Return to Zul'Aman

So, tonight my guild went to tackle the new Zul'Aman. I ended up tanking on my druid instead of healing this time, due to us having different people online - and really, I just wanted to play with my guildies, I didn't care that much about my exact role. And finally those months of gearing up my druid paid off! I sometimes feel silly upgrading my alts' gear as much as I do, especially if I then hardly ever end up playing the role that I geared for, but occasionally you get a moment like this, where you suddenly need a reasonably geared character for a specific purpose and it feels all the sweeter to be able to provide what's needed.

Where Zul'Gurub feels inspired by its previous incarnation but otherwise features a whole host of completely new encounters, Zul'Aman is almost exactly the same as it was before. Bosses have been tweaked to accommodate the smaller group size, and the last boss is called Daakara instead of Zul'jin now (and he's got two eyes and two arms, shocking), but the core mechanics of the instance have stayed the same.

I have to say, in some ways it felt good to wipe on the last trash pull before Nalorakk again, or to fail at stopping one of Jan'alai's scouts in time. It always hurt me to see people steamrolling this content from patch 3.0 onwards, and it's nice to see that the mobs have levelled up and demand respect again. However, at the same time there is no way of going back to how things used to be. The trash has been thinned out considerably and I kept looking for patrols and hidden pulls that simply weren't there anymore. The patrols in the dragonhawk area don't keep respawning anymore, so you don't have to constantly huddle close together or risk aggroing something from behind. The bosses also felt a lot easier than the ones in Zul'Gurub and we one-shot all of them except Nalorakk, where we had a mess-up with one of the new mechanics at first. To be fair though, I don't know how much of that was due to the fact that I ran the place to death back in TBC and thus knew how to handle all the unchanged mechanics in my sleep.

One thing that really gave me food for thought was the Akil'zon fight, which was the first one we did. This one kept all of its original mechanics... and had a new one added. Think about that for a moment. Level 70 Zul'Aman was a pretty high-level raid, about on par with the tier five twenty-five-mans. Now it's been downsized to a Cataclysm five-man, and apparently they actually had to add mechanics to keep it interesting. I always scoff when people complain that instance bosses are getting too complex, but that one boss fight really highlighted the truth of it for me, when what used to be a reasonably challenging raid boss a few years ago is now considered too simple even for a five-man and needs to be upgraded. The mind boggles.

Similarly I realised that Nalorakk really used to be nothing but the tanks standing on top of each other and taunting back and forth. With only one tank available in a five-man, the developers added something to make the rest of the party move around a bit. Same thing with Halazzi really, who used to be all about standing still and sharing the saber lash damage. Now he drops a healing totem instead so the tank has to keep moving him.

Janalai was kind of funny, because I only told the dps to kill one of the hatchers but didn't think of reminding them that, if we were still following the same tactics as at level 70, they'd eventually have to kill the second hatcher too so that we'd have time to AoE down the dragonhawks he had spawned and to give the flame buffet debuff some time to drop off. As it was, the second hatcher kept running around freely and a steady stream of hawks kept on coming until they were all gone. I just ran in circles maniacally, spamming my AoE abilities whenever they came off cooldown, but we seemed to survive just fine. Back in the day that never would have worked simply because few classes had strong AoE abilities.

The last two bosses felt like a bit of a letdown, considering how hard I still remember them being. Daakara doesn't even call upon all the different animal spirits, only two of them. And most importantly, they didn't bring back the cool music at the end. :(

In summary I would say, I think that Blizzard did a good job updating the instance for the new level cap, and to someone who never did it back in TBC, running it now should certainly be a much more rewarding experience than just soloing the entire place in fifteen minutes used to be. However, as someone who got her Amani War Bear back in the day, running this new Zul'Aman kind of made me feel like a middle-aged woman who's having a midlife crisis and desperately trying to recapture her youth. The instance has nothing new to offer me, other than a couple of new pieces of loot. I'll probably run it a couple of times with guildies, but other than that I don't think it'll interest me that much. There is no way to turn back time, not even in a computer game.

Epic adventures in Zul'Gurub

I just spent all evening fighting my way through Zul'Gurub with a guild group. It took us almost five hours to complete the instance. It's not really difficult enough that it should take that long, especially with a group that was mostly overgeared for it, but it was just one of those things. Slight dawdling around ("Look at that giant turtle, I need that for a quest!"), having to replace people when they grew too tired, trying the fights without having looked up all the tactics first, and of course, patch day syndrome: I swear, I got disconnected almost every single time I died and released to the graveyard, and every so often my screen would freeze up the moment our tank pulled a boss, not to unfreeze again until we were all dead (and then I would of course get disconnected again). It was rather a pain.

At least one of my fellow guildies seemed to grow increasingly frustrated with every wipe, but I really thrived on the challenge. Every wipe just made me want to beat the content more, and when we finally killed Jin'do I was too tired to cheer, but certainly satisfied.

I really liked the instance as a whole. I was surprised to see that it doesn't have a normal mode, which is a first for a WoW five-man I believe, and also a bit nonsensical if you think about it. If there is no normal mode, isn't heroic mode the normal mode? After all, there isn't anything else... still, it was good fun.

Even the trash was entertaining. There are a lot of mobs around that make the place feel alive, but most of them are neutral so you don't have to engage them if you don't want to. The ones that you do have to fight often have a mechanic that you'll encounter in a boss fight later, effectively preparing you for the fight even if you've never done it before. I thought that was cool. There were also a couple of Frogger-like passages to break things up. The one with the falling rocks even wiped us initially.

The bosses were all pretty cool as well. Venoxis took us several tries until everyone had understood all the different types of green goo that they had to avoid and how. I felt rather powerless as a healer because too many of these effects killed people before I could do anything to save them if they messed up. I was rather pleased when we finally killed him and I got the It's Not Easy Being Green achievement.

Mandokir was rather amusing when he immediately ran up and decapitated me, mere seconds into the fight. Of course I then got resed by the spirits, and we kept fighting and noobing around for a long time until I eventually ran out of mana. We were very pleased to see the legendary "ding - grats" exchange make a return. On the second try he died without problems.

I was also rather happy to see that the Edge of Madness has been kept around as a place where dedicated players can summon a random bonus boss. We got Gri'lek, who gave me flashbacks to Karazhan and the big bad wolf - which is a good thing!

High Priestess Kilnara won the award for causing the funniest wipe, as we went in blindly once again, burned her down and then got pounced on by all her panthers at once. It took us another two attempts or so to get things right, and we decided to go for the Here, Kitty Kitty... achievement as well. Strangely enough only two people in the party got it, even though it should have been shared (as the whole party had to contribute to its success), which was somewhat disappointing.

Zanzil turned out to be a major road block, which seemed appropriate considering that he's living on Jin'do's old hill and old Jin'do used to be similarly annoying. While we understood how to use the cauldrons, the small zombies kept giving us trouble, plus people kept randomly dying to the fire trail. It is very harsh though, what with it ticking for 50k damage a second. One small step at the wrong time can kill you quite easily. This is where we lost our first dpser to tiredness, but fortunately we had a replacement online in guild. I lost count of just how many attempts this guy took us, but in the end we got him down (though it was once again close as several people had already died by the time he fell).

Jin'do was another really tough one, and eventually our tank also wanted to log off and sleep. Our retribution paladin switched to tanking and we gave four-manning the fight a shot but didn't quite succeed. Our group leader was close to calling it since we didn't have any more replacements online, but I begged to try once more with a random from the dungeon finder. We got a nice fury warrior who did a great job after we briefly explained the strategy to him, and two attempts later the achievement spam from completing the instance finally flashed across guild chat.

I'm convinced that we'll do much better next time, now that we know all the fights, but I do have to wonder how viable that instance will be to pug, or to put it differently, how long it will take until it will be viable to pug. Mandokir and Kilnara shouldn't be too hard to get the hang of, but all the other fights strike me as requiring a pretty high focus even once you know the tactics (dancing around all the goo on Venoxis, switching between the cauldrons on Zanzil, juggling the different kinds of spirits on Jin'do), and that's many a pug's greatest weakness. I also reckon that these fights won't be completely trivialised by better gear quite as quickly.

Tomorrow: Zul'Aman! I'm rather anxious to see what the developers have done to my former favourite raid, though considering how much fun I had in ZG tonight, I'm optimistic.

Alliance vs. Horde AGAIN, and the zones the Cataclysm forgot

After completing all the quests in Stonetalon, my rogue moved on to the Southern Barrens. This is another one of the zones that have been reworked completely, at least for Alliance, because it didn't actually used to have any content worth mentioning in that area. I enjoyed it for that newness alone, and a subtle reference to Mankrik's wife made me chuckle.

Camp Taurajo has been razed by the Alliance, and there's a quest to take care of some looters in the ruins. Like in Darkshore, there were named corpses all over the place, but for some reason it hardly affected me. Mind you, while my first ever Horde character was a tauren and levelled through the Barrens, I don't have the same kind of fond memories of the place that I have of Auberdine, so that definitely played a part, but I think part of it was also simply that I was playing the other faction. As such, dead enemies weren't really that interesting to me and I tried to mostly ignore them. I'm pretty sure that if I were to visit the place again as Horde, I'd feel very differently.

The one thing that disappointed me a little was that it was yet another zone that was focused on the Alliance vs. Horde conflict. Yes, I know it's a core part of the game, but that doesn't mean that I want all my quests to be about it all the time. Maybe it's just the levelling path I chose, but basically I went from Ashenvale (oh noes the Horde has taken Silverwind Refuge) to Stonetalon (oh noes the Horde wants to bomb us) to the Southern Barrens (oh noes the Horde is attacking Northwatch) and it just never seemed to end. Maybe it's my bias from usually playing Horde that made me a bit uncomfortable there after a while, though the fact that one of the quest givers was a complete jerk whom I just wanted to strangle didn't help either.

Moving on to Dustwallow Marsh, I found that this zone didn't appear to have been changed at all, except for some very, very minor tweaks to the geography and the like. It's understandable, seeing how it was already revamped once back in 2.3, which pretty much put it on par with Outland content. So it's less linear than the other zones now and you'll have to do do more running back and forth, but it's still good fun.

I was just slightly miffed that the missing diplomat type chain hasn't been updated either, except for Jaina laughing at you at the end and going "oh right they kidnapped Varian, lol, that was ages ago and he's back now". Okay, so she doesn't actually say that, but it sure felt like it.

I then randomly got out another alt, my warlock, and had a look at the new Arathi Highlands for a change of pace, the one zone that I had skipped during my paladin's otherwise pretty linear quest progression. I had heard some rumours that this zone was really bad and hadn't been updated properly, and I'm sad to say that it's all true. I don't know what it's like for the Horde as they have a new outpost on the western edge of the map, so I'm assuming that they must have some new content to tackle, but on Alliance side it's literally the same old, same old. It's telling that the Arathi Highlands quest achievement only requires you to complete 18 quests, the lowest number of all zones. How do you make it through five or more levels on so few quests? Easily, as they are still as grindy as they used to be in vanilla. After clearing my way into the kobold cave for the Myzrael quest, out again and then in again just to collect enough quest items, I was about ready to bang my head against a wall.

Basically, I imagine that the revamp of this zone happened like this: the designers had already finished every other zone in the northern part of the Eastern Kingdoms, but realised that they were running out of time until the expansion's release, so they decided to just give the zone an emergency clean-up along the lines of "okay, tell me five things that used to annoy you about Arathi Highlands and we'll change those".

"That guy Fozruk wandering all over the place; I could never find him when I needed him!" - "Okay, we'll just have him stand in front of that rock over here."

"That Forsaken courier patrol! They used to kill me all the time. And then when I got the quest to kill them they were once again nowhere to be found." - "Fine, we'll remove most of them and just leave one guy. And um, he'll just run in circles on this small piece of road as if he's confused about where he was meant to go. Yeah."

"Stromgarde was kind of fun, but it was annoying that you had to run in and out repeatedly to complete that quest with the tower." - "No problem, we'll just have a quest NPC in there that moves you right along."

"Speaking of running around, the Myzrael chain used to require you to go to the Badlands or something, didn't it?" - "Not anymore, it doesn't. Next!"

"Faldir's Cove is a cool place, but ninety-nine percent of players never even found it in the past!" - "Okay, let's carve a big tunnel towards it into the mountain and put a sign in front of it that says 'here be pirates'. And add a breadcrumb quest for good measure. Oops, we're out of time, so that will have to do."

I thought it was telling that when I first entered the zone, I could only pick up two quests at Refuge Pointe - one to kill lots of mobs in one corner of the map, and one to kill lots of mobs in the opposite corner of the map. /facepalm. And they even allowed Myzrael to remain an elite mob and technically a group quest, though I didn't even notice until she spawned and my warlock still soloed her with ease.

It was really kind of shocking. So many lovingly revamped zones and then a rush job like that. I always felt pretty neutral about Arathi, neither loving nor hating it, but with the quests in the surrounding zones being so much smoother, having nothing to do except grind endless amounts of elementals, ogres and syndicate mobs all across the map sure made this one stick out like a sore thumb. I seriously hope that Blizzard is going to give it a proper revamp in one of the upcoming content patches.

On my way through night elf lands

I'm a levelling machine! Once I had decided to park my dwarf paladin at sixty for the time being, I immediately picked up another old alt, in this case my level fifteen human rogue, and took her to Darkshore to get onto the questing path in Kalimdor.

Darkshore is still a wonderful zone, though I admit that I might be biased as this is where my little night elf priest first learned the ropes back in vanilla. As such it's never been a zone that I would have named as one of my favourites (I generally prefer things a little less melancholy and a bit more green), but every time I go back there, a part of me immediately feels at home. It's funny how much that early conditioning can stick.

The zone is one of the ones that have been changed more drastically by the Cataclysm, and the quests have been overhauled completely to reflect this, but somehow it still manages to retain the same old feel and atmosphere (which I consider a good thing). It's also a zone that struck me as particularly attractive to old-timers who are rolling a new alt, because there are a lot of references to the way things used to be that won't mean much to a new player but will definitely catch a veteran's attention.

The quest line dealing with the destruction of Auberdine is the most striking example of this. I won't claim that I immediately recognised any names I read during The Last Wave of Survivors, but many of them seemed familiar in a vague way, so I went to look them up and then usually went "nooo, not him/her" and felt distressed, as if Deathwing had killed someone that I personally knew. It's interesting how little things like that can get to you.

There are also the Shatterspear trolls, and I for one felt a pang of sadness remembering how they used to be neutral and people would hurl themselves off mountains to go dance with them, yet now they are getting slaughtered in the name of the Alliance. War, what is it good for?

Oh, and the Master's Glaive! For years we wondered what lay buried there, and now we finally get some backstory for it, which again, wouldn't be anything special to a new player, but for someone who has wondered about that strange site many times in the past, it's very satisfying.

Gameplay-wise it's worth mentioning that Blizzard attempted to alleviate all the running up and down caused by the elongated shape of the zone both by more sensible quest design as well as by implementing night saber riders that will give you a ride between different sites, which is a reasonable enough solution to move players quickly between places where it wouldn't make sense to have full-blown flight paths but that are still far enough apart that all the running will start to bore players without a mount. There's also a quest that allows you to acquire a permanent run speed buff that works in the entire zone.

Moving on to Ashenvale felt mildly disappointing in comparison, as it hasn't been changed nearly as much. The conflict with the Horde has been escalated, but overall a lot of the old quests were kept and simply adjusted somewhat. This is not entirely a bad thing, as Ashenvale had some pretty memorable quest lines to begin with, but still the final result wasn't as exciting as I had hoped. For example I had heard a rumour some time ago that the new Dartol's Rod quest line would allow you to keep the rod at the end, but that didn't turn out to be true, and the new version of the rod can only be used in Ashenvale anyway. Slightly disappointing.

The zone's lore also felt inconsistent to me. I've talked about the "Haven't I killed this guy before?" syndrome before, but it's really not just about named NPCs. Why can the Alliance procure an entire keep out of thin air in Swamp of Sorrows, but Forest Song still looks as if they started building it yesterday, after nearly five years? The passage of time sure has left a lot of anomalies after the Cataclysm. Oh, and speaking of anomalies, there was also a quest that has you defending Astranaar against a Horde attack, and while phasing was used to show fires and enemy windriders, all the NPCs still calmly went about their business in the middle of it all, completely undisturbed, which was just weird.

The transition from Ashenvale to Stonetalon was pleasantly smooth, with a couple of quests "spilling across the border" so to speak, which I liked as it felt more natural and less as if you were simply playing a game and just ticking off another zone as "done". There was also an explanation for why some quest givers are able to talk to you remotely as one of the gnome NPCs at Stardust Spire builds a "gnomecorder" for you - it's just a shame that this same technology is also automatically assumed to already be existent in several other (including lower-level) zones without any kind of explanation. Plus, you kind of wonder why the NPCs don't use such a powerful technology for more important things than talking to the random schmuck that they sent out to kill ten orcs.

I was curious what Stonetalon would be like for Alliance after my rather intense playthrough of the Horde side. It was... not as exciting to be honest. I was kind of disappointed to see that more than a few quests were complete carbon copies of what I had experienced on Horde side, and not just mechanics-wise. The Alliance even has its own deranged little girl with a pet robot! The big plot happening on Horde side only comes into play in a marginal role really - the Alliance discovers the bomb and you manage to delay its deployment a bit, but in the end you don't make that much of a difference. I don't know why the big climax of that story didn't touch me as much as Alliance. Part of it was probably that it wasn't played up as much, not to mention that I already knew how it was going to end, but more importantly I guess it was just another instance of "watching the Horde being jerks" as opposed to the massive guilt trip the Horde story puts you through.

The rest of the zone was kind of mix and match. Fight the Horde and gather some stuff. Alright I guess. Lore-wise it was interesting to see the Alliance try to ally with the Grimtotem. I also hit exalted with Darnassus about halfway through, which seemed way too easy, but whatever. Oh, and was I the only one who kept looking for some kind of follow-up to Brood of Seldarria that involved doing something to Seldarria herself? It just seemed very atypical for a WoW quest giver to go "oh noes, a black dragon... let's, um, smash up some of its eggs and then leave it alone".

Through the Dark Portal... or maybe not

My little dwarf paladin hit level sixty yesterday, less than three weeks after I decided to start playing her again, and after what were effectively only a handful of play sessions. I suppose that's hardly amazing considering that I often hear that you can take a character the entire length of the way from 1 to 85 within less than a week these days, but to me, a player who always spends a lot of time idling, exploring and faffing around with professions, it still feels huge. A month ago I hardly even remembered that this character existed, now she's my toon with the fourth highest level on that server. The zones flew by so fast it's silly.

I also thought it was kind of funny when I hit sixty about halfway through the Blasted Lands and the anti-fun team's XP penalty for "playing in the wrong expansion" kicked in. As I watched my experience bar's progress slow down massively, I actually found myself thinking "yeah, that feels more like it". I also noticed the number of experience points needed to level, something I hardly ever pay attention to, and it was less than 300k. I distinctly remember coming to Hellfire Peninsula for the first time and marvelling at the fact that my next level was over a million XP away. How times change.

Anyway, mini reviews of the zones I covered on my way - there were four of them as they were all relatively short:

Searing Gorge

Apart from Lunk the friendly ogre (who is very amusing), this zone felt very familiar. You're still helping the Thorium Brotherhood, though they become friendly much more quickly now than they used to, to kill the same old Dark Iron dwarves with the exact same names (déjà vu?) - but it's still more fun now than it used to be in my opinion, as everything has been strung together into a more cohesive story and they got rid of the need to constantly crawl down into the Cauldron and back up again. That thing used to be the bane of my existence whenever I quested my way through that zone, as I'd inevitably get lost somewhere in the tunnels or on the metal scaffolding outside, unable to find my way back up, and there'd be Dark Irons everywhere and GAH! Now they just dump you at a tunnel entrance towards the end of the zone, you antagonise the Dark Irons in every way you can at once, then you climb up again and that's it. This is one case where I'm honestly in favour of simplification.

Burning Steppes

I can't really say that I miss anything about the way the Burning Steppes used to be, because as far as I remember there simply wasn't that much there in the first place. Back in Vanilla I just remember it as this place where everyone went to farm Thorium and dragon scales. Nowadays players get to meet up with Rambo Corporal Keeshan, whom an Alliance player may or may not have met before in Redridge Mountains (a zone which I did on another character right after the Shattering). He once again concocts a crazy plan that allows the two of you to defeat a huge army on your own, and it's still funny. I was just disappointed that there was no mention of, erm... how he got from where he was at the end of Redridge to hanging out in Burning Steppes. The final quest of the zone displayed what I thought was one of the rare cases of a good use of the cut scene mechanic.

Swamp of Sorrows

The next stop in the natural zone progression was the Swamp of Sorrows, which used to be a bit out of the way to get to from the Burning Steppes. Blizzard decided to fix this by adding a mountain highway straight from the latter zone to the swamp, and it just so happens to be traversed by a random woman on a rocket mount who has nothing better to do than sit on a rock in the Burning Steppes all day, waiting for customers. Convenient, but somewhat contrived.

Swamp of Sorrows used to be a very dull place for Alliance (and actually for Horde too as far as I'm concerned) and to be honest it's still not that exciting, though at least there's something to do. There are Steamwheedle goblins, Itharius wanting to get into the Sunken Temple and a newly erected Alliance base among other things. The latter kind of bugged me simply because from what I could see of Stonard from my limited Alliance point of view, it still looked like the same old somewhat poorly equipped outpost that it's always been, but the Alliance somehow managed to erect an entire keep out of nowhere in the meantime. Developer bias!

Blasted Lands

The Blasted Lands are once again a zone that I remember as pretty boring and empty before the Cataclysm. There used to be a couple of longish quest chains that led you there for some reason or another, but there wasn't much in the way of proper quest hubs. This has been rectified and it's fun. The zone has been spiced up a bit via the inclusion of some greenery, wildlife and worgen in the Tainted Scar, but nods to the way things used to be are still around as well. For example you can run into some mobs that still use the ancient high elf model (hideous!), and the old blood mages that used to give out boring buff quests are still around, as proper quest givers this time. I also found one slightly hidden quest (read: no exclamation point or sparkles to start it), which was both sweet and sad. A good mix of story and random adventure in my opinion.

I have to admit that I felt a slight distaste at the thought of continuing through the Dark Portal after that - I don't share many people's opinion that Burning Crusade content is just horrible to play through these days, but there's definitely a big break in terms of style and story, and it feels jarring. I'll probably leave my little dwarf at sixty for a while and move on to the next alt in order to explore more of the new low-level zones. My paladin never even had to leave the Eastern Kingdoms, so there's a lot left to discover.

Recruitment is frustrating

I still enjoy raiding and my guild is progressing well enough on principle, but we keep having to cancel raids due to not having enough players. We're advertising on the official forums and via in-game chat, but it's been nearly two months since we had any kind of application at all. It's immensely frustrating. When I ask around I get told that it's the same for all guilds, but that still doesn't answer the question of why.

Many people say that the raids are too difficult and that this has killed the player base's interest in raiding, but I don't really buy that. Or rather, I can believe that this is true for many but I don't see how it explains such a massive dearth of recruits. Raids in Burning Crusade weren't exactly faceroll either, but I don't remember there ever being such a lack of interest in them. Not to mention, to come to the conclusion that raids are too hard or not fun for you or whatever, you'd at least have to give them a try - where are all the new players trying to break into raiding? My guild is pretty casual these days, so it's not as if we have huge expectations and are only open to the most experienced, but still we don't see any of them.

I wonder how much the fragmentation of the server community plays a role. It feels like you have little reason to interact with people outside your guild anymore, maybe the occasional Baradin Hold pug and that's it. I used to have plenty of contacts outside our guild, but they have mostly dried up. Five-mans used to be the big thing to do with people outside your guild occasionally, but the dungeon finder has mostly killed that off too. So it's not until you're short on raiders that you realise that you've got nowhere to turn. I keep thinking that I should make a point of running the daily heroic again and ask in general chat whether anyone wants to join to get to know people, but seeing how I'm a healer and healers are exactly what we're missing, that strategy wouldn't really achieve much.

Strangely enough, the whole guild levelling system doesn't seem to help either. You can question whether the guild perks are really all that, but it's an additional mental barrier to prevent you from leaving your old guild for sure. I actually hit exalted with Onslaught only yesterday, almost four months after expansion release, and most people in my guild still have a fair way to go. I doubt this kind of thing is keeping anyone in a guild that they hate, but if you're just considering leaving to join a raid guild for example, it's one more thing you risk to lose if things don't work out. Not to mention the issue of whether your raids count as guild groups in the eyes of the in-game system, something that has effectively killed off multi-guild raid forces and discourages filling holes with the occasional pugger.

And then... there is the issue of ten-man raiding. So many people thought that ten-man raiding becoming the new focus would make everyone happier, but I'm not sure it's working out that way. People thought that fewer people would mean less organisational effort, and in many ways it does, but maintaining a balanced roster with neither too few nor too many raiders is harder than ever, and multiple smaller raid groups means that more people have to take on the burden of being raid leaders than before.

Also, the whole "raiding with my friends only" thing has turned out to be a double-edged sword in my opinion. How many people cheered that they would now finally be able to focus on raiding with the nine players they liked best, without having to "carry" the chaff of fifteen others? (I wasn't one of them, but there were many.) However in the end, if one or two of your friends leave the game and you need replacements, who do you turn to? What are the chances that you always have a close friend at hand who can provide just what you need? In the end most guilds need people who are willing to be raiders first and friends second (at least initially). But if everyone else is already friends, who wants to be the one guy who has to struggle to fit in? Since you only need ten people, you're probably better off trying to make your own raid group with players that are already your friends. Except that you're probably one or two slots short in the end as well... And so it continues as everyone just sticks to their little cliques, which are too large to be absorbed into another ten-man but too small to be stable on their own.

This is all just rambly theorising of course, as I don't have any proof of these things beyond my own impressions and the occasional chat with other players. But I do feel that something is off, and I still don't think that it's the raid content itself. I'd be happy to hear other people's thoughts on the subject, and suggestions for solutions if you've got any.

Oh, and Onslaught on Earthen Ring-EU Horde side is recruiting. Of course. /cough

Gathering in a shattered world

Most of the alts that I've created since the Cataclysm have a gathering profession of some sort, sometimes paired with a matching crafting profession. I'm finding it quite noticeable how gathering has been changed in the revamped old world.

Mining has probably undergone the biggest changes. It used to be... not really difficult, but somewhat messy, as different ores with different skill requirements were all over the place. I'm sure that everyone who's ever levelled a miner before the Cataclysm knows the feeling of finding a random iron or mithril node in what's otherwise a low-level zone and then doing a dejected /cry emote next to it because you didn't actually have sufficient gathering skill to collect the shinies. Or maybe that was just me. Either way, give me a break, I only just started on tin! And who ever thought that Stonetalon Mountains should have mithril nodes in it anyway?

This could sometimes be frustrating, but it also made ores very valuable because it was hard to do any focused gathering. Thousand Needles used to be considered a good place to mine iron for example, but it had just as much - if not more - copper and tin nodes taking up space, and nodes were generally pretty sparse to begin with, at least compared to something like herb spawn points.

Well, let's just say, the Cataclysm changed that as well. There are still "transitional" zones where you'll find more than one type of ore (for example tin and iron in the Wetlands), but never more than two different types, not counting the rare spawns like gold and silver. A lot of zones however have been "purified" completely. Western Plaguelands? All iron, all the time. Badlands? Same with mithril. Searing Gorge? Also nothing but mithril. (I thought that was funny actually, considering how all the outposts are called Thorium something-or-other. It doesn't quite add up now.) In addition, the number of ore nodes in general struck me as having been increased a lot and it's now more on par with herbs. I don't have any hard data to back this up, but it really was very noticeable. For example I'd go to an ogre cave in the Badlands and find four or five nodes right around the entrance, then another five inside, and by the time I came back out again everything outside had already respawned again as well. To someone who's used to ore, especially certain types, being a rare and precious commodity, that's simply insane.

It shows on the auction house as well, with many ores only going for a couple of silver per piece these days. I reckon that levelling a crafting profession that depends on mining, and especially on particular kinds of ores (*cough* blacksmithing *cough*), must be a lot easier these days than it used to be, even without any nerfs to the actual crafting requirements. I guess that's a good thing, though I have to admit that finding multiple different ores in each zone somehow felt more natural to me.

Now, skinning has sort of gone the opposite way. It was always the easiest gathering profession to level, because you didn't have to seek out any gathering nodes, you just clicked to loot the body of each beast or whatever else Blizzard considered skinnable a second time to get some leather as well. Unsurprisingly, the spoils from this weren't worth a whole lot. I remember always vendoring light hides for example, because there was just such a huge oversupply that there was no point in trying to auction them for even the smallest profit.

It's still just as easy to level skinning, but there just doesn't seem as much to skin as there used to be. The mobs in most low-level areas have been thinned out considerably so you're less likely to have to kill anything that just happens to be in your way, and it's harder to find a good leather grinding spot when everything's so far apart. In addition the number of "kill ten wolves" type of quests has been reduced greatly because people always complained that they are boring, so you generally don't have reason to kill as many skinnable mobs anymore as you level up. This shows itself on the auction house as well, and I was shocked when I saw one of the aforementioned light hides go for more than a piece of iron ore. The mind boggles.

It also stinks big time if you're a leatherworker. Mind you, the skinning/leatherworking combo has involved a certain amount of leather grinding for as long as I can remember, but Cataclysm has taken it to new and ridiculous levels. My baby hunter found herself grinding mobs in Elwynn Forest for ruined leather scraps of all things, because they are the best way of getting through the first couple of leatherworking levels. I remember once upon a time I was annoyed when mobs in the Barrens still gave me scraps long after I had moved on from that, but now I struggled to get any at all! Oh, and ten levels later I was back to grind yet again, for light leather this time as my levelling had taken me onwards to medium and heavy leather dropping creatures way too quickly. What a nightmare.

Herbalism has probably changed the least, though herb spawns appear to be even more plentiful these days than they used to be. Good times to level inscription I guess, though not so much as an alchemist, because the difference between common and rare herbs seems to be just as pronounced as ever, if not more so. Case in point, I needed a lot of goldthorn to make it past a certain skill level range of my alchemy, but all I could find in the level-appropriate zones were piles and piles of blindweed, fadeleaf, khadgar's whisker and kingsblood. Eventually I looked it up on Wowhead and they actually had comments there guiding you towards what's only a handful of very limited goldthorn spawn points in multiple zones. I understand that different herbs grow in different environments and that this puts limits on how much you'll find of each - and in fact I like it, it feels more natural, unlike the single-ore zones mentioned above. For example kingsblood always grows out in the open, and since there is a lot of open space it's easy to have a lot of spawn points for it. Goldthorn on the other hand only grows on hills and rocks, which is obviously limiting - but even in Arathi, a zone which is nothing but hills and rocks, there was hardly any to be found, which I found rather disappointing. It would be nice if Blizzard considered rebalancing things like that, but I'm not holding my breath.