Dec 14, 2007

alt love

Early on in my WoW career I was weary of my alts. Sunblossom was my bread and butter, and it took only casual observations that she could accumulate wealth much faster than a brand new character could, and thus could easily twink out a new character -- even in only minor amounts -- which would be much faster than "legitimately" levelling that character from scratch.

Now that I'm raiding and Sunblossom has a full set of purpz (though, I am still using the Scryer Bloodgem, but its one of the best +spell hit trinkets in the game, so it doesnt count) my "progression" focuses have narrowed. I cant be raiding all the time, because they are scheduled only for specific nights. 5-mans no longer give me gear that I can use, and I dare not do heroics outside of my guild as PUGing is rampant with idiocy. I don't care to do PVP at all -- TF2 satisfies those urges quite nicely. This limits the current activities I can do with Sunblossom:

Questing - My log is currently full of 21 group/dungeon quests that need to be completed. A lot of the time I'm too busy to get people together to help me to do those. Besides the last few Ethereum quests I have left to do, the only zone thats left for me to quest is Shadowmoon Valley, and I dare not start that with only 4 free quest slots.
Reputation Grinding - I'm exalted with Scryer and Kurenai, but I really need to get Sha'tar and Cenarion Expidition down
Epic Fyling Training - :(
Grind Enchanting to 375 - :( :(
Grind Fishing to 375 - :( :( :(... at least until I get a boxed set of some TV show I want to watch, then fishing is fun to do.

None of these are that fun right now. Plus, recently I've been feeling the itch to re-experience the lower level content, and with a super powered main that can buy a few peices off the AH for them every now and then and fun their lvl 40 mount expenses, why not!? The increased level curve makes this even more enticing. Furthermore, since I can afford to trick out several alts, I'm taking advantage of the fact that I can wait for the weekends and then only play them while they have rested XP up. It makes the entire experience so much less painful than it was when I first started out. Quite frankly, levelling alts rock right now. Especially with the levelling curve and old world dungeon changes. I'm not entirely sold on the "solo-ification" of some of the Old World questing areas by removing elites. I know that all of those orcs that used to be elite still require a group to kill easily since they are crammed so close to eachother.

Some other day I will go into length about each of my alts, but for now all I can say is that alts should be best left to those with level 70 mains they cant trick out easily anymore. The only alt a new player should have is a bank alt.

BANK ALTS FOR NEWBIES

While you should never ignore a characters bank space, never underestimate the power of a bank alt. Just make a new character, and run them to a city with where a bank, auction house and mailbox are in close proximity. For alliance this means ironforge, unless your computer sucks in which case you might have to relocate. Horde has more options, and Ogrimmar seems to be the most popular one.

The key to the bank alt is that all they do is process mail your other characters send them. They sell the items you want to sell on the auction house, and they store items that you want quick access to when levelling a character that cant hack it in outlands yet. By sending all your goods across the mail, you save loads of time that would otherwise be spent running/riding/flying around on a levelling character between the bank and where they need to level.

Plus it also starts a centralized area of finances where you can visibly tell how much profit you've gotten from selling items off the AH. Your bank alt will need some seed money, but after that they will be more than capable of establishing a positive cash flow for you quickly and easily as long as you supply them with goods that will sell on the AH.

So seriously. Do it. It just takes a few minutes of boring running to get them set up, and then later on you can enjoy tricking them out with unique clothing ("real" characters have to unequip a lot of crap to see the awesomeness of festival gear). My bank-alt wears only brewfest regalia (hat, hosen and shoes!), a stein and an offhand fish. And it was totally worth getting too.

bah humbug

I'm all for the holiday season. It's great! Gift giving, spending time with family and loved ones, ridiculous amounts of red and green decorations, pretending that donating $0.37 to the red cross donation buckets will make a difference, but December is really just a black hole of a month where Raiding goes to die.

At the start of December all the school age guild members are busy preparing for finals and studying, or going to parties after finals are done, by Mid december, a lot of people leave behind their WoW computers to go somewhere else for the holidays. I know this is the situation for me, soon I'll have to say goodbye to my WoW computer as I spend 2 weeks at my parents house, and I know a lot of our guild members have already just done this.

We were missing 10 people for attempting Lurker Below, and all of the healers that were saved to the first Karazhan group. I ended up doing 2 heroic dungeon runs instead. Which was kind of nice, because I've felt ever since I got thrust into raiding ("No, we dont care that youre in greens and blues, we need more warm bodies") I have had hardly any time to run 5-mans, much less heroics. But at the same time, raiding turns down the volume on 5-mans. The boss fights -- which at one time seemed at least somewhat dangerous -- are now trivial and easily overcome. But thats probably just because I have twice as much shadow spell damage as I did back then.

But at the same time, it really sucks when you lose raiding momentum. It took us a while to down Gruul, but now that he is on farm we realize the critical mistake we were making in allowing the raid to show up without consumables. Magtheridon took a month for us to kill, but in reality, only one week, as the other weeks we were struggling with just getting people to actually show up to the raids. It'd be a nice Christmas gift to get Lurker and Reaver down before I have to run off, but its probably not happening.

Personally, I'd like to get through all of SSC, TK, MH, BT, and the unreleased Sunwell content before the next expansion pack drops, but guesstimating that we have some 12 months before WotLK drops, we'll be lucky to get through Kael'Thas before we all go running off to Northrend.

Dec 12, 2007

why the current arena system is lame

As a player in general - not just a raider - I have an issue with the current Arena gear distribution system.

Its not that I consider them welfare epics. If Arena gear is welfare epics then that makes all reputation reward, crafted, and badge reward items welfare epics. The only real welfare epics were the things Headless Horseman dropped in my opinion, and that new item they added in Scarlet Monastery. And I'm pretty sure the latter only exists because they wanted to fuck around with people who make BG twinks. Back on point: from what I understand, having a set of Arena gear is necessary to compete in there, and I dont want them to change it so only the best teams have the best gear. Thats stupid.

Its not that I'm bitching about the stats. New seasons are necessary to prevent Johnny Q. Raider from coming into Arena's and being unstoppable because stuff he got from the latest instance is too powerful compared to Arena gear. Furthermore, for all of the Arena's +stats, the Arena gear really sucks for raiding. It doesn't have avoidance stats, so you can't tank in it. It doesn't have enough of the required stats for raid healing. And it doesnt have enough +hit to make it useful for DPS on anything beyond Gruuls Lair. It can fill gear gaps a raider might have in the middle of SSC, but with the new badge gear, ZA gear and various professions these gaps should have been filled by now. Similarly if you desire epics for grinding mobs or doing 5-mans, heroics and badge rewards fill out the armor slots quite nicely and easily.

The only Arena gear that can really interest raiders are the weapons, and now that weapons are getting ratings locked, its really more of a problem on Blizzards end with not properly itemizing encounters. One well documented case is that sword rogues pretty much have to PvP to get decent swords for raiding. This is not the fault of the Arena system having too good of items, but the fault of the itemization team for not including enough swords. Its easily fixed: there needs to be more loot tables like Prince Malchezaar, where you are gauranteed an armor token, a nice weapon, and something extra. On a more extreme side, Blizzard could reintroduce raiding weapon quests, where a quest item can drop that multiple classes can use and then assemble tradegoods and raid drops to create a nice weapon.

My problem is the cosmetics. With raiders, having unique looking gear is one of the side benefits of fighting bosses. Dont get me wrong, I'm not "raiding for the items". The items themselves become the battle trophies of the amount of effort you put into raiding. And while WoWJutsu is nice, its not nearly as built in as Arena ratings. I think this "gear as a trophy" mechanic is an important mechanic. Blizzard thinks so too, which is why S3 shoulders are ratings locked.

But in Arena, after a certain point, everyone starts to look the same from all scrambling to get the same, best gear. My proposition is this: allow gladiator/pvp gear to be upgraded stat wise at a discount, while at the same time ratings lock the newer items. The upgrade itself is a special kind of enchantment that takes up a special "arena enchantment" slot the item has, that doesnt overwrite standard enchantments. The discount should be great enough that it is cheaper for a newcomer to grab the oldest season items and upgrade them to the current season. The discount could be at least some sort of Arena point reduction, but perhaps contain a gold and/or honor point component. To not trivialize getting the newest Arena gear entirely, the "arena enchantments" only apply in Battlegrounds and Arenas -- perhaps only a weakened amount in the Battlegrounds.

This has 3 intended effects:
Removes the barrier for new gladiators even more.
Removes gear gaps that shouldnt exist in pure PvP competition faster.
Enhances the "items as trophies" mechanic on the newest season of items.

There also really needs to be a difference between the Arena gear and Raiding gear. I'm not saying Arena gear should look crappy, I'm saying it should look different. Raiding gear should and does look like you ripped it away from whoever was holding onto it and took it for your own use. PvP gear should look like it is worn by battle hardened elite, who are victorious in the field of battle. A good example of PvP gear models are the old High Warlord/Grand Marshal plate armors. They're a little simple compared to todays current super-cool-animated-glowy-armor, but they're a nice starting point.

At the very least, if they are going to recolor raiding tiers for arena gear, at least make them look different enough that you can readily visibly tell if somone is wearing arena gear or a raiding tier. Good: Priest T5/S2 (though honestly I think the shadow set for T5 should look like S2, make S2 have red highlights or something). Bad: Warlock T5/S2.

raid report: gruul & mag tuesday

Since our primary tank was not on today, our secondary tank got to be the main tank for these fights. We also had to drag in some PVPers to fill in a few slots since as the holidays approach more people log off to go spend time with their families. I know personally this is the last week I can raid, so I want to kill Lurker and Reaver.

Downed maulgar easily, our 3rd warrior tank finally got T4 shoulders to replace his Dungeon set. Downed Gruul with 24 people (somone was AFK for too long and we decided to just go on without them).

Magtheridon was a 2 shot encounter again. The first wipe happened because the main tank died, and then he went and killed me and another cube clicker. Usually when the main tank dies on this guy we all end up wiping but this time somone was able to get aggro on him and get healers before half the Raid wiped so we were only down 3 people. So I ended up wiping the raid by not bothering to tell them that they needed somone to click my cube.

The 2nd shot was a bit more interesting. We had to click the cube one last time when Magtheridon was at 2%. Apparently somone got confused as to which cube they should have been at and their cube was absent for the channeling. A few pulses later 80% of the raid dies and the rest of us burn him down for the last 1%. A lot of people were pissed off but you cant really complain when you get to loot the guy.

The GM was extra happy because this was the first night we were able to farm 6 T4 tokens in a night. I'm extra happy because it means the rest of the 25 man content left for us to do is bosses we haven't killed, which is a lot more fun than killing bosses we have on farm.

Dec 9, 2007

raid report: magtheridon

Raided Magtheridon tonight. Would have gone on to attempt Lurker Below, but a lot of people had to leave within the hour and our main tank had a family crisis that he needed to attend to.

On the plus side I got the Eye of Magtheridon with a 100 roll.
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28789
Granted you dont want to trigger its secondary effects, but some theorycrafters have found that its a really good trinket to have if you havent reached the spell hit cap -- which I havent.

We wiped only once, which is nice, since we can start saying we farm Magtheridon now. We had trouble the first attempt because after the 30% collapse too much healing was diverted away from the tank. Additionally for some reason anytime anyone talked over TS we got massive white noise interference, which didnt help since there was some assistance that needed to be done. (I also clicked the cube way too early one rotation and almost wiped the raid. I got super lucky by the fact that the moment my cube channeling ended the other 4 went up.)

2nd time we got close to wiping towards the end, two clickers ended up dying close to eachother and it was pretty tense since Mag was falling below 5% around then. Thankfully people stepped up on both occasions.

Dec 7, 2007

on this blog and myself

When I first started World of Warcraft I didnt know what to expect. I had basically shunned it for its first 2 years in college, when I saw the devestating effects it had on my roommate, and at the time I felt it was inappropriate to play a game that incurred a monthly fee when I didnt have a steady source of income. I also realized it was basically a gigantic time sink, and that as a sophomore and junior, if I had time to play WoW, I probably should have been studying.

Senior year though, things were different. I finished most of the hard classes I needed to take, and even hard classes were easy for me to sleep through. So I figured I might as well try it one day at a friends house while drunk.

After killing a few kobolds I was immediatly hooked.
There was something about how the combat worked that just seemed so right.

After a trial account I realized that playing a Warlock was my true calling in the game and bought a boxed copy to have fun with after finals were finished that semester.

My initial observations painted it as some sort of inferior bastardization of the worst aspects of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2, blocky and confusing in the heat of battle and a clickfest with an unappealing endgame grind. In reality it had a much leasurely pace, and unlike in the information overload in Warcraft 3 -- where it was vital to understand every detail in the battlefield -- the mass of information the game throws at you is tuneable and most of it is ignorable.

Currently I am in a "casually serious" (or is it "seriously casual"?) raiding guild. Our current progression as of this post:

  • Karazhan, Gruuls Lair on farm.
  • Magtheridon down twice.
  • Working on Lurker Below.
  • Doing Zul'Aman runs when we dont have enough to do a 25 man and no new recruits need gear from Karazhan. (ie: never)

Not a very impressive list of bosses down, but Magtheridon is quite an accomplishment in my opinion, and I really dont think Lurker or Void Reaver will take that long for us to get on farm status.

I started this blog partly as a desire to share information and opinions about the "state of the game (tm)". I dont expect anyone to read or follow this advice, but I do expect to get in trouble with my guild leader when somone links a post where I complain about the Shitty-DPSer-of-the-week-who-keeps-wiping-us-on-learning-content-because-they-cant-pay-attention-and-arent-cautious-enough. (please dont do this)

Its also so I can post speculative stuff in hopes that some blizz designer will see it and think "hey thats a good idea to put in the game, we should work that angle" (this is purely fantasy and will never happen).