So... Mists of Pandaria is official.

There is a lot of raging and incoherent complaining going on right now, and I don't really want to add to that... but I'm sorry to say that I am disappointed. When the title of the next expansion first came up as a rumour, I said that I was feeling pretty indifferent about it... but I have to admit that since then I'd developed some hopes that regardless of what the expansion was actually going to be about, it would contain something that would reignite my spark for the game. Unfortunately the expansion preview panel hasn't revealed anything that excites me - on the contrary, I kept reading about plans for the game that I personally find nothing but extremely off-putting.

As far as the pandaren themselves go, I don't mind that Blizzard changed their mind about including them and that they want to make a former joke race a more serious part of the lore. New races have always been one of my favourite expansion additions. And a race that at least starts neutrally is something that I'm sure a fair amount of people are going to be quite excited about. (I have to admit I'm somewhat intrigued by the further-reaching implications myself - if Blizzard doesn't care about race as an easy way of identifying friend or foe anymore, could other races eventually be allowed to change sides as well?)

However: while I approve of new races in principle, I personally don't find the pandaren appealing at all, and unfortunately it kind of looks like there isn't really anything else to this expansion. I don't think Burning Crusade would have been as good if it had just been "WoW: Blood Elves and Draenei". Or think "Cataclysm: Goblins and Worgen", with no Deathwing or anything. I get the impression that Blizzard is counting on the pandaren being such massive fan favourites that nothing else will matter. Well, it doesn't work like that for this (soon to be former?) fan.

There are other features that don't sound bad in principle, like the pet battles (Pokemon is popular for a reason), but that simply don't interest me personally and just work to reinforce my feeling that I'm not part of the target audience anymore.

The real kicker for me however were a bunch of announcements that actively made me shudder:

Talent trees getting reworked again

Or is it more like "removed"? Whatever. Cataclysm's talent tree revamp was extremely painful for me and actually made me fall out of love with my favourite class for several months because things were just that bad. They did manage to balance things out somewhat after a while though, and in fairness, I did feel like it was worth it. I think the Cataclysm talent trees are good. Not perfect - people who love to go crazy with customisation find them boring I believe - but they achieved what they set out to do.

So why they hell do they want to turn everything upside down again? You know it's going to be another balancing nightmare, and I absolutely do not have the stomach to relearn everything about all the classes I play from scratch again. I think Elder Game has the right of it when he says that Ghostcrawler has gone overboard with the idea of trying to achieve perfect balance.

Challenge Mode Dungeons

"Complete a dungeon in x minutes". As Redbeard already pointed out in a comment, it's pretty ironic that this feature is announced right after I mentioned in my last post that I hate the "rush rush" culture that has developed in instances since the introduction of the dungeon finder. Meanwhile, Blizzard thinks that players should be encouraged to rush more! Sorry, but we simply don't see eye to eye about what makes a fun dungeon experience anymore.

Changes to Questing

"Incentives for dungeons/raiders to run quests and do outdoor/daily kind of stuff. For example finishing a quest might give you a buff for the day, and maybe that buff will let you roll on a loot that only appears to people with that buff." I don't know about you, but once again I can't help but think that this sounds like an absolute nightmare. Dailies and random dungeons are already making people feel burnt out with their subtle pressure to do ALL THE THINGS every day. At least you still have a bit of choice about whether to focus on dungeons or dailies right now, but with a system like that people will not just feel that they have to do the daily dungeon, but to make it worth it they also have to do the quests that will provide the extra loot later... ugh!

I suppose one should never say never, but I really can't see myself buying that one.

Ran some normals again

I don't think I've ever hit my weekly heroic cap since it was first introduced, but I used up all of my weekly random bonuses for normals on my newly dinged night elf priest within two days. I think that says something about me as well as about normals, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

I've talked about the advantages of running normals before, and all in all, they still apply. I think I'm also finally managing to pin down what has been bothering me about dungeon runs in the game as of late, and it's not so much about point systems, immersion or difficulty by itself, but the whole "rush rush" culture. Players want to get through dungeons as fast as possible, and the developers keep talking about releasing content at a faster pace. I don't like that! It turns fun into stress for me. My favourite run these past two days was actually a normal Grim Batol with four people from the same guild who advanced at what most people would consider an agonisingly slow pace (one trash pull every other minute or so). At one point their dps warrior fell off a bridge, died, and took ten minutes to find his way back. The tank apologised profusely for his friend's drunken stupor, but I honestly didn't mind. I just watched a bit of tv on the side and was happy. I'd rather deal with someone who's ten times slower than my "ideal" pace than someone who pulls even a bit too fast. It's pretty obvious that I'm exceptional in this attitude though - I'm pretty sure that ninety-nine percent of pug healers would have abandoned that group quite quickly.

I also met several nice players again with whom I continued to do more than one run, and even the not-so-nice ones were never outright mean or rude.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses however. In fact, my very first run was pretty disastrous. I got into Lost City of the Tol'vir with nobody using crowd control, two melee dps, and the very belated realisation that my keybinds were completely messed up. I struggled on for a bit, casting the wrong heals all the time and finding myself forced to drink after every single pull, but when we wiped on some trash after the first boss, someone finally complained about "bad tanking and healing". Since I was most definitely performing sub-par, I apologised and left, to try again later.

Subsequent runs with properly set up binds went a lot better, though getting fewer melee dps that loved to bathe in any ground AoEs helped as well. Still, I have to admit that I felt a lot more performance pressure than I had in a while. I think I only met one person who wasn't geared for heroics yet, and most tanks had around 150k health. I remember when we tanked heroics with 125k! I really didn't think I'd feel so undergeared in normals of all places - and other people having better gear only did so much to make my job easier, as AoE damage remains the same if people don't dodge or prevent it, and I was still left with a lot more green bar space to fill than my poor mana pool could handle at first.

There wasn't a whole lot of gear to be had either, since mages are still needing on all the spirit cloth (and winning it) even a full year after 4.0 made the stat obsolete for their class.

At some point I did the Horseman and won a ring, at which point the system suddenly tried to put me into heroics. What is this, I don't even! I'm in greens and can't heal my way out of normal Lost City and you want to put me into heroics? Clearly a single high-level epic can seriously screw with item level restrictions.

In a Vortex Pinnacle run, my group spent eight minutes on the first pull with two Temple Adepts because they just could not control or interrupt the heals. I still don't know how I managed to keep everyone alive that long, even with blowing all my cooldowns. When we ran into the same problem on the next pull, I did run out of mana eventually and we wiped. The tank told everyone that they sucked and left, at which point everyone else dropped group as well, presumably in shame. I requeued for an entirely new group, and we almost wiped to the same problem again, though we eventually managed to scrape by, barely. I think I might have to reconsider my opinions on Cataclysm dungeon difficulty...

Lost City of the Tol'vir was the instance that came up for me most often, and I think there wasn't a single group that didn't wipe on those trash packs at the entrance to the last third of the instance - you know which ones I mean, the ones that people always try to skip, but then someone inevitably butt-pulls them, you get two or more groups at once and you die. I thought it was amazing how consistent that was. You'd think people would learn eventually.

Still, I had fun, because even if it wasn't perfect, nobody was stressing about speed and that made all the difference. Also, chain-running instances is an awesome source of cloth for levelling tailoring!

Questing from 80-85 again, this time as Alliance

I still feel burnt out on Cataclysm questing and have avoided completing zones that my various max-level alts are still missing because I just don't find it fun - even if it would benefit them by unlocking certain reputations and perks. I did manage to finally level my night elf priest to 85 the other day though, driven by the desire to see what this stretch of levelling looked like from the other side.

Mount Hyjal and Deepholm were exactly the same, but that didn't really come as a surprise since it was always obvious to me that these quests were given by neutral organisations. I still think that these two are probably my favourites of the five new zones.

I only dipped my toes into Vashj'ir briefly to unlock the portal, get my sea legs and the sea horse. From what little I saw, it reeked heavily of "superficially different but actually the same" syndrome, as I wrote about it two weeks ago. The only thing that made the experience feel different to me was the fact that I realised for the first time that Vashj'ir was actually located off the coast of Stormwind. As Horde I just got a loading screen while sailing there and assumed that the zone was placed in a separate instance, since the coast was too far away to see it anyway. In contrast, sailing there straight from Stormwind harbour and with no interruptions felt nice and immersive.

Something that has nothing to do with factions but that struck me once again was that the Vashj'ir intro quest makes no sense. First you get a summon from the Farseer/Earthspeaker who then gives you that vision of Thrall... and then they send you off to some random island off the coast to fight the other faction. Talk about a non sequitur! When I first did these quests as Horde and skimmed parts of the quest text in my drive to advance quickly, I actually thought that the boat was supposed to take me to the Maelstrom. It just makes no sense to have Thrall's call for help as an intro to a completely unrelated zone - in my opinion it should have been part of the introduction to Deepholm if anything.

I avoided Uldum and then got started on the Twilight Highlands - finally a zone with noticeable differences between Alliance and Horde! And it was quite a pleasant surprise to me too: on Horde side I didn't really like the introduction to the zone much. First Garrosh has you kicking around scared goblins and lazy orcs, and then you have to endure a twenty-minute "event" that is effectively a long, unskippable cut scene that still requires you to move on and off the blimp at the right moments (so you can't just go AFK or you'll eventually have to start all over again).

The Dragonmaw storyline is... a bit weird as well. Like I mentioned in my review of the Stonetalon story at the time, I find it kind of unpleasant when the game mirrors real life politics too closely, and a story where a large foreign power kills off the local leadership and puts rebel sympathisers in charge instead felt way too close to comfort for me, even if the lines are very clear-cut in this case, as Warchief Mor'ghor is an evil bastard and Zaela is likeable. That aside, the Horde story then sends you on missions that are all over the place and on very different ends of the seriousness spectrum, from dealing with wild dragons and evil spirits to shooting pool ponies out of goblin contraptions, which makes the whole experience feel a bit disjointed.

The Alliance version really is very, very different. Where Garrosh just continues to cement his reputation as a massive ass, Varian has you strolling around town with Anduin in tow - and that boy is freaking adorable. He actually cares about his subjects, and he wants to be a priest when he grows up, just like me! D'aww. Mercifully, the Alliance doesn't have to endure an endless travelling cut scene either; you just hop onto a plane, see it fly away and then it's fade to black and a straight cut to you already being in the Highlands.

Once there, the story flows a lot more organically as well, as you visit the various Wildhammer tribes to get them to work together and basically get to save the day by being a successful diplomat. A certain degree of humour also comes naturally to the dwarves and it doesn't feel as jarring as the contrast between the super serious business of the orcs and the utter silliness of the goblins on Horde side.

There are some parallel quests, but it's not excessive. It's also notable that there are examples of how you can use parallels to make interesting content for both sides. For example the Horde has a story where one of the Dragonmaw warlords rushes off to attack the dwarves and gets killed. You don't actually get to see this, but you see him storm off and then have to retrieve a valuable item from his corpse afterwards. On Alliance side on the other hand, you get to fight off this attack and personally get to land the killing blow on the orc. I think this is a great example of how synchronous storylines on both sides can be used to provide different experiences that add up to a more interesting whole, instead of just giving the orcs a quest to kill ten dwarves and the dwarves a quest to kill ten orcs (though those exist - and have their place - as well).

I dinged 85 not long after the Maw of Madness, and while I still intend to finish the zone, it looks like the rest is going to be a mix of neutral hubs and more "different but the same" quests, except that you get to work with Mathias Shaw instead of Garona and the Gob Squad.

All in all, I enjoyed the dwarf quests enough that I think my endeavour to level an Alliance character to cap was worth it to see those alone, but I still think that it's a bit of a shame that the developers didn't try to differentiate the experiences of the two factions more.

Playing a holy priest in (rated) battlegrounds

I have to admit it: I'm jealous of discipline priests. Not because their spec is sometimes a raid leader's preferred choice in PvE; that's all part of the normal up and down of class balancing. But because discipline is still considered to be the only viable PvP healing spec for priests.

I didn't mind the situation back when disc was designed for PvP only and holy was designed for PvE only, and I actually played both at the time. I don't require perfect balance for everything if different specs simply cater to different niches. But then WOTLK came, disc was made to be PvE viable as well and I thought that was great for all the priests who had longed to play it seriously in PvE for a long time... but I have to admit, I'm rather cheesed off that holy never got the same treatment for PvP. Like I said, I'm fine with different specs having different niches, but if you make one talent tree able to do everything while still limiting another, it gets kind of annoying for those who suddenly find themselves left behind.

I know that various damage dealers have had to deal with this issue for a while, but as far as healers go, holy priests are currently the only healers who are not considered PvP viable at all. I don't know why Blizzard can balance all other healing specs around both aspects of the game but not holy priests. It gets really depressing though when you're trying to look up guides for playing rated battlegrounds as a holy priest and find that there don't seem to be any because even the most basic "rated battlegrounds 101" guides assume that you won't want to bring anything other than a disc priest.

Well, screw that, I say! I'll write my own guide then!

As far as credentials go, I'm not amazing at PvP, but I've managed to get Legionnaire as holy this season and I feel that my team's further progress has not really been limited by my spec but that we've simply hit our skill cap. I reckon that a really good player could get much higher as holy still.

Here's the thing: while holy is still not really balanced around PvP, it's actually in a much better position than it has been in a long time. I believe that the bias against the spec mostly comes from two sources: disc priests having greater survivability, and that holy is still more focused on AoE healing, while PvP tends to be more about being able to keep a single target up while it's being nuked. Both are fair points... however there are "but"s attached.

As far as survivability goes, I would still agree that disc priests have more of it, but the difference is not as pronounced as it used to be. When I come up against a team with a disc priest while playing in my (admittedly low ranked) arena team, it never feels to me as if they are that much better at keeping themselves up against damage - the bigger problem tends to be mana regen, as a disc under pressure keeps getting returns from Rapture, which works in a "the more you get attacked, the more you regenerate" way similar to a shaman's Water Shield. As holy on the other hand I'm in serious trouble once I run low, because even with full "of meditation" gear (aka spirit on everything), the rate of regeneration is comparatively slow and if the match continues for long enough, I'll eventually die simply due to being oom.

In rated battlegrounds, with the sheer amount of people involved, survivability is in an entirely different ballpark. A good team can pretty much burst down any healer if they are truly focused. Still, your best bets for survival are paladins and shamans, because they are a bit sturdier due to their armour. Druids and priests of either spec are all considered squishy, with the differences being so marginal as to hardly even matter. I'm still continually surprised by how many teams will go for our resto druid first before coming for me because it just feels weird to not be the primary target.

Also, the holy PvP talent Blessed Resilience works much better when there are other healers around to help you out. Survivability going up when someone else heals you may sound like a bit of a "duh" observation, but compare Blessed Resilience to the disc equivalent Focused Will, which provides the same amount of damage reduction regardless of circumstances. A +30% healing taken buff on the other hand scales in effectiveness the more people you actually have healing you.

As for holy priests being AoE healers... well, that's true, but it's also the reason why the spec works much better in battlegrounds than in arena - there are actually enough people around to make AoE healing worthwhile. You just have to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and plan accordingly. Leaving your holy priest behind as the only healer to guard the tank against rogues is a bit of a waste, and a paladin or a shaman could do a much better job. As a holy priest you always want to be hanging out with as many people as possible so that your AoE heals get a chance to shine. I love joining the big battle for the waterworks in Battle for Gilneas for example, because Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing are absolutely perfect for easily healing up incoming AoE damage as the enemies try to prevent you from capping the flag.

Let's look at some holy talents and talk about their best use in PvP.

Desperate Prayer

Okay, this is far enough up the tree that I'm guessing that most disc priests are specced into it as well, but I wanted to mention it because it's a talent that I've always avoided in my PvE specs because I simply didn't need it. In PvP however it's awesome, because it's a sizeable instant heal, and in an era where every single melee class has at least one interrupt on a short cooldown, instant heals are king. I use it all the time whenever I get nuked, which is quite often. I think that it should always be your first choice of survival cooldown, because as opposed to Guardian Spirit it can only be cast on yourself - better to save the latter for someone else if possible.

Lightwell

Now, I have to admit that Blizzard managed something that I had thought impossible with Lightwell this expansion - they actually made it not completely pointless. Still, its actual viability remains highly dependent on how well you can train the rest of your team to use it. I'm quite fond of it in arena, because it's easy to convince one or two other people to use it, and sometimes I simply use all the charges myself to click-heal myself through various stunlocks and silences. In battlegrounds, even rateds with a fixed team, I have to admit that I haven't had as much luck, and even in very heated battles I often see it expire with several charges still unused.

Still, in base-capping games it's worth plopping down a Lightwell near a flag that you're defending or assaulting - only if you intend to stay there yourself though. I learned the hard way that you can't "leave" a lightwell for someone else to heal themselves in your absence as it despawns if you move too far away. In flag-carrying games I tend to put one down near our flag carrier if we're preparing to defend against an incoming assault in the flag room - he's the only one I've seen click on it with any regularity whenever he gets nuked.

Spirit of Redemption

"Improved Death" has never been a favourite of many priests, and I remember intentionally skipping it in my PvE spec for a long time because I didn't want to "reward" people with free heals for letting me die. I have to admit though, in PvP it's quite awesome. In PvE you can argue that counting on your own death is a bad idea since you should always plan to beat each encounter with no deaths, but in battlegrounds in particular, most people will suffer several deaths each game (unless you're dominating your opponent completely) and there's no shame in it either.

In such an environment, Spirit of Redemption is actually a bit of an Obi-Wan Kenobi power: "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!" Massive uninterrupted healing for fifteen seconds, hurrah! Considering it's usually quite tricky to get cast-time heals off due to the many interrupts and silences, this is seriously huge. You can generally recognise the smart teams because they'll actually avoid killing me until almost everyone else is dead, so that there's nobody left for me to heal once I'm in spirit form. If I die while there are still people up, I'll spam Flash Heal x2 for Serendipity stacks and then follow it up with a Greater Heal or even Prayer of Healing. If the group is under serious pressure, being dead is a great time to pop a Divine Hymn too.

One thing to keep in mind is that since dying actually provides a (limited) benefit to healing, it goes from being something that just happens to you, to something that you consciously plan for. For example if it looks like multiple people including me are close to going down, I'll stop healing myself and try to die, so I can spam uninterrupted heals on the others and keep them up for longer (which can be quite essential when all you need to do is hold on to a base or keep a flag carrier alive for just a few more seconds).

Resurrect timers are an issue as well. In rated battlegrounds you should always try to communicate them anyway if someone's already dead, so that others can "die up" at the right time and res up again immediately, but this is even more important for holy priests. If another round of resurrections is imminent, it might be better to click off the spirit buff early so you won't get stuck with a 40 second res timer once it runs out. On the other hand if you die and just missed a res, it can be fun to have someone else throw you a combat res, die again, and then spend another fifteen seconds spirit healing while you wait for a "proper" res. Might as well make use of that downtime, no?

Chakra

Chakra is interesting because the way it was first introduced, it was not very useful in PvP at all. The 30 second duration was simply way too short, and nobody had the leisure to recast Heal or Prayer of Healing to refresh it either. Now that it's got unlimited duration however, you can "buff up" into the correct Chakra state at the start of the match or after resurrecting and then you don't have to worry about it anymore.

When I still ran into other holy priests in our rated matches (haven't seen any in a long time), they seemed to be using the Sanctuary Chakra state most of the time, but I never understood why. Yes, the buff to Renew's output is nice, but the associated Holy Word is quite useless in an environment where you have little to no control over people's positioning and they move around all the time.

Chakra: Serenity on the other hand is awesome, simply because it's an instant heal on a short cooldown, and you remember what I said about instant heals earlier, right? The fact that it refreshes your Renew on the target is just a nice bonus. I pretty much use this on cooldown.

Holy Word: Chastise is worth mentioning in so far as it's nice to have a brief stun/disorient effect if needed, and one that people generally don't expect at that. It's useful to have a macro to quickly cancel your current Chakra state so you can use this as your Holy Word instead if needed; however, it can be a bit of a pain to get back into your desired Chakra state right afterwards once you're in combat.

Circle of Healing

There isn't much to say about this one other than what I already said above about AoE healing in general: try to stick to larger groups so you can get the most bang for your buck when casting this. For PvP it's generally not worth glyphing it for the extra target. Also, if you're really under pressure it's nice to keep in mind that this is basically another instant heal that you can use on yourself, even if the single-target portion of it is relatively small.

Guardian Spirit

Once again, similar to what I said about Blessed Resilience above, this is not as powerful as Pain Suppression in PvP, because preventing damage is more powerful out of the box than increased healing. Still, it's a pretty decent survival cooldown to use on a beleaguered flag carrier... or anyone else for that matter. I have it glyphed for the reduced cooldown because unless I'm anticipating an attack on our flag carrier, I'm pretty much using it on cooldown. Glyph of Desperation is a must-have as well - nothing like seeing someone be sure of their kill as they apply a stun on you on low health - and suddenly the wings go up and you're saved.

In general however I actually avoid using Guardian Spirit on myself, because I have Desperate Prayer as a survival cooldown for that purpose, and because as I mentioned in the Spirit of Redemption section, for a holy priest in PvP dying can actually sometimes be a good thing. (And you can still cast Guardian Spirit on someone else while dead/in spirit form!)

Anyway, this is just an attempt to summarise my own knowledge about holy priesting in PvP, as I've acquired it over time. There needs to be more information about this out there! I'm open to feedback or links to more resources if anyone's got them.

The homogenisation of WoW's two factions

I've been hopping back and forth between a bunch of my lowbie alts lately, looking at the last corners of revamped Azeroth that I hadn't seen yet, and while I've been enjoying the experience overall, it also reminded me of something that has been bugging me about the Cataclysm quest revamp. No, I'm not talking about the speed and ease of levelling this time - I'm thinking of the homogenisation of the two factions.

Let me grab my veteran cane for a moment and say that "back in my day"... I levelled up as Alliance first and found that, in the most general terms, Alliance quests mostly seemed to be about one or more of the following things: politics (mostly human-based), searching for ancient artifacts and lost treasure (dwarves), slightly mad inventors trying to reclaim their lost home (gnomes), protecting nature (night elves) and gathering goods for trade. Basically the Alliance side seemed to represent a "classic" fantasy society that was reasonably well off apart from the occasional intrigue, kobolds in the woods, and bigger but also more vague threats looming beyond the borders.

When I rerolled Horde several months later, it was actually a bit of a culture shock, and not just because Orgrimmar was very different from Stormwind and I kept getting lost in the Undercity. Playing the other faction just felt very different in terms of atmosphere and story. The Horde felt a lot more down to earth, or more savage if you prefer, and the quests seemed to imply that everyone was constantly fighting for survival. They were about hunting for food (tauren), gathering building materials (orcs), trying to carve out some space in the world, ancestor worship, dealing with dark magic (trolls) and struggling with and rebelling against an unpleasant past (undead).

Even though there wasn't a whole lot going on in terms of Horde vs. Alliance in the overarching story, I was always kind of wary of the enemy, because I knew first-hand that they lived in a very different world and had very different priorities.

There've always been zones with neutral quest givers, but those never bothered me. I didn't find it hard to believe that there were outsiders who simply didn't give a damn which side you belonged to and simply wanted to hire you regardless, especially if it concerned a greater cause. I didn't feel that this affected the way I viewed either side.

In Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, the borders between the factions started to get a little fuzzy however, as they still had separate bases in most zones but often pursued the same goals regardless, which made many faction-specific quests feel a bit same-y. Still, there were a fair chunk of storylines left on each side that were exclusive to that faction and remained in your memory as uniquely Horde or Alliance.

To take Hellfire Peninsula as an example, there are a lot of parallels between the quests from Thrallmar and Honor Hold. Where the Alliance clears up the Path of Anguish, the Horde kills the exact same mobs in Felspark Ravine. While you burn Horde blade throwers for Honor Hold, the Horde has you setting fire to the Alliance cannons on the other side of the map. Both sides send you on the same tough group quest, even if it comes under two different names.

However, the zone also still had plenty of interesting moments that were unique to their faction. On Alliance side, who could forget The Exorcism of Colonel Jules? Who didn't feel bad about the events set in motion In Search of Sedai? Who didn't get tired of players asking in general chat where to find Nethergarde Bitter, over and over again?

In the meantime the Horde got to be amazed to rediscover the clan of its Warchief, the Forsaken got to make friends with some local undead, and vindictive players got to help a duped blood elf woman get revenge on her cheating husband's mistress. While Horde and Alliance may have shared the same goals in regards to the Burning Legion, they were still two distinctly different cultures with different priorities.

In Cataclysm however, it feels to me like the borders haven't just become fuzzy, they've almost been completely erased beyond the immediate starter zones. The two factions seem more and more alike to me, or rather the Horde appears to have become more and more like the Alliance. Orgrimmar may still look very different in style, but it's every bit as pompous as Stormwind these days. Garrosh and Varian are both unpopular warmongers, and the orcs in general feel a lot like more aggressive humans to me, with their fight for survival and shamanistic roots largely swept under the rug. (There is a quest in Durotar where a shaman tries to convince an enforcer to be less hasty and aggressive, gets completely ignored... and nothing bad comes of it.) The Bilgewater goblins have been set up to be "gnomes for the Horde" and even share the gnomish backstory of having lost their home. Even sub-factions have been copied across, and where the dwarven Explorer's League formerly had a monopoly on archaeology as a hobby, the Horde has now received its own version in the Reliquary.

If you look at it at the level of individual quests, the parallels become even more glaring. In neutral zones where both factions have their own bases, it's often shocking to see just how close to identical their quests are. During the end of the Lashtail Hatchling chain in Stranglethorn you talk to a draenei priest who can't speak proper common as Alliance... and as Horde you get a troll priest who speaks orcish exactly the same way. (One of the user comments on the page for the draenei does in fact bring up in-game evidence to show that the character was simply copy and pasted.)

Or take the Badlands, which I replayed only yesterday: as Alliance you get sent out to hunt with a group of dwarf NPCs, as Horde you get a group of orcs with exactly the same abilities. God help us if either faction did anything slightly differently.

This just strikes me as lazy. Clearly the developers thought that if they made a nice quest chain for one faction, they could just copy it over to the other side and get two quests for the price of one! Maybe they even thought that they were doing their players a favour this way, by not "limiting" precious lore to one faction only. I really dislike this practice however. If you're just going to give both sides the same quest, simply make the quest hub neutral and be done with it. Making two faction-specific towns that offer exactly the same quests, only from different NPCs, just waters down faction identity and sets players up for disappointment. The former because a draenei shouldn't be acting like a troll and orcs shouldn't be acting like dwarves, and the latter because by setting up separate bases for the two factions, you create an expectation that they'll actually contain different content that makes it worth levelling an alt of the other faction to see - if you then just end up with a carbon copy of the same content you've already done, that's nothing but a massive letdown.

That aside, I also think that it leads to Blizzard making their own lore less convincing in a way. These days the writers are all about beating the war drums between the two factions, but when the game actually represents both sides as more similar than ever, the hostility only becomes less believable. Don't waste all that wonderful background lore by having all races of both factions pursue the exact same interests in the contested zones!

Blizzard Entertainment wants my feedback!

That (sort of) was the title of a mail that I found in my inbox this morning. After careful inspection it turned out to not be just another stupid phishing attempt - Blizzard does indeed ask random players for feedback this way sometimes. Considering that I've been rather unhappy with recent developments, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to make my voice heard and immediately went to fill out the survey.

Unfortunately... I'm not sure it's actually going to be very useful to anyone. On the plus side, the questions indicated to me that Blizzard is quite aware of most of the game's current problem areas, but the way they were phrased I doubt that my (or anyone's) answers are truly going to provide a lot of useful feedback to the developers.

Am I "satisfied" with daily quests? No, not really, though some are better than others. They never asked about the whys though, so for all I know they could interpret my answer as "There aren't enough dailies, we need to make more!", which could hardly be further from my intended message.

Same with raiding. How useful is it really to simply ask me to rate how "fun" I consider raiding on a scale of one to seven? If you're just going to guess about what exactly I like and dislike about it, you're just as likely to make things even worse. Am I satisfied with Cataclysm raiding? Considering that it made me quit that part of the game after more than four years, definitely not, but it's not as if Cataclysm just dropped one big change on me that instantly flipped my feelings from love to hate; it's been a long time coming based on changes that already started in WOTLK.

Do I approve of storyline quests? In principle yes, I just wish that they didn't turn entire zones into one giant linear quest chain. But again, if I simply declare that I haven't liked the Cataclysm storylines that much, how are they going to interpret that? Now I'm actually kind of worried about my responses being used to justify more changes that I won't like.

At least I got a chuckle out of how many questions they asked me about Star Wars: The Old Republic. Are you going to buy it? Are you going to stop playing WoW then? They may not care about the details of my opinion about the game, but they are certainly concerned about the competition...

MMOs can really spoil you for single-player games

It's been quiet on here because I haven't been playing much, and as a consequence I haven't had a lot to say about my limited play time. On the plus side for me, this means that I've had time to do other things that I hadn't done in a while, such as play a single-player game, in this case Dragon Age II.

Without going into too much detail about it, I can say that I really enjoyed it. I was a bit wary of it at first because it had received some very mixed user reviews, but my worries were completely unfounded. I had a blast. I stayed up late several nights in a row just to play that little bit further. And when I finally completed it, I was happy to simply watch the credits roll by for a good ten minutes or so, just to allow the whole experience to sink in.

Even after I had finished my first playthrough, I still wasn't done. There were alternate progression paths to be explored! But more than anything, I felt an urge to connect with other people who had also enjoyed the game. I talked to friends who had played it, read reviews and sought out a bunch of forum threads that were discussing various aspects of the game. This was enjoyable for a while, but oddly enough it also diminished my desire to actually play again somewhat. I wanted to share my enthusiasm, but playing the game again effectively meant isolating myself.

At the end of the day, I can talk to other players about how they played the game all day long, but I can never actually meet their characters. We all play in our own little bubble worlds, and we can talk about how much fun it is but we can never actually interact while playing. And it's kind of scary just how much I miss the ability to share space.

Back before I got into WoW, The Sims 2 was my game of choice. I spent hours upon hours breeding funny-looking Sims, taking screenshots and making up stories. I was also a member of various communities and took part in a vivid exchange of ideas and information there. It was all I could have wanted from a game.

But then I started to play WoW and... in principle playing with my Sims was still as good as before, but I just could not stand playing completely on my own anymore, having to wait for the interaction to happen afterwards and on forums. In Dragon Age II I could briefly overcome this problem because I managed to really immerse myself in the story and wanted to see where it was going, no matter what. However, now that I know the ending I'm really longing for company again.

It's a bit of a shame because intellectually, I'm aware that single-player games can still offer great entertainment. And I would kind of like to play around with different settings and options. After having spent so much time playing an MMO however, the experience of just doing my own thing in my own lonely little world just feels a bit hollow these days.