Why I don't like the weekly raid quest

When I first read that a weekly raid quest would be introduced in patch 3.3 I was very enthusiastic about the idea. Finally there'd be a reason to do all the WOTLK raids again, even if nobody was running them for their gear drops anymore!

From what I've seen in my guild, this weekly raid quest has been a resounding success in practice too. As soon as a new quest is out, groups for it form left and right, and then again because people want to do it on their alts as well. However, me personally? I haven't completed a single one so far, and it's not for a lack of grouping opportunities. I actually ended up disliking the whole concept!

The thing is, in the past few weeks the weekly raid quest on my server has been Ulduar three times in a row. First it was for Deconstructor, then for Razorscale, then for Flame Leviathan. So what did people do? They quickly formed a raid, went to Ulduar to kill just those bosses (they are all right by the entrance after all) and then went home again. It's encouraged people to go back to an instance they were starting to lose interest in, but only to kill the first and second boss, which I find extremely unsatisfying. When I go into a raid, I want to clear it, or at least make a decent effort at doing so. Going in with the expressed intent of just killing the first one or two bosses feels wrong to me in so many ways that I find it hard to describe it. Imagine if the daily random heroic gave you frost emblems just for killing the first boss in each instance. Nobody would ever run a complete heroic again!

I really think that Blizzard made a mistake in making those raid quests all about the entry bosses. It's like the weird loot issues with Trial of the Crusader all over again, where a way too easy and bland raid made a much more fun and interesting one completely redundant by outclassing its loot by a mile. It felt wrong because the best rewards came from something that was extremely easy and thus encouraged you to skip a lot of harder content.

Blizzard managed to make heroics relevant and popular again by rewarding you with top tier emblems for their completion. I thought that they would do the same for the "old" WOTLK raids, but in fact very little has changed - people still skip most of the instance because the emblem reward is given out right at the start. Why bother with killing any more bosses if the effort will result only in minimal rewards compared to just taking the time to kill the quest boss? I can only imagine that getting a "proper" group for any of those raids is now going to be harder than ever, because unless you manage to pull one together on the very first day after the reset, half your guild will already be saved to a dozen different raid IDs from pugging the first boss for the weekly quest.

The dungeon finder and role distribution

The dungeon finder has changed many things over the past weeks. One thing that I found particularly interesting is that it made it official that a lot more people want to play dps than tanks or healers. I mean, we always knew that it was harder to find a tank for your instance group than a random dps, but just how much harder it was could be difficult to qualify at times. Now, if the queue times in my battlegroup are any indication, I feel confident in saying that for every tank there are about three healers and thirty dpsers.

There's been some talk about how this will make tanking and healing more popular now, but I'm not so sure. I mean, we've always known that it's easier to get groups as a tank or a healer, so what's different?

In fairness, the new system has made the benefits of playing one of the more sought-after roles more obvious and more tangible than ever. With the way things used to be, even a much-needed tank could find himself in a position where he couldn't get a group going occasionally, for example because he just couldn't find a willing healer at that particular moment. And of course group-building in general was more of a hassle. If you use the new dungeon finder on the other hand and you are a tank, you will get a group immediately, guaranteed. Whereas if you queue up as dps only, you'll be forced to wait in line for a comparatively large amount of time. So there's definitely an added incentive to queue as tank or healer if you are able to fill either of those roles.

The dungeon finder has also made life for tanks and healers easier in general in some respects. During the first week after 3.3 release, I remember running heroic Culling of Stratholme with a massively overgeared raid tank who happily chattered away about how tanking random instances had become an amazing source of income for him: cash rewards, loot to sell, enchanting materials, and since he didn't need any of the badge gear anymore, he could use all of his emblems to buy crusader orbs and epic gems and then sell those too. It's basically the equivalent of daily quests designed specifically for tanks and healers.

Don't get me wrong, we are quite capable of doing normal daily quests too, and some of them don't even require you to kill anything... but let's be honest: most of them do, and then you'll always be faster doing them on a dps character than on your healer. Compare that to being teleported to an instance where you can do what you're specced for and then get paid for that. So much easier.

Still, the reason that I believe that we won't see a massive surge of tanks and healers any time soon is that the actual acts of tanking and healing themselves haven't changed at all, so if you hated performing either of those roles before, the new dungeon finder isn't going to change that. Being able to get a group faster might make it a little more beareable, but not much.

This is even more true since the finder strongly encourages you to only play the role(s) that you like. In the past, how many times did a dual-specced dpser agree to do something else just to get the group off the ground, because he was worried that the run might not happen at all otherwise? On the other hand, if you join the new LFG as dps only, then you'll be guaranteed to get a group in which you're allowed to dps, no questions asked. It might take a little longer than if you queued as a tank or healer, but it will happen.

I found that this has strongly encouraged me to give my hunter alt more playtime again for example. She's the only one of my alts at eighty who can't tank or heal, which used to make finding groups quite difficult and there was always this nagging voice at the back of my head telling me that I could actually get things done if only I switched to another one of my toons. With the dungeon finder - no more! If I feel like doing some pew pew on my hunter, I can do so and I know I'll get into a run even if it takes a while.

I think that this will encourage a lot of people to stick to their preferred dps playstyle and that way a potential influx of new tanks and healers lured in by shorter wait times will be balanced out, leaving us with the same inequality of roles in the end. Regardless, a World of Warcraft where we can all get instance groups more easily regardless of spec and role is still a much better one than we had before.

Seeing the world with new eyes

Merry Christmas to my fellow bloggers and all that.

For various reasons I decided to make myself a Christmas present this year, namely a shiny new gaming PC. Looking at WoW now and at the way it looked to me before, it's hard to put the sheer magnitude of the difference into words.

See, my old PC wasn't a complete piece of crap or anything. It was already a few years old however, and had never been a top of the line machine, not even when I got it. It served me well over the years, I played WoW with all the graphic settings set to something reasonably high throughout BC, and it never caused me any problems except for occasional slowness in Shattrath during peak times.

When I first set foot into Howling Fjord I was amazed at how pretty it all was and continued to marvel at every new WOTLK zone as I discovered it. Dalaran was pretty slow for me from the start, but I didn't mind too much at the time. But the first time I set foot into a twenty-five-man raid... hoo boy. It was nothing more than a slide show, and for a while I was seriously concerned whether I'd be able to continue raiding at all. In the end I managed to do so, but only by turning all my graphic settings down as much as possible, disabling certain addons during raids and adjusting my playstyle to a point where I mostly limited myself to instant-cast healing spells and often had to base my movement on mere predictions of what was going to happen instead of seeing what was actually going on.

During my everyday play, the loss that hit me the hardest was that of greater viewing distance. I don't know if you've ever played on the "low viewing distance" setting before, but what it basically means is that you'll perpetually be surrounded by grey mist. Whenever you fly, there's nothing but fog around you, and you can only really base your movement on your position on the map, and not anything you actually see around you. People with better PCs were often baffled by my helpless flailing around in Icecrown because the airship wasn't correctly showing up on the map and I couldn't actually see it until I bumped right into it, which sometimes meant circling it repeatedly without even noticing.

So yesterday I installed WoW on my new computer, jacked all the graphic options up to their highest settings, logged onto my druid in Dalaran, marvelled at the fact that her tabard looked like more than a brown blob, ran to Krasus' Landing, switched to flight form... and stopped. My boyfriend laughed at my gaping and exclamations of wonder, but it was seriously amazing to see Crystalsong Forest stretch out ahead of me, Stormpeaks and Icecrown off the the side - I was used to being greeted by nothing but a grey wall!

When I ended up healing a heroic Halls of Reflection I also noticed the increased performance: While I didn't have any major problems in five-mans before, even the slightly increased responsiveness already helped a lot with things like getting off that nourish when the tank's health plummets too quickly or casting a quick regrowth. I can now cast spells that aren't instant and they still go off within a reasonable amount of time, zomg! I can't wait to see the difference it will make to my performance in raids.

So this Christmas, my heart goes out to all of you who still have to struggle with PCs that limit your view of the World of Warcraft to about a circle of a hundred yards around you and that make it hard for you to play at your best. May you be able to experience the game in all its glory soon!

Cyclone EU battlegroup ponderings

Tamarind made a post about the new dungeon finder the other day, in which he noted as an aside that Crushridge seemed to be the one server in his battlegroup where "the tards come from". As I read this I nodded my head in agreement and thought about how I had observed something similar in my own battlegroup, except that I couldn't remember the exact name of the server at that moment. It was something starting with an S though.

So I went to have a look at all the servers on Cyclone, to see if I would recognise the culprit... and had to realise that no less than eight out of the fourteen servers in my battlegroup start with an S. Three of them start with "Storm" too. D'oh.

The problem was, now I was really curious. Which server was it that had caused most of my unpleasant experiences in pugs? So I started to take notes. And after grouping with more than one hundred and fifty different puggers, I came to a couple of interesting conclusions.

First off: Man, the official list of realms in the battlegroup as posted on the European forums is so outdated. I spent quite a while wondering why I never met anyone from Shadowmoon in my pugs, until I realised that that server was actually shut down over a year ago. It used to be one of the inofficial Russian servers until Blizzard created some official ones, and after everyone had transferred off it was shut down. Hello there, random piece of trivia!

After a while I started to wonder whether Silvermoon had already ceased to exist as well, but just as I was about to write it off, a Silvermoon player ended up in a normal-mode Ahn'kahet pug with my shaman. Still, she remained the only one. What's up, Silvermoon? Every other server showed up in my groups at least five times since I started counting. Is Silvermoon just that dead or are there any other factors at play? I can't help but wonder.

Enough yapping about dead servers, you say, which one ended up being the "black sheep" where all the jerks came from? Well, I feel a bit silly saying that, but there actually wasn't one. I mean, looking back at it now I was probably thinking of Stormscale, because I noted three negative experiences with Stormscale players during my "experiment" - however, one player also stood out as particularly nice and no less than thirty others simply did their job without leaving a mark one way or the other.

The thing about Stormscale is that for some reason it's massively over-represented in my Cyclone pugs: out of my one hundred and fifty-six puggers, no less than thirty-four were from Stormscale. (The second most represented server was Shattered Hand with twenty, which is already a fair bit behind.) My point is that when you run with a lot of people from a certain server, it's automatically also more likely that you'll run into some bad apples among them. I mean, the five players from Ravencrest and the five from Spinebreaker that I met didn't leave an impression one way or another, but does that mean that those servers are better or "nicer" than Stormscale? In all honesty, when you've only met such a small number, you can't really tell.

Also, contrary to what we people on roleplaying servers tend to believe sometimes, PvPers aren't all jerks and social rejects. I mean, Stormscale is a PvP server, and nobody does more pugging on Cyclone. In fact, nearly two thirds of my fellow puggers came from PvP servers. How surprising is that?

Before the release of the new dungeon finder there was some talk about how cross-server instancing would destroy the "local" server community. I can't really say that I've seen this happen yet, but only time will tell. However, after observing my fellow puggers from other servers in the battlegroup closely over the past week or so, I have to say that they don't quite feel like such a big anonymous mass either anymore. It's not that the battlegroup is becoming the new server, but it's like... having lived in the same city for all of your life and then travelling through the rest of your country. Some of it is strange, if you go far enough west the people start to talk funny, but some things are also familiar and there are certain cultural points of reference that you share. I'm curious how that will pan out for the WoW community in the long run.

How do you feel about your battlegroup?

Changing views of heroics

Running all those random heroics as of late has made me realise how much my opinion of a lot of them has changed over time.

Shortly after WOTLK's release, my favourite instances were those that tickled my inner explorer. I loved Old Kingdom because it seemed so vast and full of surprises, plus I thought that the last boss was hilarious. Culling of Stratholme was another favourite, simply because I loved all the instances involving a time-travelling setup so far, and also because working on the timed run for the bronze drake made for a good challenge back when everyone was wearing blues.

Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning were instances that I didn't like very much because I didn't care too much about the whole backstory involving the titans (blasphemy, I know), and because Halls of Lightning was ridiculously hard to heal early on - especially the Loken fight, which always resulted in at least a couple of wipes per run. The Oculus was so scarring the first time around that hardly anyone ever wanted to go back there once they'd experienced the horror of "endless wipes on Eregos without knowing what the hell was going on" for the first time.

Once more powerful gear made everything easier and everyone was mostly running heroics for the next tier of emblems, I developed an appreciation for instances that facilitated this with the least amount of hassle. Old Kingdom slowly became less and less appealing, since killing all the trash seemed to take up an unnecessary amount of time. In fact, anything with slightly more trash became somewhat annoying, including places like Utgarde or the Nexus, while Azjol-Nerub and Gundrak became new favourites. Halls of Lightning became less painful once people didn't get one-shot by the lightning nova anymore, and the abilitiy to do it as a "double daily" added to the instance's appeal. The Oculus remained unpopular but became slightly less scary, as the only people daring to pug it were usually quite skilled at using the drakes and knew how to get through the instance quickly.

Now that things have changed once again, with the dungeon finder enabling people to jump right into a massively overgeared group and burn through any heroic in twenty minutes, my perception of what's most enjoyable has changed once again. Getting things done fast isn't really something special anymore, and the oh-so-popular break-neck speed often comes at the price of me (the healer) feeling stressed and having to worry about whether there's even enough time to loot before the tank charges off into the next room. So now my favourite instances have become the ones that simply don't allow for manic chain-pulling, either because of their overall setup (Trial of the Champion) or because the trash is on a timer, like in Violet Hold or Culling of Stratholme. I sigh with relief every time my random dungeon for the day presents me with the loading screen of one of those instances. Azjol-Nerub would be on that list too, but an overabundance of overconfident tanks has made the first boss in there a massive source of wipes due to careless achievement whoring.

I wonder which WOTLK instances will remain truly memorable and fun to do once the next expansion rolls around.

Strange five-man boss nerfs

While running multiple random heroics per day in the past week, I couldn't help noticing a couple of strange changes to some boss fights.

Ionar in Halls of Lightning only disperses once per fight now, instead of three times.
The Prophet Tharon'ja in Drak'tharon Keep only does his psychadelic "I'll turn you all into skeletons" thing once per fight now, instead of three times.
Grand Magus Telestra in the Nexus only splits once per fight now instead of twice.

I wonder if there have been more changes? These are the ones that I noticed anyway. I neither love nor hate them; more than anything I just find them confusing.

The first two changes were apparently part of a hotfix a few days ago, which immediately poses the question... why? Ionar and Tharon'ja have been among WOTLK's easiest dungeon bosses from the beginning (I'm not sure if I ever managed to wipe on either of them), so I don't understand why what little of interest there was left about their fight mechanics had to be taken away too. The only people that I can see benefitting from this are the manic badge farmers who were always sighing in exasperation about the way the bosses' abilities artificially extended the fight and prevented you from pwning him more quickly. But was that really such an issue?

As far as Telestra goes, looking at various websites they all claim that there's always been only a "possibility" for her to clone herself more than once on heroic, but in all the heroic Nexus runs I did before the latest patch she always split herself twice. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a lack of dps either, as it seemed to be tied to her health (first split at 66%, second split at 33%).

Telestra actually used to be pretty tough back in the day, and the double split certainly played a role in that, so I do consider this a "serious" nerf. However, once again I can only wonder about the reasons behind it, because people go into heroics with better gear than ever, so nothing is nearly as hard as it used to be anyway?

I can't help feeling that Blizzard is currently pushing the "farm everything into oblivion as quickly as possible" mindset a bit too much at the moment.

The tank, my enemy?

Once upon a time tanks and healers had a special relationship. They were both designed to be played in groups and sucked at doing anything on their own. When in groups they also had to take a lot more responsibility for everything going smoothly than the average dps, which could be a considerable burden sometimes. And of course they relied more on each other than on anyone else - if the healer died the tank would soon follow, and if the tank died the healer would soon follow. Having dpsers in the group wasn't irrelevant, but they simply didn't share that special connection.

One day Blizzard decided that healers and tanks shouldn't be quite so tedious to play solo, so they combined healing and spellpower so that healers could smite random mobs slightly faster. They were still mainly healers however, their damage didn't impress anyone and they could still get overwhelmed quite easily, so they continued to prefer not having to do things alone.

Tanks' damage was increased too, but since their reduced damage output had been a tradeoff for being nearly indestructible, they suddenly turned out to be better at killing tough mobs than even the best dps, because now they could withstand any amount of damage while dishing it out at the same time, more or less eliminating the need for assistance from anyone else.

As someone who plays all three roles at level eighty, I find it very striking that the tank is the one who's easiest to play solo and never, ever dies unless I accidentally hurl myself off a cliff. I wonder if this is part of the reason why tanks seem to become more and more uncaring as of late.

I remember a few months ago there was a sort of discussion going on among several bloggers about personality types behind different roles and who had to be the most caring. Many seemed to think that tanking was the role that required you to care the most about the rest of the group. I don't know if that was true then, but it certainly isn't true anymore now. In all the pugs I've run since the LFG change, I've once or twice run into a dps who complained about someone else not being quite as leet as them, but it's always a tank who

- completely refuses to even acknowledge the existence of the other party members. Greetings, questions, requests... he doesn't respond to any of them and might as well have the rest of the group on ignore.

- clicks "ready" on the random dungeon group popup and then drops group the moment he ports into the instance and realises that he didn't get his favourite, leaving four other people stranded. Sometimes he'll actually tank a few trash groups and then disappear without a word (see point one).

- treats the healer like complete garbage, not giving a crap about whether they have mana or are even in the same room. If called out on this, they'll say that they've got it all under control and that's what cooldowns are for. Clearly healers are obsolete and there should be an option to just run with four dps. After all, there's cooldowns!

- has an ego the size of Pangea and likes to wipe the group because he thinks that "I can solo tank this lol". Afterwards it's of course someone else's fault. I used to love heroic Azjol-Nerub for example because it's so quick, but since the introduction of the new dungeon finder I can never do it without at least one wipe on the first boss, as the tank will always go "I want achi, I just tank em all, kk", ignoring any warnings about things not being quite that easy. Only after a certain amount of wipes will he sigh and consent to do it the normal way because clearly everyone else in the group is made of fail.

I've been taking some notes about my pugs lately, and it's almost always dpsers these days who leave a positive impression. I guess that ten-minute wait in the queue is just enough to make them care at least a little about the people they run with (and whom they had to wait for).

Tanks on the other hand? They can solo better than anyone else, they are more desired for groups than anyone else, why should they give a crap about what anyone else thinks? They, more than anyone else, are given the feeling that everyone else is just there to make things a little more convenient for them, but that they could do it all on their own if they wanted to.

I have currently stopped tanking five-mans on my paladin and druid because even just being associated with this current "generation" of tanks is too embarrassing for me to bear. In pugs I spend most of the time healing, always keeping a wary eye on the tank to mentally prepare myself for the next act of dickishness that I'll have to endure to just get to the end of the instance. What happened to tanks and healers being friends?