A preview of Cataclysm fashion statements

I try to avoid most Cataclysm spoilers, but I don't mind hearing about mechanical changes or seeing the occasional screenshot. So I clicked on a link to MMO-champion, advertised on WoW.com as showing some Cataclysm caster armour sets, and found... that little guy from He-Man? What was his name? Orko!


You have to admit, the resemblance is absolutely uncanny. Makes me wonder if we can make any deductions about Cataclysm fashion in general from that. Are we going to move away from the dull Northrend browns and greys towards slightly more colourful and silly outfits again, if not quite as bad as the Outland clown suits? I think I'd like that, even if I'm not particularly keen on my own Orko outfit. After all, the elemental planes as a whole are probably pretty colourful places too. Gotta adjust to the environment!

Or maybe we'll all just end up looking like eighties cartoon characters.

Powerless

Events in my guild have taken an interesting turn since my last post about how it was dying. Basically I immediately felt a lot better after getting the frustration off my chest. (People seriously underestimate the value of a good cry or whine sometimes.) Yes, my guild was in an atrocious state, but who said that I had to lie down and take it? I'd be better than all those other people, those... traitors, who left the guild because they were tired of nothing happening. I'd make things happen myself!

I made a post on the guild forums asking for the cooperation of everyone who still cared about the guild. A fair number of people came out of the woodwork, often sounding a little sheepish as they talked about how so many of their friends had left but they still felt that their home was here. I found their words very touching, as they closely mirrored my own experiences - I originally joined the guild to play with two of my friends, but after a few months one of them left for a more hardcore raiding guild and the other stopped playing. For all intents and purposes I should have felt abandoned and out of place then too, but I didn't. I stuck around and it felt right.

Anyway, people agreed that we should get back into raiding as a guild, even if it was "only" ten-mans as opposed to the twenty-five-mans we were used to, and the sole active officer created a couple of events on the raid calendar for this purpose. I actually got pretty excited, along the lines of Brave New World: In a brave new world, with just a handful of men, we'll start all over a-gain!

I thought of what other things we should be doing to get things going again, like update the guild message of the day more regularly, update the guild website, clean up outdated forum threads... so much to do! Except... I don't actually have the powers to do so, as I'm not an officer. I asked the guild leader (who is still around, if very distracted by real life) if he'd consider making me an officer so I could make a better contribution to getting the guild back on its feet. I was told that the officers would consider it but haven't heard anything back from them since then. That was about ten days ago.

It's highly ironic that I find myself in this situation, considering that I was offered an officer position about three times over the years but always rejected it because I knew how much hassle was associated with it, and I believed that we had enough alternate candidates who were perfectly capable. Now that I'm finally willing to take on the burden because the alternative is a dead guild, I can't seem to get the leadership's support!

And I don't really understand it either. I like and respect our guild and raid leader. I understand that their real life concerns take precedence over playing WoW. But... why does this have to stop the rest of the guild from having fun together as well? I've seen a guild leader leave WoW before, and he was perfectly happy to hand the reins over to someone who was still invested in the game and let us continue on our merry way. Forcing the whole guild into inactivity with you seems kind of unfair.

On Wednesday we actually managed to get a raid together. The sole active officer couldn't make it, so I led it. We didn't do too great as we had both some raiding newbies and people who were clearly quite rusty, but we had fun and killed stuff, so as far as I'm concerned it was a success. It just feels weird to do all these things "as a guild" but with little to no backing from the leadership. I've never seen the guild's powers be so disjointed from their base before. It's very strange and I really want it to change. There is still time.

The Battle for the Undercity revisited

Last night I did the Battle for the Undercity on Alliance side for the first time, which inspired me to write about this quest in general and why I think it's overrated. On Wowhead, comments like "best quest ever" get rated up, and anyone criticising the quest seems to get downrated into oblivion quite quickly. I'm honestly not sure why that is.

Now, to clarify, I did rather enjoy the battle the first time I got to participate in it. The quest does have three major points going in its favour as far as I'm concerned:

1. Revolutionary use of phasing mechanics. In the game's current state, the Wrathgate and the following hijinks at the Undercity are the earliest points at which you can experience phasing in the game, and like most new technologies it's quite shiny and impressive at first. But if you continued questing until Icecrown, you'll have experienced many more quests along those lines by then, some of them even going as far as to create whole new outposts with associated quests and flight paths for the Argent Crusade and the Knights of the Ebon Blade. You might also have got to experience the problems that currently exist with phasing, such as being unable to help your friends if they are in a different phase or struggling with inconveniently placed summoning stones. That kind of thing definitely tarnishes your intial impression of "that's so awesome" after a while. Also, in Cataclysm phasing will probably exist all over the place, so seeing it in action won't be nearly as exciting anymore.

2. Getting to fight alongside important lore characters. This is kind of dependent on you having some kind of positive connection to the characters in the first place - for example I just rolled my eyes at Varian Wrynn the whole time - but assuming you do care, it can be quite a rewarding experience. I rather enjoyed Sylvanas' song, and seeing Thrall call for the help of the elements to clear a path for the Horde forces made me appreciate why he's the warchief so much more. Unfortunately WOTLK in general has overused the "interact with important NPCs" gimmick in a lot of respects, so this is another thing that significantly goes down in value after you've quested your way through all of Northrend once.

3. If you're a fan of seeing big numbers when you press a button, this quest caters to you. Personally it doesn't do much for me, and I got tired of spamming my AoE button after three minutes at the latest. I dread to think what this quest must be like if you do it for example on a rogue before you get fan of knives. Dreadfully slow, that's what.

Now, I already added qualifiers to those three points, saying that there are factors that will decrease their positive impact. However, there's also one big negative that is always present and which is the main reason why I'd never label the Battle for the Undercity as WoW's best quest ever: the fact, that game-play wise, you're actually not doing much of anything.

Sure, AoEing everything down while laughing at the big numbers speeds things up, but the NPCs by no means need your help. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted, you could just go AFK for half an hour once you started the quest and wait for it to complete itself. What this means is that it's in effect the most tedious escort quest ever (commenters on the Horde version clocked it at about three quarters of an hour while participating; the Alliance version is a bit shorter), as you follow your faction leader around while they do stuff they don't actually need your help with. How could anyone consider this a great idea for a quest?

I was actually grateful that the Alliance version seemed considerably shorter, including only one mini-boss before killing Putress, though the fights seemed to be tuned for maximum annoyance to make up for it. For example the mini-boss, a so-called "blight worm" grabbed and stunned me every couple of seconds, making it impossible to get anything like meaningful dps in. Similarly Putress summoned an endless supply of weeny adds that made it impossible to get an uninterrupted cast off, meaning that I even had to spend the last boss fight spamming nothing but AoE while waiting for Varian and Jaina to actually finish off the big guy. I don't remember the Horde's fights being that annoying, except for the second mini-boss having somewhat fiddly aggro.

I also came to the realisation that Alliance and Horde definitely get seperate phases for the quest, as the scene in the throne room plays out slightly differently depending on which side you're on.

All in all I'd say the Alliance version is better if you just want to get it over with quickly, while the Horde version has a bit more lore flavour to it the first time around, even if it's annoyingly long. Either way it's a quest with an interesting story, but as far as your actual contribution goes, I still find doing ten "kill some of these mobs" quests more engaging than following Thrall or Varian around for half an hour. They might as well have made it just another cut scene.

Pug peeves of the week

I've been going back to running random heroics this week, and while none of them were exactly awful, none of them were truly pleasant experiences either. In particular there were two types of behaviour that got on my nerves a lot.

Firstly, dps pulling for the tank. I know, people have been complaining about this almost since the dungeon finder's introduction, but I honestly didn't actually see anyone doing it all that often. In the past week however, nearly every pug I've been in has had a dpser doing it. Mostly it's dps warriors, but other classes have been guilty of doing it as well. Only today I ended up healing a heroic Halls of Stone run where the mage started blizzarding the first group of trash mobs almost as soon as we had zoned in. The tank and I just took a step backwards and out of the instance until the fighting was over and then came back to res the culprit and those he had taken with him. What was he thinking?

I refuse to believe that so many people get off on pissing off tanks and reducing their numbers even further; are they just all that ignorant? Here's a hint: if you're running headlong into groups of mobs without being the tank or truly being able to finish them all off on your own, you're being stupid. You're effectively trying to kill yourself and relying on the tank or the healer to bail you out. I usually don't intentionally let people die for being stupid, but if I see that the tank doesn't want to babysit you, I won't do so either. We're here to fulfill our roles within a normal five-man dungeon run, not to serve as your personal bodyguards while you hurl yourself from one suicidal situation into the next.

The second annoying behaviour that I had to deal with repeatedly this week is sort of a reaction to the former I suppose - tanks treating the instance like a race to the point of stupidity. I'm not talking about fast pulls here, I'm talking about cases like the tank I had in heroic Utgarde Keep who would aggro a group of mobs, hit them once, and then run off into the next room while the mobs beat on the dps who were actually trying to kill things before moving on. News flash: you're supposed to actually tank things, not just aggro them once on the way to the last boss!

I have a limited amount of understanding for how "tanking" like this might serve as a sort of defense mechanism against the first peeve mentioned in this post, but the tank playing badly instead of one of the dpsers still doesn't make the run any more enjoyable for the rest of the group.

Belated blogday to me!

So, I realised the other day that I missed my blog's one year anniversary. This is sadly typical and perfectly in line with how I treat birthdays and anniversaries in real life as well: I notice them on the calendar or otherwise remember them about three weeks in advance, at which point I go "oh right, I need to do something about that", but about three days before the actual event it will suddenly escape my mind and I won't remember again until at least a week later, by which point it will be too late to say anything without feeling at least slightly embarrassed. "I swear, I didn't forget, I just... remembered at the wrong time!"

I thought about just letting it slide in this case, as I so often do, but then I figured: hey, this is my blog, why would I be embarrassed about being late to congratulate myself? So here we go. Happy blogday to me! And I'm only two weeks late.

It's been an interesting year for sure. You see, I've been keeping a personal blog for over six years now, but it's never served any other purpose than to record stuff that happened in my life so I would remember it later, and to give my friends a way to stay in touch. It doesn't have the aim to entertain, so my writing there is often trite and I don't care.

With this blog, the moment I poured my thoughts on heroic Oculus on the web page, I knew that I meant for other people, complete strangers, to read it, so I tried to make sure to have an actual subject and a proper structure for every article. And then, once a few people actually started commenting, that created new dynamics as I began to take their opinion into account for future articles. Not to imply that I write purely for my readers - it's still about getting particularly persistent thoughts out of my head more than anything else - but I can't imagine writing something for a public audience and not caring about their reactions at all. It's a wondrous little world, that of a writer.

According to Google Analytics I seem to have an average of about a hundred page views per day. I did get linked by WoW.com once, in this article by Allison Robert, but it was a class-specific link in a class-related article, mentioned as a side note in a whole sea of links, so it didn't result in any noticeable craziness other than a traffic spike on that day, and I'm glad. I look at the kind of stuff that larger blogs often have to deal with and I'm really rather grateful that I'm not attracting that kind of attention.

Still, I'm happy with the progress I've made, trying to write more coherently while also posting at least once every couple of days. I hope I'll be able to keep it up. And thanks to my readers for reading; it's nice to know that some people get enjoyment out of looking at the things I write.

My least favourite vehicle quest

I'm kind of ambivalent about vehicle quests in general, but I think after last night's round of questing I've found at least one that I definitely don't like. The Golden Raspberry for worst vehicle quest of WOTLK goes to... The Storm King's Vengeance.

I actually liked it on my first playthrough and thought that the way your character sits on Gymer's head was cute, but I was teamed up with my boyfriend then, and with two storm giants at our disposal we could simply steamroll our opponents and bypass a lot of issues that way. Re-doing it on my own I ended up facing a lot of frustrations however.

First off, it seems buggy. It's not the buggiest quest I've seen in WOTLK (that honour goes to Changing the Wind's Course, which bugged out on me in at least four different ways), but unlike the latter, The Storm King's Vengeance is messed up in ways where I can't even tell whether they are actual bugs or simply bad design.

It immediately starts when you mount the giant and get teleported into a phased version of the zone where the mob density is about ten times higher than normal and you have an aggro radius of several miles. I'm not kidding. With my view distance set to high, all the mobs as far as I could see immediately began to make a beeline for my giant. You have an AoE attack, but it's relatively ineffective and I often found myself surrounded by enemies in such a way that they were just far enough apart that there was no way to get rid of them other than to precision-punch each of them individually.

Trying to shake them off and make them reset doesn't work so well either. According to the comments on Wowhead there's a golden spot where you can make a lot of them turn around, but if you don't know where it is, running away will just lead to a larger and larger horde of scourge minions trailing behind you, until they finally catch up and you get to enjoy the in-game equivalent of being gnawed to death by ants.

So, just to make sure this is clear, you have to spend the entirety of this quest running around with about hundred scourge chewing on your feet and whittling away at your health as you try to complete the actual quest objectives. Sure, you can try to kill them, but they'll respawn faster than you can finish them off anyway. So much fun! Except not.

Fighting the boss mobs is an exercise in tedium as well. If you're lucky you'll notice that auto-attacks stop every time you use a special attack, so you have to spam the attack command constantly or take off their health really, really slowly with nothing but specials. And all this while several dozen ghouls and banshees are gnawing on your toes at the same time, just in case you forgot.

You also get to kill Thrym. Oh yeah, that huge dude walking up and down the road! Except... during the one quest where he's actually relevant he's not there. He only spawns after you kill another one of the mini bosses (something there was no prior indication of), and even then it's possible to miss him since he's in a different place than usual. Way to be confusing, Blizzard.

Then there are the storm clouds. You're being told that they'll heal your storm giant friend, but nothing more. The problem is, it's not that easy. First off, they aren't hugely common and can be somewhat hard to spot in the sea of ghouls, which is obviously a problem. Just walking through them doesn't do anything, you have to grab them. Except, that doesn't always work either. In the Wowhead comments there's some discussion about how only a special kind of storm cloud heals you and how to recognise it... but why is that mentioned nowhere in the quest? Is this a bug or intentional? It sucks either way. Also, to get full use out of a storm cloud you apparently also have to attack something right after grabbing it to get the full effect of the HoT it gives you or something. I wonder how many times the people who found out about that had to die on this quest just to figure this out. Again, there is not even the slightest hint in-game that this is how things are supposed to work. Personally I just gave up on the storm clouds eventually and simply let Gymer die repeatedly, completing only a small portion of the quest on each new try. Hint: having to resort to zerg tactics is usually a sign that something's wrong.

I was rather surprised that so many people in the Wowhead comments actually talked about how much they loved this quest. I just can't share their enthusiasm. What about my readers? Did you find Gymer tiresome too or was there another vehicle quest that really got on your nerves?

Scary statistics

After following a link somewhere else and then browsing another blog's archives I stumbled upon this post at Bubblespec today, in which the writer talks about how she thinks that she ran way too many dungeons this expansion. To illustrate her point, she included a screenshot of an armoury statistics page that shows that two of her characters combined killed Cyanigosa an impressive sixty-nine times.

"Oh, that's neat," I thought, "I never thought of looking at all of my level eighties like that. I wonder how many instances I've run in WOTLK." So I looked at my statistics page. And, um. I almost wish I hadn't, because it was slightly scary.

Now, I know for a fact that a lot of the numbers on the statistics page are wonky at best. For example it claims that my paladin never killed the Black Knight on normal mode, even though she wore the Black Heart for a long time, or that my night elf priest has acquired less emblems of triumph than she already spent on gear. I still think that they have at least some basis in reality though; I guess at worst some of them need a little rounding up. Which is not really good thing when you have huge numbers to begin with, but there you go.

So, according to my armoury statistics page, I've entered 1456 WOTLK five-mans across my seven level eighties (yikes), but only completed 885 of them. Now, this is another number that I have a lot of trouble believing, because no way did I abandon 571 instance runs halfway through. Maybe it counts twice if you leave and re-enter an instance in progress while alive. I don't know. Still, close to nine hundred full dungeon runs is still a pretty damn impressive number. A lot of them were pugs too.

Curious as I was, I wasn't satisfied with those numbers however, and wanted to know which instances I did the most often. Somewhat to my surprise, the clear winner turned out to be Drak'tharon Keep, with a whopping 197 Prophet Tharon'ja kills (151 of them on heroic). To be fair, it does seem to come up as a random dungeon fairly often for me, and I also remember intentionally running it every day for a while early in the expansion, because it was considered one of the easiest heroics; and coming fresh from the Burning Crusade, we didn't dare to jump into something as scary as, say, heroic Utgarde Pinnacle right away.

In second place but already very far behind is Azjol-Nerub with 106 Anub'arak kills (seventy-three on heroic). Again I was slightly surprised at first, but then realised that this matched my habit of running this instance on multiple characters a day if it came up as the daily heroic pre dungeon finder.

My third most-visited dungeon of this expansion turned out to be the Violet Hold with one hundred Cyanigosa kills (eighty on heroic). I don't remember ever making a point of running this one more frequently, but it does seem to come up as my random reasonabily often.

Fourth place goes to the Culling of Stratholme and Mal'Ganis, whose butt I helped kick eighty-five times (seventy-five on heroic). I remember running this instance a lot early in the expansion while we were trying to make it to the Infinite Curroptor in time. (Yes, kids, once upon a time that was actually a difficult feat to achieve.) I never really got tired of it either, and stubbornly stuck it out even when pug members dropped group right at the start because they couldn't stand all the talking (before you could skip the dialogue, obviously).

Fifth place goes to the Black Knight, which, again, I found somewhat surprising considering that Trial of the Champion was released fairly late in the expansion. I didn't assist that many people with Black Heart farming either. I did run the instance on normal mode a lot with those of my characters that hit eighty after its release though, as it's a great way of getting geared up quickly. My paladin spent a lot of time in heroic mode as well, farming for the Peacekeeper Blade for a fairly long time.

Now, I'm not going to continue listing the numbers for every single boss. Let it just be said that the average for most of them seems to be around seventy.

The ones that I visited the least often are also interesting, however. For example I only escaped the Lich King in Halls of Reflection thirty-nine times (thirty-one on heroic). I suppose this is in part because the instance is one of the newest ones, in part because it has a high gear requirement on the dungeon finder, and in part because the few times that I went there intentionally for a gear drop, I got it almost immediately.

The other Icecrown five-mans are well within the normal average, presumably because even though they were released late, I ran them a stupid amount of times for gear drops for my alts.

My second least-visited dungeon is, not entirely unsurprisingly, the Oculus with forty-two completions (thirty-seven on heroic). I may have overcome my dislike for it now, but the fact that I avoided it like the plague for the first half of the expansion left a visible mark on the numbers.

Slightly above it with fifty-four kills is Sjonnir the Ironshaper from Halls of Stone (forty on heroic). Just goes to show that even though it feels like I get that instance all the time on some days, I really don't.

That's a crazy number of dungeon runs either way. Unlike Enlynn from Bubblespec I don't really regret them though. I mean, there is of course a vague sense of having wasted a lot of time on WoW, but as far as activities within WoW go, instance-running is still one of my favourites so there aren't many things that I'd prefer to have done instead anyway.