Voices of Wrath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And my five favourite voices from WOTLK raids...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking back at Wrath raiding as a healer

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

Making choices: Yes, please.

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

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

Do split the party!

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

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

I'm not just a healbot, you know.

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

Environmental awareness: a double-edged sword

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

Undecided: vehicle fights

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

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

Spam spam spammedy spam

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

What's this? I'm taking damage?

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

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

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

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

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

I rather like Icecrown Citadel and its difficulty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurrah for bugs! Sort of.

So my guild has been wiping on the twenty-five-man version of the Northrend Beasts fight on heroic difficulty for what seems like a billion years now. We've been going back to Trial of the Grand Crusader every week for at least one whole night and do nothing but wipe on that one fight there over and over again.

There has been some progress, but it's been so slow as to be almost undetectable by the untrained eye. I mean, if I look at our attempts last night they were a lot better than the ones on our first night ever, but not much different from our attempts last week. That makes each night by itself seem very unsatisfying, because taken by its own merits it never appears to have achieved anything at all.

Yesterday we started the night with five wipes again. On the sixth attempt we absolutely aced phase two for the first time and everybody was alive when Icehowl entered the arena. Then he turned around and took out three healers at once with his freezing breath and some melee got punted into a pool of poison that was still lingering after Dreadscale's death. The remaining people fought on valiantly (I sound like Tirion Fordring there), but with half the healers dead the tanks quickly dropped like flies as well. As the last tank bit the dust, I thought "aw shucks, and it was such a good attempt" and prepared to die too. Icehowl turned around once more to cast his frozen breath and spewed. Then he breathed out. Then he exhaled. Those of us who were still alive were starting to seriously wonder about his lung capacity. Nobody was actually taking any damage, but Icehowl appeared to be stuck spewing a cloud of ice over and over again.

So the dps went back to attacking him and the remaining healers joined in with smites, lightning bolts and the like. The enrage timer came and went, and still Icehowl continued to breathe out. We smote him some more. And then he died.

There were cheers and laughter on TeamSpeak and in raid chat, and I couldn't quite fight a certain sense of bemusement myself, but at the same time it felt quite unsatisfying. I mean, it wasn't real, you know? I guess everyone agreed in so far as there were no victory celebrations on our guild website afterwards, though some argued that it was karma making up for the many bugs we struggled with throughout the weeks that caused us extra wipes (mass DCs in heroic mode only, Jormungars spontaneously despawning etc.). I can't entirely disagree with that either, and if nothing else it was nice to spend some time wiping on Jaraxxus for a change, who looks a lot more manageable by the way. It will just be weird to go back to more wiping on the Beasts now to learn to actually kill them without lucky bugs.

Still, while I've seen some interesting things happen during first kills of bosses before (like someone accidentally taunting Sartharion towards the end of our first Sarth+3D kill and making him spin all over the place), this one has to go down as my strangest first kill of a boss ever.

The trouble with TotC

In the past week I had a couple of days off, so I had more time to play WoW and raid. Here's what I did:

Trial of the Crusader (10-man): four full clears (no, really)
Trial of the Grand Crusader (10-man): two or three hours of attempts spread out over two nights, two boss kills
Trial of the Crusader (25-man): one full clear
Trial of the Grand Crusader (25-man): about six hours of attempts on Northrend Beasts, also spread out over two nights, no kill

If you think that sounds slightly insane, you're not the only one. And here I thought I was hardcore when I did two full Karazhan clears in one day back in BC...

In the end the experience mostly just left me with a very weird feeling. Obviously nobody forced me to raid the same instance over and over again, and it certainly felt cool to get the achievement for clearing it on all of my alts. However, on the other hand I'm starting to get seriously tired of doing the same fights over and over again (especially the Faction Champions), and in a strange way it feels as if Blizzard isn't leaving me much choice regardless. I mean, I'd quite like to do some Naxx and Ulduar runs again for a change, or even Sartharion and Malygos, but none of those would do anything for my characters' personal progression anymore, as the emblem items have made huge chunks of the gear in there completely irrelevant, even for my alts. My hunter for example has never even cleared Naxxramas, yet she's completed Trial of the Crusader and was only outdamaged in there by a mage in full twenty-five-man gear. How wrong is that?

I think raiding right now suffers from the same problem as the levelling game, namely that Blizzard seems to think that making things accessible means forcefully funneling people towards the end as quickly as possible, even if that means skipping a large part of the journey. Which is really bizarre, considering that the journey is what makes up ninety percent of the game. No wonder that I feel the pull of low-level alts stronger than ever as of late - at least they still have some roads left to travel.

Faction Champion Fail

I really dislike the Faction Champions in Trial of the Crusader. I know that I'm not alone in this; a lot of crying has been done about how the fight is too much like PvP and people don't want that in a PvE instance, but that's actually not really it for me. I don't mind a bit of PvP and occasionally even participate in it myself.

There are two things that I dislike about the Faction Champions, the first one being that I really feel sidelined as a healer in this fight. I realise that no fight is equally interesting to everyone, but this is a pretty extreme example of inequality if you ask me. Especially in twenty-five-man mode our raid leader has to spend ages discussing the strategy for this fight every time (since the group composition is always different): who should (try to) crowd-control what, interrupts, kill order, and so on.

However, in the meantime the healers don't need any kind of plan, because our role is always the same: 1.: Heal anyone that takes damage (this is completely random). And 2.: Run away from things that try to damage you (this will also be completely random). So I get to spend ten minutes twiddling my thumbs while a lot of things are being discussed that have zero relevance to me and then I spend a lot of time seeing one of my favourite activities in the game being reduced to Whack-A-Mole in its purest form. No strategy here, it's all random. /yawn

The second thing that I dislike about the Faction Champions is that they have somehow turned into the personal nemesis of my ten-man group. We have downed them on both normal and heroic mode, but if anything is off one night, this fight is where the shit will hit the fan. And unfortunately tonight was one such night, as we just could not get them down on heroic mode and nobody seemed to have a clue why. From my point of view it was because we healers were being silenced all the time, but that didn't really make it any better because I had no idea how to solve that problem either.

I mean, usually when I encounter a problem in a fight like this I take the following steps:

- Ask myself if I did something wrong and if so, how I can avoid it next time: In this case I couldn't see what I could have done to avoid the constant interrupts from the mage, the enhancement shaman and the warlock's felhunter. I can't really get rid of the fel puppy when it's absolutely set on chewing on my toes. Both counterspell and the shaman interrupt are ranged instant casts, so I can't avoid them either, seeing how I can't constantly be out of range of those two guys while staying in range of the raid.

- Ask myself if anyone else obviously did something wrong and if so, how that could be corrected next time: Now, I wasn't sure whether anyone was supposed to keep the shaman and the mage busy, but even if they were, nobody can be expected to keep a champion's attention one hundred percent of the time, so an instant cast targetted at someone else can always go off anyway.

Which left me... completely lost and helpless. On absolutely every attempt I would get interrupted and locked out of my holy spells for ten seconds after a few casts - and ten seconds are a looong time in a fight like this, a time during which people would get dangerously low despite of the other healers' efforts. When the silence finally wore off I'd get a few casts off before being interrupted again, and during the next ten seconds the whole thing would then quickly devolve into a wipe.

Nobody really seemed to know what to do either, people were constantly asking to change the kill order but it didn't seem to do us any good whatsoever. Eventually it got late and we got so frustrated that we left for the night and went off to do something else, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had a sour taste in my mouth.

Maybe I do dislike the Faction Champions for being too much like a PvP fight after all, because it's all so random and impossible to fully control, so nobody knows what can realistically be expected from everyone else at any time. So it's random trial and error every time... Trial and Error of the Crusader, hmm.

In the immortal words of G.I. Joe: Knowing is half the battle - unfortunately that also means that if you don't have a clue what's going on, you'll always be fighting a battle that's already half-lost.

The story of a sad, burnt out raider

It occurred to me the other day that I have now been playing WoW's raiding game for a whole two years. There have been occasional short breaks due to holidays, broken computer parts and the like, but on the whole I've been extremely loyal and dedicated to my raid force, raiding three nights a week and never picking and choosing my raids - when I'm available then I'm available, be it for a thrilling progress night or farming old content until my eyes bleed.

There have been ups and downs during that time, moments when I wanted to quit in a frothing rage because of something that I considered outrageous at the time, but then didn't. There were times when I didn't really enjoy it that much and kind of went through the motions more than anything. But never have I felt as utterly disheartened with raiding as I do now.

It all started with Yogg-Saron. We had been making decent progress through Ulduar until we met him and he turned out to be an utter cockblock. We were stuck on him for weeks and months, wiping and wiping and wiping some more. The fact that this was during the summer didn't help either, as we were often short on signups and couldn't always organise enough raids to clear the rest of the instance before the weekly reset, thus not having any attempts on Yogg at all during some weeks. (This was before the ID extension feature obviously.)

I showed up for every raid and got to enjoy the wiping to its fullest. This wasn't a problem; I had made similar experiences during BC, but in the end we always got the suckers down and victory was all the sweeter for it.

One night in August my PC decided to play silly buggers because of the hot weather and I phoned in to ask to be replaced after having experienced multiple shutdowns mid-fight. That night they finally downed him. I was bummed, but more than anything because it was an exact repeat of what happened during our first kill of Kael'thas last year. Still, I tried to remain positive because I had seen Kael'thas die on the next raid, surely I'd get my chance to down Yogg as well, right? Right?

But suddenly... people didn't care anymore. Trial of the Crusader was out and way more alluring with its new and better loot. We were still doing Ulduar, but barely managed to clear half the instance some nights because the raid leaders would suddenly decide to try hard modes on a whim, just to see what they were like. And Yogg had died, so who cared if we didn't make it to him before the reset? I did of course. I nagged. People rolled their eyes and made fun of me.

Still, I continued to sign up for every raid, convinced that my day would have to come eventually. One night about a month after the first kill I decided to sign off because a friend from England was in town for a day - not exactly something that happens often - and I wanted to spend time with him. Guess what the raid did that night? Yep, they went and killed Yogg-Saron.

I facepalmed but still tried to keep my chin up. After all, it was kind of my own "fault" for choosing my friend over the raid, right? I'd just have to make sure to not miss any raids anymore in the future. So I kept signing. And people kept finding excuses not to do Yogg.

One night we were finally in his prison and had made one unsuccessful attempt on him when someone called out "We've got Wintergrasp! Let's go to VoA!" and the raid leader actually went along with it, abandoning Ulduar and ending the raid after Archavon. That was definitely one of those frothing rage moments.

Since then we've been to his lair one more time, but even though we had half the night to kill him, we just wiped over and over until raid end time. The worst thing was that nobody seemed to be particularly bothered by this. They just don't care anymore. Yogg-Saron is so last month. It's just me with my weird obsession with wanting to see all the bosses dead and longing for closure after dutifully attending Yogg wipe nights for several months.

"Ok," you might say, "we get it, you've got some real issues with not having killed Yogg-Saron and it bothers you. But what about all that time that your raid force spends not trying to kill Yogg? Surely there must be something enjoyable there?"

Well, that's kind of the problem. The only other thing we're doing is Trial of the Crusader. On normal mode that's all fine and dandy (though in all honesty I'm already starting to get a bit bored with it after so many flawless clears, more than my guild ever did of any other raid instance I believe), but it's too easy. It takes about two hours maximum, and that's including summons, bio breaks, explaining boss strategies to the new guy and so on. Then what?

Then we try to do it again on heroic mode. I've expressed my dislike for hard mode raiding before, but I'm not sure I've really managed to convey properly just how much I despise it. It manages to combine the worst bits about progression (endless wiping) and farming (the same old fights over and over) without any of the fun parts. The loyal part of me wants to put up with it for the sake of the guild and because there's no other raid to progress into at the moment anyway. Except I'm still stuck at the point of progression where I want to kill Yogg. So all I ever think about during Coliseum nights is how bored I am and how I'd much rather smite some tentacles. It's sucking the fun out of things harder than a vacuum. I've come to the point where I actually dread most raid nights, wishing I could just hide on an alt. But hey, duty calls...

My friends tell me that I should take a bit of a break and then I'll be able to come back feeling refreshed and enjoying it again. I do think that getting away from it all might help and I might actually miss it again, but there's still the problem of Yogg. If the past is anything to go by, then I just know that the raid will kill him again as soon as I'm away, and going by the utter lack of enthusiasm displayed during our last attempts I'm afraid that it will be the last time as well. And then what? Then my last incentive to keep signing for every raid will be gone and I'll feel majorly let down by having missed out on killing one of the best raid bosses of this expansion. I don't want that. I want to feel like I'm back on the progression curve again and be able to enjoy raiding.

So I cling to signing up like a rabid bulldog clings to its victim, simply because I'm afraid of what will happen if I let go, all the time getting more frazzled and distressed due to not achieving my goals and being frustrated with the content we do. I know it's a game, and in a few years I'll probably look back at this and shake my head at how I could ever get so upset about it, but right now I really don't know what to do but despair.

Saving the day

The most fun moments in a raid are never when you down a boss flawlessly, but when things go hilariously wrong.

Today I joined a guild group for ten-man Trial of the Crusader, consisting of a couple of main raiders, a few guild members who don't usually raid with us and a bunch of alts. We one-shot the first three bosses, if not flawlessly, and then wiped a few times on the Twin Val'kyr as those unfamiliar with the fight struggled to get to grips with the whole colour-swapping concept.

To summarise it for non-raiders: You fight two val'kyr and there's some stuff with white and black swirlies that you have to either seek out or avoid.

Oh yeah, and I was main-tanking on my paladin.

On our third or fourth attempt the tank of the other val'kyr went down when the boss was at about thirty-five percent health. Within only a few seconds a whole bunch of thoughts raced through my head:

Ok, the other tank is down. This already happened on a previous attempt but we managed to recover from that particular mishap due to the feral dps druid taking over tanking for a bit while one of the other druids combat-resed the dead tank. Can we do this again? Nope, the feral druid went down very early in the fight this time. Any combat reses at all? Nope, both of the other druids used theirs on the previous attempt and they are still on cooldown. Hm.

I targetted the loose val'kyr and saw our enhancement shaman attempting to tank her, the fool. He took a hit or two and lived, but it was obvious that he'd be dead meat soon. So I did what any tank would do in such a situation: I taunted.

There was no real logic to it. After all every guide will tell you that you need two tanks for this fight, though I couldn't remember why. Something about the two val'kyr healing or buffing each other if they are close? All I knew was that a boss was hitting someone she wasn't supposed to be hitting, and even if we were going down it was only right that we should be going down with everything beating on me, the tank, until the very last moment.

Healers have a similar instinct, which often annoys our raid leader when he calls for a wipe and we drag it out endlessly by desperately healing whatever we can until we're all dead. It's what healers do, damn it, we can't just stop because you say so!

Anyway, there I was, tanking both of the winged ladies at once. Somehow I managed to keep aggro on both of them too, only losing the one I wasn't supposed to tank briefly once but taunting her right back again immediately. The healers were frantically spamming heals on me as is their way. The dps kept nuking. A smile started to spread across my face. I felt invincible!

Slowly, very slowly, the twins went down. They did a couple more of their special moves and we lost more people, but somehow we kept going. Even though I wasn't moving, suddenly all the little buffing swirls seemed to be attracted to me, and before I knew it I became a giant among elves and started to radiate light. (No really, it's what that buff does!) And then they both fell down at my feet at once, I ran around like a loon and laughed at my screen.

People congratulated me on my tanking and on saving the day, but the fact of the matter is that I didn't really do anything that amazing. Just doing my "normal" job on the previous three bosses had involved more work than that one taunt really.

Nonetheless I have to say that it felt really great. It's one thing to beat an encounter because you're doing it right, but there's also something to be said for doing it outrageously wrong and still coming out on top.

Heroic Northrend Beasts = boring

No, not because they are too easy. God no. In fact, for my raid force - which cleared normal mode of Trial of the Crusader with ease on both ten- and twenty-five-man - our first attempts on heroic mode were like hitting our heads against a brick wall; it was just such a massive step up in difficulty.

Now, I don't mind wiping a lot to learn a difficult fight. It's usually worth it for the feeling of excitement when you finally get past that really difficult phase and your heart races as the boss exclaims something, adds appear, other exciting new things happen and you wonder if you'll make it to the end. In Trial of the Grand Crusader nothing new and exciting awaits me at any point. I don't have a particular personal desire to get Gormok the Impaler down quickly because I know exactly what will happen afterwards: not one, but two jormungar will enter the arena, and so on and so forth. I've done it a dozen times before. It's the same on heroic mode as on normal, only with more damage on the tanks and more fires to stand in for everyone else, sort of as if I had suddenly walked into a really bad pug group for the normal instance. The difference is that if I walked into a pug where the boss was turning the tanks into tauren mash in less than a second I'd say "screw you, guys" and go home. (Well, maybe not exactly like that, but you get my point.) With my guild I kind of have to stick it out, because the little checkbox says that it's heroic mode and thus it's okay for us to suddenly suck really badly on a fight that we usually ace. That's "progression" for you. Sigh.

Spinks made a post only today in which she said: "There are two types of gamer in the world. Those who want to play through a game again on a harder mode after they’ve finished it, and those who don’t." I think I can safely place myself in the latter group.

Though it probably doesn't help that Northrend Beasts isn't a very interesting fight to heal, as there've been some hard modes that I found a lot more tolerable. I mean, there's a lot of damage going around in this particular encounter, but that doesn't make it interesting.

You see, I believe that the fun of raid healing increases and decreases along a curve. (If I was as talented as Tamarind I would make a snazzy graph to illustrate this, but I'm not so explaining it in words will have to do.) Obviously, when there is little to no healing at all for me to do, I won't find this situation fun. It's kind of boring and makes me feel useless; who'd enjoy that? As you increase the healing load, my enjoyment will go up as I actually have something to occupy myself. However, once you get past a certain point it becomes less fun again, namely when fights deteriorate into nothing but massive damage that you have to spam-heal. Kologarn is such a fight, as is Hodir - and at least phase one of the Northrend Beasts falls into that category as well in my opinion. It's not that I shy away from a challenge, but just mashing your biggest heal over and over to barely keep people alive strongly reduces the amount of actual thought you have to put into the job, and that is something that I don't find enjoyable at all.

Many of my favourite boss fights as a healer are actually relatively light on healing but engage the healers in more ways than just making them watch health bars and not standing in the fire. Archimonde was one such fight for me in BC; in WOTLK I really loved Yogg-Saron. Hell, even Anub'arak is not so bad (as Spinks also remarked the other day), because he really requires you to heal intelligently towards the end, not too little but also not too much. Maybe I'll like his hard mode more if we ever get there.

Still, as far as I'm concerned, Blizzard could still scrap hard modes altogether and I'd be all the happier for it.