrids in the definition of "any class that can do more than just do damage"). Tanking was largely about being sufficiently armoured to be able to withstand some damage and making at least an effort to hold aggro, while healing was about casting single target heals on the tank and occasionally on a dps. No special tools were required. The warrior tanking as dps spec would take a bit more damage and the healer healing in dps spec would run out of mana more quickly, but in most situations that was perfectly manageable.

At the same time, while many hybrid talent trees were really lacklustre in terms of what they provided if you wanted to specialise, this also meant that there wasn't that much difference between someone specced for healing and someone who wasn't, making it easier to switch to another role for a while even if it wasn't your main specialisation.

I remember back in Vanilla retail I was told that it was perfectly fine to level my priest as shadow while playing the healer in dungeons. Once I'd hit level sixty, a guild even took me along to AQ20 as a pug healer (while fully aware of my dps spec). It just wasn't that big of a deal.

I remember being rather miffed when I briefly returned to retail WoW in MoP and found that Blizzard had made this kind of thing completely impossible with the talent changes in that expansion. If you're a feral druid, you're fully feral now, with little to no mana and no reliable healing abilities. Of course by then the game had dual spec instead, but you can't get that until you're a bit higher level and it's not quite the same, as it still requires you to make a conscious choice between roles instead of being able to do multiple things out of the box.

I enjoy re-experiencing this Vanilla attitude of people being open about what roles to play as it runs counter to the worst outgrowths of individual min-maxing and emphasises working as a group to achieve success. In my Uldaman run, one of the dps took over tanking for the last bit since our tank up to that point was a bit low level for the instance and was starting to have trouble holding aggro - it was the most natural thing in the world. Sometimes pets do some off-tanking or a dps does some off-healing. It's not about maximising your individual performance but about getting through the whole thing together. It makes my inner socialiser very happy.

The only times I've seen people be oddly specific in their group requests (e.g. "looking for one more caster dps"), it usually seems to be motivated by concerns about loot, which is a bit greedy but also understandable when you consider how much more precious every bit of loot was in Vanilla. Nonetheless these calls seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

More Vanilla Dungeon Nostalgia

When I picked up playing on Kronos again after a break of several months, I dumped a whole bunch of group and dungeon quests from my quest log and vowed to myself that, in the future, I wouldn't allow them to bog me down. If I got them done, great, but I wasn't going to fret about it and if I outlevelled them before a good opportunity presented itself to complete them, I'd just throw them out without a second thought.

In terms of group quests, I've actually been pretty lucky since then - just as the ones in Stranglethorn Vale and Alterac Mountains were starting to build up and beginning to feel like a problem, I had a lucky day and got the whole lot of them done in two runs (one for each zone).

Also, I've been running dungeons again, mostly as a healer, even though I always feel a bit self-conscious wearing a dress as a paladin. I tend to not put my healing gear on until we're at the instance and I immediately take it off again as soon as we're done. Funnily enough, the one time I didn't do that and left it on for a bit while wandering around Ironforge clearing my bags, a dwarf paladin whispered me accusingly that paladins shouldn't wear dresses (it was clearly tongue-in-cheek but still telling)!

I'd kind of given up on the idea of actually tanking dungeons because it's just too annoying without a taunt, but ended up doing so for one SM Library/Armoury run anyway because everyone else in the group was several levels below me, which I figured would give me enough of a threat buffer. It did work out OK, though towards the end we had to replace one damage dealer and the new one was a shadow priest that was only one level below me or so... she had aggro pretty much until the end of the run.

Overall I've been enjoying these runs, for a variety of reasons. I'd forgotten just how much more distinctive the classes felt in Vanilla due to their different abilities, and it really makes every group excitingly different as well. Having a mage means that you can always sheep one mob in each pull, which vastly increases the tank's amount of control and makes the healer's job a lot easier, not to mention that their secondary job as a water vending machine is a godsend for any mana users in the party. (Remember when everyone had to sit down after every other pull to drink up?) Warlock summons are really useful in this age before summoning stones if one party member is slacking on their way to the instance and makes it so much easier to replace someone if you need to. On the other hand, they constantly lifetap themselves to within an inch of their lives and then just stand there, waiting for me to drink and heal them up again! Get your own food or drink, buddy, or at least some bandages! Hunter pets are actually really useful as occasional off-tanks since tanks have so little control, and over the course of the evening you can get really attached to the little critters. I always apologised if one died and often resurrected them afterwards. I actually felt sorry for Sheldon the turtle when his happiness level dropped to "unhappy" because he'd died so many times... also, as a paladin I'm having oodles of fun with seals and judgements. In Scarlet Monastery in particular, runners can be a real problem and I got a real kick out of slapping them with a judgement of justice when they got low on health so that they couldn't run away. There's just so much utility and so many synergies going around. The more time passes, the less favourable I look back on Ghostcrawler's "bring the player, not the class" mantra and the effect it has had on the game.

The whole experience is also just so different from most dungeons in more modern MMOs. Syp posted about what he considers a good dungeon run yesterday, and Telwyn wrote a post in reply to offer a counter-point on the subject of why "should take 30 minutes or less" might not be a good requirement for an instance. I can actually enjoy a 30 minute dungeon run as well if everything else about it works for me, but there is a certain quality to these old-school, multiple-hour runs that seems to be missing from many newer games. Both the time and effort required and the rewards you get are just so much greater. There's the whole issue of having to manually assemble the group and getting everyone to the instance (the trip to Scarlet Monastery as an Alliance player is epic on its own), but then once inside you earn decent XP and the drops are just amazing. I'd completely forgotten how rare even greens used to be in Vanilla and I sell almost every single one I find on the auction house. My own paladin still has level twenty gear in several slots simply because I haven't had any appropriate drops or received useful quest rewards. So going to a place where you're pretty much guaranteed to see multiple blues or at least high quality greens drop is just exciting. It's pretty much comparable to pugging a (non raid finder) raid in a newer game, just with fewer people. I guess as someone who enjoys raiding to this day, it's not surprising that those old-school dungeons appeal to me as well - though I fully admit that I wouldn't want to be running them every day either as it would get quite exhausting.

One thing I definitely do miss from those days is the greater sense of patience pervading every group endeavour. You could argue that people simply had no choice, since getting impatient and dropping group would just result in having to spend even more time finding a new one, but I think I'm not alone in actually enjoying that slower pace and feeling more comfortable with it. In one SM Library run, one of our dps apologised profusely that he had to leave to get dinner, but we encouraged him to not leave the party and continued clearing trash with just the four of us. It's not as if we'd gotten that far by the time he came back fifteen minutes later... Then there was the hunter who said "one sec, potty break for 4 year old", or the warlock who suddenly went AFK and then came back ten minutes later to say that her son had cut his foot open and she'd had to help him out, though he was all OK now... and everyone just nodded knowingly. In some way, this atmosphere is actually more casual and family friendly than the more modern, shorter but much more hurried runs, where there is a constant feeling of being on the clock and any interruption means wasting people's time. I really prefer a more relaxed approach where it's not all about efficiency but more about enjoying the experience of simply being in the game, where a bit of downtime is something that's perfectly acceptable every now and then.

Welcome to the Deadmines

 This video was an instant classic - though in hindsight the part about the old instance getting buffed to 80 seems bittersweet.

After my less than stellar grouping experience in Redridge, the next time I logged in and had finally sorted out my bags, I decided to look for a Deadmines group again, vowing to not let myself get distracted this time. I mopped up some leftover quests in the Westfall area and kept an eye on general chat.

At first I ended up grouping with a mage, but after we hadn't got a single response to our looking-for-more requests in about fifteen minutes, he said that it seemed like the server was too quiet at that moment and that he'd try again later.

Not much later a guildie expressed interest in a Deadmines run and we teamed up. I didn't keep an eye on how long it took us to assemble a full group, but I reckon that it still must've taken at least twenty minutes. It didn't feel too bad though because I was using the time to run some more errands in Stormwind, such as smelting ore, putting things on the auction house and so on and so forth.

Eventually we had assembled the following group: me on my prot paladin, supposed to tank. I'm not sure going protection was a wise choice - I had initially forgotten that pallies didn't get their taunt until 2.0 (I started playing shortly before that, so my memories of what was introduced when are a bit fuzzy). The prospect of tanking without a taunt seemed more than daunting, but after I had seen people talk about it in guild chat for a bit I felt reassured, as most of them seemed to agree that it was manageable in dungeons and for off-tanking in raids. My guildie, a feral druid, said that she would be happy to dps or heal, and so did the retribution paladin we invited. Finally we also got a hunter and a warlock.

We were lucky that everyone was quick to make their way towards the instance, because when we tried to use the summoning stone, we didn't seem to be able to get it to work. I can't tell if this is a bug or another one of those things that weren't actually introduced until a patch or two after I started playing.

I felt proud that I had managed to gather up all the quests for the instance and shared the ones that others didn't seem to have. I said in chat that I would like to do the two quests with the dead miners just outside the instance and people were like "sure", but whenever I tried to go towards the area they were in, everyone else just ran off in the opposite direction until we were actually at the instance entrance. This didn't feel like the best start.

Things got worse: my tanking was useless. With nothing but a judgement every ten seconds and auto-attack (I had forgotten that consecration also used to be the 11-point holy talent), I simply didn't stand a chance against the warlock and hunter pulling things from range. On top of that, the druid only had bear form to dps in. The warlock yelled at me to taunt once, and I explained that paladins didn't have a taunt in Vanilla. I'm not sure he believed me. Either way, the feral druid soon started taunting instead and effectively usurped the tank position because I couldn't taunt back. It's a good thing I don't have much of a tanking ego or I might have felt offended.

As it was, we seemed to be doing okay the way we were doing things, with me sort of off-tanking, and there were no further complaints or accusations about bad tanking... or bad anything really. Things felt quite chaotic compared to the well-orchestrated trinity song-and-dance that I'm used to performing in today's MMOs, but we managed. Mobs were running all over the place, first because aggro was such a fickle beast with limited tanking tools, then because almost without exception they were all the type of enemy that tries to run away when they get low on health. However, everyone seemed to accept that this was just the way things were and made the best of what we had. We only wiped a couple of times when we accidentally ended up with too many mobs due to accidental overpulling. The hunter and warlock mostly stayed quiet, but the druid and the other pally were quite cheerful, and everyone was unfailingly polite. There was no ninja-looting, and people were constantly asking whether they could need on this or that or if someone else needed it more.

At the very end I even got to enjoy a moment in the limelight after all, when the dps decided to burn down Van Cleef while ignoring all his adds, which resulted in a massive amount of Defias spawning in quick succession... and I tanked them all. I even happened to record it! I liked how people initially even stopped what they were doing and just stared at me tanking the whole pile of adds (and typed "wow" in chat).



I didn't keep track of the exact time we spent in the dungeon, but I can confidently say that it was about two hours from start to finish. I'll be honest and admit that I actually felt pretty tired after that, even though it hadn't been a bad run! It's weird to think that people can probably run the revamped Deadmines on live in about fifteen minutes, even though the instance is the same length. In Vanilla everything just took so much longer to kill.

I like long queues and I cannot lie

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

Am I mad? Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Halls of Origination story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call to Arms: the first week

Patch 4.1 lured me back into running dungeons at max level again, partly to see how the new Call to Arms feature was working out, partly to see what else was new. (For example it took me several runs to figure out what that weird fire animation was that I kept seeing on the floor, until I finally realised that it's the new animation for hunters' explosive trap. Personally I think that it's hideous, but maybe it will grow on me.) On top of that, patch days tend to encourage me to get back to working on goals that I've been neglecting, such as gearing up my umpteenth alt, which is similar to the way people feel inspired to make resolutions on New Year's Day I suppose.

Call to Arms isn't actually active on my realm a lot of the time, which shouldn't have come as a surprise to me in hindsight. I mentioned before that I could never really relate to the complaints about forty minute dps queues, as my own were usually barely half of that, even before Call to Arms. From what I can tell, the "magic number" where the system considers the wait time too long and will activate CtA is around ten minutes, and with many tanks returning for the same reasons I mentioned above, queue times are often shorter than that anyway.

Of course the result of this is that I'm checking the dungeon finder window continually, while refusing to queue up as tank or healer while CtA isn't active. I reckon that a lot of people are doing the same, as there'll be no CtA indicator for ages, and then it suddenly appears for both tanks and healers at once. It's a bit like trying to find the best deal while going shopping. Yes, I do want a suitcase my valour points, but next week in an hour or so there'll be a special sale Call to Arms where I'll also get an umbrella a goodie bag for free, so I'll wait until then. It's a funny psychological trick that works because people like to get free stuff even if they don't need it. I've collected about half a dozen satchels of exotic mysteries so far, and not one of them contained anything but rubbish, i.e. nothing but a little gold and a single gem or two to three cheap potions. /yawn.

I was a bit wary of taking up tanking again, but so far my runs have been surprisingly pleasant. CC has definitely gone the way of the dodo by now, but in a way I'm glad. I do prefer using it, but as I said last time I ranted about tanking frustrations back in February, it's no fun when "should we use crowd control or not" is just another thing for the party to fight over. So if everyone would rather AoE everything I'll consider that fairly boring, but after the last couple of months I'm just glad that everyone is on the same page again. I do feel somewhat bad for the healers - my paladin is still on the lower end of the heroic gear curve, and when I AoE-tanked heroic Lost City of the Tol'vir today, I was rotating through my tanking cooldowns non-stop as I anxiously watched my character hovering on the verge of death on pretty much every single pull. I expected the healer to complain about my squishiness or ask for CC at any moment, but he seemed happy and his mana bar barely even appeared to move. (Actually, the latter might explain why I was constantly hovering on the verge of death...)

On the whole, everyone in the runs I've had has been pretty bearable. Yes, I've had a guy in full tier eleven roll need on blue dungeon drops. Yes, I've had a tank in full pvp gear. I've had people drop group mid-pull if things weren't going their way, and I've had others start insulting the group the moment something went wrong. I've seen people run right past bosses in order to "save time", just to go AFK for five minutes afterwards. I've also had people who declared that they wanted a fast run, but then didn't even know which way to go (which I found rather hilarious). But I've also had players who joked around and were patient when my screen froze or when I missed the jelly-vator in Throne of the Tides, making else everyone wait. (There seems to be a new graphical glitch where it becomes invisible when it's at the bottom, which made me think that it was still at the top.)

I actually found myself wondering whether any of the 4.1 changes might be contributing to people behaving better, and I do think that the valour cap from dungeons being a weekly thing instead of daily might be a positive influence. If you're not in the mood for a dungeon, there's no pressure to get it done now or else - instead you can run several instances in a row when you actually feel like it and still get the same reward. And well, fewer people running dungeons when they don't actually want to be there can only be a good thing.

What's so different about tanks and healers?

The Call to Arms debate continues to rage and after almost everyone agreed that bribes are probably not the way to go, discussion has turned towards tanking in general and why not enough people want to do it. A lot of bloggers have made a lot of good points, but one question keeps nagging at me whenever I read another post about how tanks have too much responsibility and don't get appreciated enough: What about the healers? Aren't healers in exactly the same boat? They carry the burden of keeping the party alive through the most suicidal of pulls, and since the dungeon finder replaces them just as quickly as a bad damage dealer, people are quite happy to abuse and kick healers at the drop of a hat. And yet there is no real healer shortage in the dungeon finder despite of that... why?

There's probably more than one reason, but as someone who mainly plays healers and really enjoys the playstyle, the first thing that came to my mind was that healers simply don't have a choice to not group. If you enjoy the act of healing and playing whack-a-mole with little green bars, you need other people. Yes, you can heal yourself while soloing things in a painfully slow manner, but then you'll probably spend more time focused on killing things than on healing. You could aggro something and just let it beat on you so you can heal yourself forever! Except, you'd be achieving absolutely nothing by doing that. If you want to kill mobs through healing, you need at least one other player who does the actual killing for you while you heal them. Healers need groups; there are no substitutes. Even if the group plays badly and treats you like crap, if you at least enjoyed pressing your buttons to heal them you got something good out of it. From this point of view it's interesting that so many people claim that healing is boring and no fun - clearly it's interesting and fun enough that a lot of players keep doing it despite of the downsides!

Tanks sort of used to be like that once, I think, though that was before I tried tanking myself. They were quite good at surviving attacks from multiple mobs, but they did so little damage that it was always questionable who would wear the other one down first, and self-healing was very limited. Going out into the world and rounding up mobs to tank them only offered a very limited amount of fun. Only a group allowed you to really shine, being the only one who could stand up to the most powerful mobs, with a healer at your back and damage dealers by your side.

But the game changed since then. Blizzard wanted to make soloing for tanks more fun and make it easier for them to gain and hold aggro, so they increased their damage output and their survivability. Successfully! Questing on my paladin tank is easy, I round up a load of mobs, AoE them down effortlessly, and Word of Glory keeps me at full health the entire time. It's just like tanking, only without any other players to pull aggro or otherwise annoy me! Wait, does anyone else see the problem with this?

I wonder how many people out there have a tanking spec these days without actually doing any tanking for groups most of the time. They literally have nothing to gain from grouping in terms of pure gameplay fun. Even if the rest of your party is well-behaved, making sure that nobody gets aggro, waiting for the healer to get mana and so on only adds extra work. Otherwise you could have the exact same fun of being in the middle of a large bunch of mobs and feeling invincible while out soloing elementals or whatever. Or alternatively, you could just be dps and be slightly less invincible while killing individual mobs a bit faster. Not that much difference anymore.

For damage dealers it doesn't make much difference whether they are soloing or grouping a lot of the time, in terms of how fun their gameplay is. In a group you might have to pace yourself a bit and maybe crowd-control something even if you don't care much for it, but on the plus side someone keeps the mobs away from your face and you get heals if you stand in something bad. It's pretty much a wash. A healer may have to deal with people giving him or her a hard time, but on the other hand they get to enjoy the game in a way that's simply not possible while playing solo. A tank only gains more things to watch out for, with no benefits (assuming he doesn't group with people he adores so much that their mere presence makes things more fun - but once again that's something that affects every role).

I've heard some arguments that tanking could be made more fun if only the tanks could have even more power, hold aggro even more easily, vote-kick anyone as they please etc. I have to disagree with all of those because none of them actually make grouping more fun than soloing for the tank. I think if Blizzard could change anything about tank gameplay to make it more fun, they would have to ensure that the tank actually benefits from grouping, and I don't mean in a material way. Like healing, tanking used to be a role that was all about the party, and sometimes it seems to me that even the developers themselves have completely forgotten about that in their endless pursuit of making everything as solo-friendly as possible. No really, tanks don't have to be awesome soloers! They are supposed to be awesome in groups, and when on their own they can switch to their dual spec, just like healers seem to be expected to do. Maybe tanking abilities could be tweaked to require friendly targets to be nearby to have their full effect - just something to make it different and beneficial to be grouped.

Though yeah, improving the quality and attitude of the average dungeon finder pug would be a good thing too of course - for everyone, not just for tanks.

Call to Arms: my predictions

So I woke up to the big news today that Blizzard is finally implementing a suggestion that I've seen people make on various blogs many times by now: that tanks and healers should get greater rewards for using the dungeon finder in order to shorten queue times for damage dealers. In practice, the system will "only" reward players for filling the role that is the most needed to create a max level heroic group at any given point in time. In 99% of all cases this will be the tank.

I'll be honest, my first reaction was: "Cool, I guess I'll have to go back to tanking heroics on my druid and paladin once the patch comes out." However, then I spent a minute remembering all the things that have pissed me off about my heroic pugs in the last couple of months and quickly amended my thoughts to add "...but probably not for very long". I strongly suspect that this is what will happen on a large scale as well.

In other words, I do think that this new system will work in the short term, as players will queue up as tanks whenever possible simply out of curiosity, to see what this new extra loot bag is all about. Once the possible rewards become widely known, people will still make a point of queuing as tanks for a while, in order to chase that special mount they always wanted or what have you.

However, in the long run, I predict that people will quickly realise that

1) whatever the reward, tanking itself is still the same as before and if they didn't enjoy it already, they are still not enjoying it now.
2) they really prefer tanking for their friends and guildies, but the Call for Arms system only rewards them for queuing alone. Wasn't this supposed to be the expansion that encourages playing with your friends again?
3) they've got everything they wanted and whatever special rewards are left for them to attain aren't worth the effort. (Flasks and gems are useful, but unless the system gives out massive amounts of them for each run, running heroics is hardly going to be the most efficient and painless way of acquiring them.)

And thus the queue times for dpsers will get longer again and we'll mostly be back to where we are now. Eventually more people will choose to tank again simply in order to get the shorter queue, as heroics become easier again - just like we saw in Wrath - but this might take a while and will happen independent of the Call to Arms system.

I'm not annoyed with Blizzard for implementing this and will be curious to see how it pans out. I'll be happy if I'm wrong and it works as intended, but I just don't think that will happen. Bribes are not useless, but they only go so far. Not to mention that I believe that they are what caused this whole queue problem in the first place. How many damage dealers that are clogging up the heroic queues actually dislike instances and group play and are only in there because it's the only way to progress your character past a certain point and the dungeon finder allows them to participate without actually having to talk to anyone? I think it's very telling that Bashiok revealed at the end of his statement that lower level dungeons don't suffer from dps overload in the same way - it's because people have alternatives while levelling, and the Satchel of Helpful Goods you get for running low-level randoms is not so great that it's worth getting if you don't care for instancing in the first place.

The bottom line is that I think that the developers need to take a step back from making everything about item incentives and think more about making sure that players actually enjoy what they are doing. Yes, you can lure them into doing things that they don't actually care for - see all those damage dealers in the dungeon queue. But the only reason that works is because a lot of the time, dpsers can get away with playing in a group in the same way as they do while soloing (or even worse, because the tank and healer are there to protect them), so they still get to play the way they want even with other people around. Tank play is quite different on your own compared to in a group though, and when it comes to choosing between extra item rewards and playing in a way that's fun, players won't be willing to chase the carrot quite so readily.