The View From Down Here

Cutting down the largest tree in the forest with a herring

The more astute readers of this site will have realised that a second armory profile has appeared in the sidebar. Druziraa was the very first character I created to tank, long before Namthe was even considered, let alone created, and before even the Burning Crusade was launched. It was the heady days of patch 2.0, it looked like druids might actually be excellent tanks (Dead Code Elimination even ran Zul’Gurub with a druid main tank). Of course, eventually the Burning Crusade arrived, and I went back to my main, leaving the poor druid at level 34, forgotten and gathering dust. By the time I came to level a tank, it was becoming increasingly obvious that bear tanks would cut it for a lot of content, but warriors just had it easier.

And now? Once I reach 80, it’s my intention to play a healing character, to see how the other side lives. In the meantime, though, having played through much of the levelling and questing content of the original World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade and now Lich King, I can see some differences in how quests are implemented but in many ways they’re fundamentally the same.

In the Burning Crusade, quests were very much a continuation of the tradition started in classic WoW – go out and kill a certain number of mobs. Unfortunately, inflation kicks in and eventually you get to requirements to kill silly numbers of creatures, like fifty ogres (The Twin Clefts of Nagrand, I’m looking at you). Things have changed in Lich King. The most I’ve had to kill for any single quest is twenty creatures, something of a step down. So, Lich King has significantly improved the quest to killing ratio. Or has it?

Sure, there are lots less of the “Kill everything stone dead” type quests, but what of it? We’re killing nearly as many things, but instead we’re fetching items that have a 100% drop rate, or finding things that are strewn across the area. Sure, there are many more interesting quests, like the vehicle quests but it just feels like a bit of a distraction from the exact same grind we had before. Borean Tundra in particular felt like this, though I can’t really explain why. Superficial differences are all that seperate the new quests from the old, with the exception of the vehicle “gimmick” quests.

In an effort to make the levelling process interesting again I’ve turned to something else. By speccing resto and running dungeons, I’m seeing a different way to level that may or may not be what I’m looking for. I’ll report back on my experiences in a few days.

I am not the world. Neither are you.

There is so much complaining going around, stating that the point of the game has been lost with its challenge.

It’s true that you can’t please all of the player base all of the time, and I think sometimes a lot of the more vocal (and hardcore) players forget that we are in the minority. Not everyone wants to be, or is able to, raid for however many hours it could take to down Kil’Jaeden in TBC. The vast majority of players are in smaller, friendlier guilds who don’t go out and conquer all available raid content in a month and then complain that there’s nothing for them to do.

There were Molten Core guilds and alliances all the way up to the release of the Burning Crusade, and there were Karazhan guilds all the way up to Lich King. Nowadays everyone’s in a Naxx guild, whether they’ve killed two bosses or all fifteen. Sure, some of us are working on or have killed Sartharion with three drakes, or Malygos, but the vast majority of raiding time is spent in Naxx. The other two encounters just don’t take very long to do at all once learned.

Wrath of the Lich King is still selling well, say Blizzard, and I have no cause to disbelieve them. There are many many more players who have progressed less well quickly than I have, and I have no doubt that there are many more who continue to level.

The biggest error was tuning Naxxramas on a too-easy scale; it does seem as if the difficulty that I remember being present in Karazhan is missing, and it’s a shame. On the other hand I also remember having to stack the raid in favour of hunters and priests in our early Kara runs, for the simple reason that we needed all the Crowd Control we could get against Moroes.

Almost nobody saw Sunwell, and it was disappointing that such a tiny number of people got to see the very end of the Burning Crusade.  Now it seems we’ve gone too far the other way. I think Ulduar will go some way to addressing this – it takes time to balance things in favour of the average player instead of the top 2%.

So, for all those people who are complaining that Blizzard haven’t done their job properly in delivering enough content, well, I agree with you. I am, however, in the minority, as are you. The vast majority of the playerbase are still happily working their way through the content.

I want some more content, I really do. I’m just not so arrogant as to assume that every single player of twelve million is in the same position that I am.

Is this what the End of the World looks like?

It’s quiet. Too quiet. I’ve been far too busy to play much outside of raids recently, but what I have seen saddens me.

We’re done with PvE content. There’s nothing left to do, and boredom is creeping in, so while I’d never say Dalaran felt empty (at least not since I first visited there at level 70), I would say it’s very much less busy.

The reason? A drought in what to do next. We’ve done the hardest encounter in the game at present, and other than farming Naxx for those last few bits of gear that we all need, and that’s true for pretty much anyone. Either Naxx was pitched too easy, or Ulduar should have been out a month ago. Maybe both. And there’s the rub.

There isn’t anything to do outside raids at the moment (roll on the Argent Tournament), and while I still enjoy raiding I can see why other people might be growing tired of the lack of other things to do. And given the raids are stale, well, I can see why a number of people might choose to take a break from the game.

I’ve seen this before; back in the day I was an Earth and Beyond player (Zira of Orion, in the unlikely event that means anything to anyone). After EA bought Westwood and consolidated the businesses, the game saw fewer and fewer content patches until it eventually fizzled out. As the difficulty of WoW has gradually reduced, so increases the perceived distance between patches.

My big hope for Ulduar is that we won’t have it on farm, in its entirety, by the time patch 3.2 comes out. Because if it doesn’t, this looks a lot like the end of the world.

Add-offs

Blizzard have finally decided to post an Acceptable Use Policy for addons. To be perfectly honest, I’m amazed that it has taken this long for it to happen.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t disagree with the vast majority of the rules; addons which cause a reduction in gameplay quality for anyone other than the addon user deserve to go outright. As for obfuscated and closed source code, and charging people to use it, again, I don’t see a problem there. I don’t see why people who want to get ahead faster should be able to do so by paying extra money for it (hello, Carbonite!)

However, the one thing I do have issues with is the “No soliciting donations” clause. I can understand why an addon shouldn’t be allowed to spam the Chat pane requesting that you donate to the author, but a small line in an “About this addon” pane that only appears when you explicitly view it? I don’t see the harm there.

What I don’t get is the sudden up-in-arms nature of the addon authors who have taken their ball and gone home. These are people that either didn’t care about any of the things the new guidelines are trying to stop, weren’t trying to make a living from addons, or even pushing people for donations.

I’ll miss some of the addons that will inevitably never see the light of day again. But are the authors of these doing anyone a disservice other than themselves? I can understand why they might do it, but in the end all they are doing is inciting the wrath of the user base. Even just withdrawing an addon for a month or so risks losing your users forever as they switch to an alternative.

I am not perfect. Nor should you expect me to be.

I was on the receiving end of a lesson in utmost humility yesterday. At the start or our Naxx run, before anyone was ready, I managed to body pull the first patrol. Ordinarily I’d have suicided, but I was under the mistaken impression that there were enough people ready and near me to survive the experience. I was wrong, and the night began with a wipe(the only one of the night)  for which the blame could be placed squarely at my feet.

That is fair enough. I will happily accept responsibility for any problems which are a direct result of my actions. I’m not a robot, and I’ll make mistakes on occasion. I’ll also learn from those mistakes.

However – if you’re going to criticise me for wasting your food buffs and elixirs, I’ll be more inclined to listen to you if you’ve proved that you can perform your own role in the raid without problems. I don’t expect perfection, of course, to do so would be hypocritical, but…

… people who don’t know their left from their right on Thaddius, can’t dance on Heigan, and are too short sighted to see they’re standing in a fissure on Kel’Thuzad, or even all three, despite the fact that we’ve been farming these bosses for months, really should sort their own problems out before complaining about mine.

Incidentally, for those who are trying to work out which members of the raid are failing them the most, the Failbot addon is a godsend.

In other news, it turns out that using Baby Spice on Kel’Thuzad is a bad idea. It may look comical, but it also shrinks his hitbox making it all the more difficult for everyone to stand around him safely. I’m not sure who did that, but hopefully it won’t happen again.

You have entered the Twilight Zone

Well-deserved by so many people who have stuck at this for the last few weeks, Sartharion is defeated on “ultra-hard” mode.

Roll on Ulduar…

Morons and Slackers Unite

The Greedy Goblin has discussed, in detail, his stance on Morons and Slackers, and while I think he might have a point that if he wants to get the furthest, he has to cut out what he calls the Morons and Slackers from the equation. Unfortunately I think he’s not quite thought this one through as much as some of his quite excellent posts on making cash.

For the record, I don’t think I’m either a Moron or a Slacker. I turn up having read the tactics, with appropriate levels of consumables, I pull my weight, I go away again. Pretty terse, but that’s the way a raid goes if you miss out all the interesting bits.

But… and this goes back to my new-found respect for pugging a few weeks ago – there are Morons and Slackers everywhere. I don’t think that the top level guilds have a lower proprtion of morons or slackers than any other guild. The difference is just in perception. To top level guilds, a slacker is someone who won’t flask up a third time for the last 30 minutes of a raid. In a more laid-back guild that isn’t so much of an issue

Morons and Slackers are everywhere – because we’re all morons and we’re all slackers by someone else’s definition. It isn’t helpful to label any of us.

Further Divination

As I expected, the Glyph changes on the PTR I mentioned in my last post have been nerfed back. When glyphed and talented, each of Last Stand and Shield Wall now have 2-minute cooldowns. I can live with that. It’s sufficiently short to make the decison easy but long enough not to make it automatic.

But – there’s yet more changes on the way! Defensive stance’s damage penalty is being reduced to 5%, down from 10%. That’s quite a serious increase in threat, and I think it’ll help a great deal. I wouldn’t say that Warrior threat is inherently bad, but when compared with other similarly-geared tanking classes, I’ve found I have to work very hard indeed on occasion to keep up with them, all other things being equal.

Of course, all things are not equal. But it’s nice to get a buff that will help wit threat as much as that one. And as gear increases, the threat game is gradually coming back into force. Rumours of its death, I always thought, were overstated.

I’m still wondering what will happen with Heroic Strike – an ability which requires a ridiculous number of keypresses at present, and one which the developers have said will be improved. I, and my RSI, await the solution with interest.

As for the oft-promised changes to how rage decays when shifting stances – they’ve been dropped. This doesn’t affect me so much because I rarely PvP, and I tend to use Battle Stance once in a blue moon to spam Execute on a boss while tanking it, or Beserker Stance of I really, really need to Intercept something. The extra tools that the changes might have afforded us might have been nice, but you can’t miss what you’ve never had. Maybe they’ll resurface in a future patch – we’ll see.

As for the patch date – it has to be within a month, because of the changes to Noblegarden. There’s still a lot going on though, so I’d wager on it being nearer April 7th /8th than any other time. Plenty of time for even more changes to make my current thoughts obsolete!

Divining the Future

There’s a few things of note in the upcoming patch notes which we can use to divine what the as-yet unseen bosses in Ulduar will be like.

For a start, Last Stand is having its cooldown reduced to 3 minutes.  When glyphed with Glyph of Last Stand, this suddenly means that Last Stand could be up all the time. I don’t believe for a second that will be attainable, but by nerfing the glyph to a 2 minute reduction, the minimum I expect to see, we’ll still see the ability available once a minute to boost health by 20% for 20 seconds.

Add to that the new glyph – Glyph of Shield Wall. It’s a similar deal to that of the Last stand glyph:

Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.

When properly talented with Improved Disciplines, Shield Wall too gains a 1 minute cooldown. This suddenly means that the 4-piece set bonus for Tier 7 gear (an extra 3 seconds on Shield Wall) means a lot more than it did.

There are two things that this could mean.

The first is that these are just the first iteration of testing and they’ll be nerfed back down to an appropriate level. Fine, I say. That isn’t too much of a problem – PTRs are for testing, and by making extreme changes and then gradually moving them back to a point where they’re comfortable, Blizzard can be sure to get them to a point at which they’re much better balanced against other tanking trees.

The second, and which has been partially borne out by the Hodir fight on the PTRs (melee strikes of 25k), is that we’ll be seeing a lot more encounters in which we take a lot of damage, like Patchwerk and Brutallus. It will mean that it’s not complete suicide for a warrior to tank an encounter such as Sartharion with all three drakes up. And, most importantly, it will make the decision to use panic buttons so much easier.

Of course, dual specialisation will be our saviour here too. A strict survivability spec might well depend on these two glyphs. Adding a full set of threat glyphs in the second means the choice is always there.

Centenary

A little under two years later, and I’ve hit post 100. Time for a little retrospective, I think.

Back in March, 2007, a raider for  tiny little Kara guild, who played a rogue, introduced a view of Warcraft that was what the little guy was seeing. Updates continued, somewhat more sporadically, until July when my new obsession, and what this blog came to be mainly about, happened: my tank hit level 70.

There were a couple more posts when we hit Gruul for the first time, but then progression stopped. And I stopped writing – what’s to be said about running the same content week-in, week-out for months?

Unsurprisingly our guild, Dead Code Elimination, collapsed. I went on to my new guild, The Hidden Circle, eventually dragging some of my old guildmates along with me. Others went to other raiding guilds, or a newly formed, much more casual version of what had gone before.

Somewhere along the way I picked up some readers and really started to get into the whole blogging thing. To all of you who’ve read or commented – thank you all very much! About the same time, we started running Mount Hyjal and Black Temple, making steady progress even through the summer when so many people were off on holiday elsewhere.

In the intervening time I’ve set down my rules for a stress-free life, which I’ll break whenever I want to, talked about why everyone’s loot system sucks, railed against “Main Tank” priority, and generally just had a good time.

So, here’s to the last 100 posts. And to all the people who’ve commented on them. May the next 100 be just as enjoyable for me to post to, and for others to read!