Jinxed Thoughts

Nintendo + Ads = Nerdrage

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:07:00 +0000

So the other day, as I was reading my BBC app on the phone (yet another thing to do while I am bored at work), I saw the news that Nintendo intends to claim ad revenue on Let's Plays of their games posted on YouTube. The reaction on the internet seems to have been overwhelmingly negative, with most people considering Nintendo to be legally in their right but morally in their wrong to do this. And I agree that my first reaction also was something along the lines of "wait, what?!", when I first read it, thinking about my friend who does Let's Plays of old Nintendo games, wondering if he too would be affected (which would've annoyed me greatly, since I dislike YouTube ads overall). I decided to find out more about this issue, and what it really means. And especially; are Nintendo really so wrong in doing this?

The first thing I understood about this whole issue is that it really is two different questions being debated -
1. Are Nintendo right in doing this?
And
2. Will Nintendo really gain anything by doing this?

I don't think anyone will question Nintendos legal rights to do this, and that's not what I mean when I say "are Nintendo right to do this". I mean, "are Nintendo really, although no one seems to think so, morally right to do this? Are we getting angry over nothing?". Overall this isn't an easy thing to figure out, since there are so many aspects about this issue that we simply are not clear on and therefor don't agree on.

Are Let's Plays copyrightable?
One of the first things people will mention is that a Let's Play, which is a playthrough of a game basically, for anyone who didn't know, of a Nintendo game isn't necessarily Nintendo property. Unlike a movie or a picture for instance, the game can be experienced in many different ways, and I agree with what most people say that any Let's Play won't be exactly like whatever I end up playing in the end. Another good argument is that if you watch a pirated movie, because piracy is what this has been compared to, you'll probably be done with that movie - meaning you won't feel any need to buy aka pay for it. A Let's Play for a game on the other hand might instead encourage or persuade you to actually buy/pay for it. In fact, one of the issues the gaming industry faced a while ago was that there was no good way for gamers, unlike movie goers, to really find out if they liked a game before buying it. This meant possibly spending a whole lot of money on something that you ended up never playing. This was partially solved with letting people try demos of games, something that is still around to some part, but far from every game has a demo.

I am one of those people who, if I am unsure about a game, will check out Gameplay and Review videos of that game on YouTube to make up my mind, just as I would check out a trailer to a movie to see if it seemed like something I want to pay 10 euro (swedish movie ticket price) to watch. So there is no doubt that Let's Plays, and similar videos of gameplay, hold an interesting value to the game creator. If someone is unsure about a game, it is unlikely they'll dish out 30-50 euro for it on a hunch (at least in my poor ass case). The few times I have done this I have been more sorry than happy for it. And if watching a Let's Play makes me decide the game is not for me, the creator hasn't really lost a potential customer, because without the Let's Play I probably wouldn't have bought the game anyway. If gameplay videos didn't exist in any way, I would still try and find out about the game the old school way, asking friends, trying it out in game stores etc. I think a method a lot of people have been using is to pirate the game to "test it" and then just never end up paying for it because they technically already have the game. So personally I think game creators can only mostly gain from the existance of gameplay videos.

This still doesn't answer the question to whether the material is really copyrightable or not, and each side of the issue has thrown out more or less accurate examples and analogies to prove their point.

Who owns this?

Thruth is there are plenty of game creators out there that encourage their fans own creations of their games, Minecraft is often given as an example of this. There is however a massive difference between a sandbox game like Minecraft and a more linear game like Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. Because games are so different in their nature, it's difficult to compare them straight off - the experience will always be personal to be sure, but there is a big difference in degree here. Overall however, most games seem to benefit from having an active community, and regardless of game type I think that goes for just about any game. Correct me if I am wrong.

In the end, this makes the question of copyright very difficult to answer however. Personally I think that anything created within a game is still somehow owned by that game. But if you think of similar instances or half-silly analogies it is clear that it's not that simple. A painting is owned by the painter, not by the manufacturer of paint - eventhough technically it is the manufacturer that allows the painter to create that painting, just as a game creator allows a gamer to create a gaming experience. Banksy is in fact another half-good example, since the art is on public property - who does it belong to? The creator or the owner of the material used? Who has the bigger claim - the tool provider or the intellectual provider? And how much of which is a game? If I create a copy of a painting in Minecraft, do I own it, the owner of the panting or the owners of Minecraft? These are questions I can't answer unfortunately, but they are definitely very interesting questions.

So who gets to earn money from it?
Without knowing, or deciding on, who has the bigger contribution in a creation, this is equally difficult to answer. When I first read about this whole thing, I was worried that Nintendo were going to put ads on just about any Nintendo-content-video. That doesn't seem to be so, and that's how I learned that there actually are people out there that make money off of their Nintendo game Let's Plays. Of course there are! But it really hadn't crossed my mind. Personally, I would avoid watching any video with an ad in it, and it does make me feel iffy that you'd try to make money off Let's Plays. Don't ask me why, I just think it's wrong somehow but yet again this has got to do with the very difficult question as to who really owns the material. Regardless of my personal opinions however, it is obvious that there are Let's Play channels on Youtube that are very popular, and that make their owners some money (how much is another question I'll discuss further down). And like I said, I do believe these videos are doing more good than harm to the game creators in the end. So what harm really if the people putting the videos up there earn some money from it, right?

What I don't understand however is the argument that putting ads in videos will scare viewers away. If there were already ads on there, I can't see how it coming from Nintendo rather than the channel owner would make any difference to the average viewer? The fact that there is an ad there at all is the annoying part, not who the sender is, or at least that is what I thought. This makes it all seem like the people this change really would bother are the channel owners, which is kind of obvious. They might, and have also in some part said they will, stop playing Nintendo games until Nintendo change their minds. This makes it a question as to whether people watch those videos and channels because of the creator or because of the game? If I can't find the game I want on some certain channel, I'll just move on to the next one. It's not like I have to watch that exact person play that game, or nothing - but I could be the minority on this.

Do Nintendo need to do this?
Regardless of whether I agree with people earning money on playing games on Youtube, I still don't agree with Nintendo making this move either. Like Game Scoop on ign.com was saying, they can't possibly be doing it for the money, so what for? I can't see it being for them to get some advertisement in there either, since the entire Let's Play video of their game basically is an advertisement, as discussed above. Some people have been saying Nintendo simply do this to show everyone that they do consider this their property, and they just want us to know. Unless they have some bigger idea behind it though, that would make it seem like a move to make just for the principle of it, and is that really worth it?

It reminds me of the fan made version of Streets of Rage. A couple of guys sat down for years and re-created, from scratch, every pixel of the game, not using a single line of the original game code. They made 100 all new levels, redesigned every character, recorded 83 new songs themselves for the game and then released it, completely free for anyone to play, on the internet. It had taken them something like 8 years to complete and they had only done it out of love for the game, they didn't ask anything in return. A couple of days later Sega told them to remove everything or they would sue. This on a game that used nothing of the original data and that Sega had basically no interest in at that point either, except for selling cheap digital versions of the original. Eventhough they had asked Sega for permission, it turned out a verbal agreement wasn't much worth in Segas eyes, or obviously the dedication of their fans either for that matter.

The difference between this horrible story and the Nintendo ad one is obviously that Nintendo wants the money that someone is making off of their games, which is understandable in a way, but from a PR point of view it is silly. Many game creators have already realized how incredibly valuable goodwill can be, I think this is the mistake Nintendo are making right now. Looking back into the 80s, Nintendo wasn't exactly famous for its goodwill-policies, running any licensee of their games with an iron fist. This feels like a whiff of those times, but today Nintendo no longer has the power to behave this way and needs to realize that the potential goodwill damage can in no way be replaced by the tiny amount of money they might make off of these ads, regardless of whether they are in the right, morally and legally, to do this. The world doesn't always work that way.

What's the consuequence of this?
What could happen if Nintendo go through with this? I think most viewers will just shrug, or are oblivious to the change anyway, because an ad is an ad regardless of where it comes from. They'll notice if the channel owners suddenly stop doing Nintendo games, and this is where we'll see who ends up to be the "smart guy" in this whole thing. Either Nintendo will be right and the viewers will just look up their games elsewhere, or the channel owners will be right and Nintendo games will suddenly get a lot less attention. I honestly can't predict what could happen, but I am leaning towards the first option. I could be completely wrong, but personally I watch a certain channel more because of the games being played, than because of the personality of that particular channel owner. For instance, I am a pretty big fan of James Rolfes AVGN channel, to a big part because of how he does his videos - but to an even bigger part because of the games he uses in his videos. If he were to make a video of a game I have no interest in, I would probably not watch that video. Yet again, I could be the minority here. It is of course equally possible that most people watch games they have no interest in just because their favorite presenter is playing it - this is where Nintendo could make a big doozy. It makes me think of Two and a Half Men, a show I believe most people watched because of Charlie Sheen and trying to replace him just doesn't work. Unfortunately it turns out Charlie Sheen wasn't much without Two and a Half Men either.

Maybe this will turn out the same way? People will either continue to watch the show, or they will all root for the "Charlie Sheen" and move on to wherever he goes, only to find out that he's nothing without his Nintendo games or that he's perfectly fine without them.

If I could decide, no one would make money off of youtube videos with ads. Just remove them all together - the game creators get their game exposure, and the channel owners get their attention, everyone is happy? If you want to make money on your videos, do it cleverly instead, sell merchandise or something!

Zinn @ Twister Nether Blogcast

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:32:00 +0000

Dear readers, I have some exciting news to share with you. This upcoming Sunday the 12th of May, I have been asked to guest speak on the ever lovely podcast show Twisted Nether Blogcast. I am honored and thrilled to have been asked and am really looking forward to it, I think it will be a lot of fun!

This will be the first time you'll get a chance at hearing my sweet voice (ahem) and also hear me inadvertently make a fool of myself (which I almost did there trying to spell that word). I have no idea what to expect and I have never done anything like this before, but I love talking as much as I love writing so I am sure it'll be fine, and hopefully even interesting.

The show is at 8pm PT, which unfortunately for me is 5am my time. I have an evening shift just before and a morning shift of work just after so I am certain to be somewhat dazed and confused at the start, but some tea will get me on track.

I'd love for you to show up if you're curious about anything about me or anything else I might be able to answer (like; why is protection warrior so much fun?). After 8 years with WoW (has it really been that long...) there are tons of things to talk about, so we'll see what subjects we come up with. Hope to see you there!

EDIT:
Here is the link for anyone who wants to hear it.

Field Report - Boulevard Of Broken Games

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:24:00 +0000

How about another update on what's going on around here gaming wise?

World of Warcraft
First up, now that I am playing WoW less and less I've noticed something very interesting that I really was wrong about in the past. I've always thought that my WoW-gaming took time from other things that I should or could be doing. I even mention that in my previous Field Report, saying that all the time not spent playing WoW should give me loads of time to do other things I wanted to do. I don't necessarily mean studies, chores, sleeping or work (although also occasionally that) but mostly other games that I wanted to play. I've always been curious about loads of different games but WoW was just always so available, ready, easy to jump in to. I knew exactly what I had to do and eventhough I normally ended up for way longer than expected or planned, I always had the feeling that I could jump in and out of that game easily whereas most other games take some time to get in to and aren't as easy to just quit whenever you want.

This meant that I always had the impression that I chose WoW over other games simply because I was too lazy to get invested in anything else. Turns out, that wasn't the case at all. Now that I don't play WoW that much, I normally don't do anything really! Yeah, how depressing does that sound. I will expand further on this in its own post, so I will leave this thrilling subject here for now, but trust me I will rant on about it eventually because the reality of it really confused me.

Kotor 2
There is much to like about this game and a couple of things to not like so much. Unfortunately, there is a disturbance in that balance and the dark side is definitely starting to take over. The story is ok, and after rewatching the old Star Wars movies I just find it even cooler to be running around in the Star Wars universe. Suddenly I have the new found love for all things Star wars because hells yeah, it's awesome. There are loads of things to do and discover, I've never gotten stuck so far wondering what to do next and I totally love the combat system, honestly. Although the AI isn't always the cleverest and my team mates keep running in to close combat before throwing bombs, but ah well. Things like that rarely bother me as long as they're not game breaking.

I can sense a crash coming...

What is completely ruining the experience however are the myriad of bugs and crashes that this game suffers from. And then I've even updated it with the TSL Restored Content Mod which apparently was going to take care of the worst glitches. Crashes are somewhat ok, when I first started playing Settlers 2 way back when, that used to crash on me every 5-10 minutes (no kidding) but I still kept on playing it. Admittedly I would not have that level of patience nowadays, but a crash every now and then is ok. Just remember to save. The bugs however... now they really push my buttons. Mostly because they're not tinu bugs, like falling through the world somewhere or the game crashing if you do some weird ass combination of commands. No, these are bugs that mean that if you happen to choose the wrong dialogue option somewhere, the event doesn't unfold like it's supposed to. You have to go back to an old save and read up on the internet how to do it step by step right so that the game understands to move on. I can forgive this once in a game, maybe. But every other quest? Come on! Right now my Google Search history is full of things like "kotor 2 Onderon Crash", "kotor 2 Dantooine Crash" and "kotor 2 confrontation with Atris bug". Grr.

I had one where fortunately I had an autosave not long back to remedy the situation. But without a walkthrough it would've taken me a very long time to figure out exactly what step I had done wrong to make things screw up. There are many options to screw up when only one is the right one! And now I am currently stuck on basically the same thing, only this time I can't find out what I've done wrong. I'll have to restart an old save and just hope that it is old enough to fix whatever went wrong, but I'll be seriously pissed if I replay all of that and get the same result.

Other bugs include graphic crashes for no damn reason at all. How do you solve it? Just go into graphic settings and change a setting. Any setting. Doesn't matter if you change it and immediately change it back either, as long as you've pretended to change something it usually works. Having to start most gaming sessions doing what feels completely meaningless also doesn't add much to the fun.

This would be ok if I had cracked or otherwise pirated the game, then I just get to suit myself. But I've paid for this bastard! How can they release such an unfinished game?! It makes me want to scream, and it definitely doesn't want me to play. Kotor 2 should be happy it is as entertaining as it is, because otherwise I would've given up on it long ago in favor of games that actually work. Which is any other game.

Divine Divinity
I had only seen my ex bf play this game a little and didn't think much more of it than that it had to have one of the worst gaming titles ever. Divine Divinity? How about Awesome Awesomeness or Long Longevity? It gives me an excuse to use the phrase "hey, what a tautology" for the first time ever and I am going to take it. Good thing the game is a lot better than its title and until now I've spent some 40 hours playing it. It's very straightforward with its dungeon crawling, skill and stat choosing system, making it resemble most RPGs released around this time. And eventhough there is a lot of "down time" ie time spent mostly running around, trying to find the next thing to do or figuring out how to solve a quest I realized that it doesn't bother me at all. Because I always know what to do next, and if there is a 10 min run to get me to where I need to be, fine. At least I have a clear goal. There is just always something to do and you rarley get stuck not knowing what to do next. Just walk into an area of the map you haven't been to yet and bam, talking tree that summons 30 zombies suddenly attacks you.

Can't have slaughter without laughter

Another thing that I enjoy about old RPGs compared to many other old games are that they give you choices. And I don't mind good vs evil choices, but the choice to leave an area or a quest for now and come back to it later. It feels refreshing when stuck somewhere that I don't have to bash my head against a wall or something that just feels tedious. Instead I can come back to that place later with new eyes and motivation. This is something I really miss about old school console games generally.

Skyrim
I bought this little thing way back, like I don't even know how long ago. I am pretty sure it was last year somewhere. But I've been afraid of it, frankly. I just knew this sucker could hog loads of time from me and I wanted to be ready for it. If I start playing a game I want to invest a lot of time in, I want to make sure I have a lot of that time to invest. At the time I bought it I was playing a bunch of other games, and thought I needed to wait a bit with this one. My goal was to finish either Kotor2 or Divine Divinity first, because I think I am good enough to at least juggle two massive RPGs at the same time. When Kotor2 went all emo on me, and after having tried to fix it for what felt like the hundredth time, I decided I deserveda break. Good old fun really, because playing games shouldn't be about fixing them all the time, it should be about playing them. So I finally dared to start up Skyrim. I've only played a bit into it, I'm level 6 or so and have done the first handfull of quests. So far so good.

There are minor things that bother me about it, things only nitpickers would care about (and I happen to be one, at times). I don't know why, but the scandinavian accents everyone is using kinda bothers me. I realize it's to give that "norse" feeling that they clearly want the beginning of the game to have (what with the Nords and all) but for someone who is surrounded by that accent all the time (I probably suffer from it myself) it just sounds weird. There are also some control choices I found counter intuitive, like favoriting items in the menu with the F button, but you don't use those favorited items outside the menu with the F button but with the A button. Instead you change camera zoom with the F button. Why? Little things that just... yeah ok, let's move on.

Overall I obviously think the game is really fun so far, it's just the kind of gear collecting-dungeon crawling that I (and most other people) enjoy so much. I was warned by some friends that this game too constains its fair share of bugs and glitches, but since it's a Bethesda game I was prepared for that.

Guild Wars 2
When I last wrote about GW2 I was quite optimistic and had much fun with it. shortly after that, my interest in that game completely died on me though and I can't even remember the last time I logged in. It has to be well over a month ago now. I did have fun with it but I think after a while running around doing nothing I sort of realized that all that was leading anywhere. Comparing it to games like Divine Divinity and Kotor 2 that I was also playing I didn't have a goal, no ending to strive for, and simply discovering the land lost its appeal to me. Not knowing what to do initially seemed refreshing and fun, but soon made the whole experience seem kind of pointless. After ten levels or so I thought I had gotten down the general idea of the game, the feeling of the skills and the surroundings. I realize that it might be like judging WoW after having played through Barrens up to level 10 on one character. Obviously there is loads more to discover for me in GW2 if I want to. But I don't, really.

I think it might have happened when I ran into my first dungeon. I didn't go into it, mind you, because I think I was still way too low level. But I stood outside a while, looking at the people standing there, presumably gathering groups, while also asking for people in chat. And it just sort of clicked with me. I'm not in to this anymore. I've done it in WoW for years and just feel like doing something else for a change. Doing my own adventures now, adventures with a clear goal and not the ever climbing stair of increasing stats and levels into infinity. Besides, just as in WoW I don't know anyone who plays GW2 and so I would have to experience all that with strangers. I could make friends, of course, like I've done in WoW a million times. But right now I am not ready to move from one MMORPG to the next. I think I simply need an interlude of other type of games for a little while. I just don't feel like investing myself in the massiveness that a MMORPG is. We'll see in the future.

And then...
There are always other games I play a little bit every now and then. I just secretly bought a copy of RE4 to surprise the bf. We've played through RE1, 2, 3 Survivor, Code Veronica, Zero and RE1 Remake so far so RE4 feels like the next step. I'm really looking forward to getting started on that! Me and the bf also had a discussion about whether FFVIII is a good FF. He doesn't think so but personally, I quite like it, but I never got very far since my copy kept crashing in the same place. I decided it was time to test it out again, but alas - it's still crashing at that same place. What happens is that it never finishes loading between screens in the Galbadia Missile Base, and overall the loading takes ages even when it does work. I tried different things, avoiding certain areas, opening and closing the disc tray, creating a new save file, but nothing seems to work. Either I chance it and start up another save file, but I doubt that is the problem (since no other game has any issues of this sort). My other option is to buy another copy of the game, and I might get around to that eventually because I actually really want to finish that game.

I recently bought a bunch of old RPGs that are lying in wait for me whenever I finish Divine Divinity, for instance Baldurs Gate 1&2, Planescape Torment and NWN. I'm also pondering buying the old Fallout games. I also want to play the Mario & Luigi games for the DS, I've played Partners in Time and loved it and would like to try Bowsers Inside Story too. Right now I definitely feel like I have more games to play than I have time, but at least I have things to do, whenever I don't end up just not doing anything (as mentioned above). Until next time gamers.

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 2 - Stat Choices

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:39:00 +0000

Welcome to my second part of How to Disc Priest, this time we'll take a closer look to one of the favorite subjects for any disc priest to argue about - stats. More specifically what stats to choose, and why.

Previous post in this guide;
- Part 1: Talent Choices

Over the course of WoW, what stats you want to go with as a disc priest has rarely been set in stone. Even Icy-Veins state that;

"The statistic priority as a Discipline Priest is very much subject to personal preference. Your final choice will depend greatly on your spell usage, healing style, and encounter requirements, and we encourage you to experiment until you find what works best for you."

Most of the time there has been a primary stat we want to stack as much as possible, and the secondary stat has mainly been up to playstyle. There are usually recommendations as to which stat is overall the best one, overall in this case meaning "for most encounters" and/or "for most playstyles". And that's in the end what it really comes down to - what are you fighting (dungeons, pvp, raids) and how are you playing your priest? Other factors that will affect your choice somewhat are raid composition, for instance which other healers you run with, and your gear level. If this all seems like too many factors to think off, don't worry - hopefully it will be somewhat clearer once I am done here (I'll try at least).

What are stats anyway?
So how do we know what stats we want to use? Is it fine to just read what someone says in some think-they-know-it-all-blog (like this one) and smack it all on to my gear? Maybe, but wouldn't it more interesting to know the reason to why you want a certain stat over another? I've always thought so, and it has helped me greatly to adapt to certain encounters and raid groups over the years. It has meant going against the stream on several occasions, but most of the time it has worked out better for me rather than just assuming that the general advice will work solidly regardless.

Stats do one thing - boost our output. Be it passively via stamina or spirit, or actively via spell power, in the end stats are all there to make sure you can do your job for as long and as much as possible (obviously I'm not thinking of strength or agility or other stats that don't do anything for us). You should be able to look at any stat and think "how much more healing will I get from 1 more point of this?". Sometimes the answer is straightforward - 1 more spellpower might give you 1 extra heal point. Most of the time however the answer is heavily dependant on outside factors and this is exactly why you need to know more about each stats function to make the right decision and this is something I've written about before.

Take stamina for instance. By 99,9% of the healing community not even mentioned when talking about stat choices. That is because nowadays, most of the time you get enough stamina passively to not ever have to choose stamina over almost any other stat. This does not mean stamina is a meaningless stat worth ignoring however. I remember back in Wotlk (I think it was), casters were required to have more than 10.000 hp for certain encounters, or they were just too difficult to keep alive. Some had to actively enchant/gem/gear for stamina to get up to those numbers. In many ways stamina can be considered the very basic of stats, which without all the other stats are completely meaningless, because a dead healer won't heal anyone. No matter how much spell power, intellect or haste you might have, if you can't stay alive you're worthless to the group anyway.

Now I am not trying to tell you to throw every other stat out the window out the window and stack stamina, I am merely trying to point out that stats might seem simple at a first glance, but they often correlate both to eachother and outside factors that make them worth giving many extra thoughts. Rarely is that more true than for disc priest, who have many skills that are affected differently by different stats. Most of the time this is something I have enjoyed about being a priest, sometimes however it has been quite frustrating.

As you can see I am clearly in favor of adapting your stats to your playstyle rather than adapting your playstyle to your stats, although of course overall a good balance is the best. But, this must never mean that your choices should handicap your raid in any way (this is especially important in progress raiding, less important in whatever you deem to be easy content). Don't pick a stat just because "it's more fun" or "I like to crit" like one shaman told me when I had some questions about her gearing. Let there be thought behind your choices and even more important, firm results. Play around, but make sure that you in the end are able to perform the job you're there to perform. Disc priests have the benefit of being allowed a lot of leeway in their stat choices, but if something turns out to work a lot better for you, you should definitely consider running with it even if it's not an immediate favorite of yours. I have on occasion been allowed to try out some weird ass ideas, but that is because I've had a lenient raid group. Don't do that without asking first.

To wrap up this rant somewhat, here are a couple of things to keep in mind about disc priests and stats just to give you an idea as to the complexity;

Stats affect our spells differently. Some spells benefit more from a certain stat than others. We have skills that are more actively affected by mastery (fx PW:Shield) and more passively affected by mastery and actively by haste (fx Prayer of Healing). Because of this it's important to consider spell usage and the encounter when choosing stats.
Some stats boost eachother, so that having more of one makes another better. The more mastery you have, the better haste becomes. The more crit you have, the better mastery becomes. The more mastery you have the better crit becomes. There are correlations between most stats.

You're probably thinking "yeah that's all swell, but what does it mean?". Or maybe you skipped that wall of text up there and jumped straight to this section. Either way, let's get to the actual stat choices.

What do our stats do?

Intellect - Has long been our go-to stat, since we used to have a big portion of our mana regeneration through intellect via Rapture, back before it was nerfed to only proc once every 12 seconds and worse, when they locked our mana pools to set amounts. Intellect is still a very important stat to us, it's just had to make some room for spirit as our mana regen stat instead. My personal stand point on Intellect is that it is the most important stat for us right now, but only if you have enough spirit to be comfortable with you mana regeneration. Intellect will give you bigger heals, which in turn means you have to throw less heals and therefor might need less spirit. It's important to find a good balance here, but overall, start to really stack Intellect once you've reached your spirit comfort zone. More about that up next.

Spirit - Spirit is both one of your most important stats and least important stats. Without enough of it, all your other stats are pretty useless, since you won't have the mana to cast them. Once you do have enough mana regen however, any additional spirit is basically useless since you only need as much mana as you need to keep everyone alive for whatever you are killing. How much that is of course totally depends on your playstyle, whether you're doing mostly raids or dungeons and raid composition (if you happen to do regular raiding). I found that a good benchmark to aim for was crossing the 10.000 combat regen mark for raiding. After that you will need to simply estimate based on whether you oom a lot or not if you need more spirit or not. As long as you still have trouble with your mana pool, pile up some more spirit (or consider if you're using your spells wrong, more on that in spell usage in another part). As soon as you notice that you end the encounters with some mana, without struggling throughout the encounter to not oom, no need for more spirit!

Disc healing 25man Cho'gall

Mastery - Mastery has historically been pretty much on par with haste, and it has basically been down to personal preference. Do you want to cast faster heals or have bigger absorbs? Although the disc community has seemed to lean slightly towards favoring Mastery since what seems like forever, I've always been a haste-fan myself. It's simply felt better, and trust me, I regularly tried gearing/gemming mastery to see which seemed better. Come MoP and especially enter Spirit Shell, and I feel like things have changed however. Back in Cata my heals consisted of roughly 10% shields and 15% DA. 75% of my healing was unaffected by mastery, while only 10% would be unaffected by haste. These numbers did not change much with mastery heavy gearing, because Prayer of Healing was such an important spell to us back then (as it still is) and it loved haste more than mastery.

Nowadays however, mastery also boosts our healing, meaning it is less of a one-or-the-other choice that it used to be. Because of Spirit Shell combined with Shield and DA, absorbs now also make up a much bigger portion of my, and probably your, healing than it used to. Spirit Shell is one of the most powerful tools a discipline priest has when wielded correctly, and boosting its output is definitely recommended.

Haste makes you cast out spells and thus get up Spirit Shell faster, but you risk only wasting Spirit Shell absorbs this way since it doesn't stack. With Mastery on the other hand, your Spirit Shell will become stronger, which you definitely want. Because of this, and the general awesomeness of Spirit Shell, I recommend going for Mastery as your main secondary stat.

Haste - Haste has been my favorite stat for most occasions, and only rarely did I spec mastery (and never crit). Because of the resent changes to the discipline spell book and choice of spells (read: inclusion of Spirit Shell and even more preference towards absorbs), mastery has overtaken haste in MoP. A lot of priests would even put crit, a stat I've always scoffed at, higher than haste now for the same reasons (and more about crit in a second). Personally I still prefer haste, since crit, unless you have shit tons of it, is still an unreliable stat whereas haste affects almost all of your spells no matter how much or how little you have.

Crit - So let's talk a bit more about crit. As I just mentioned, crit has come in from the cold in MoP because of a couple of changes to it made in MoP. A critical cast now gives roughly 200% heal rather than the old 150% (or something like it), unless you are a discipline priest. If you are (and I think you might be), you get a Divine Aegis proc equal to the amount healed. Divine Aegis is affected by mastery, which you should have a lot of and therefor they are great. You want many Divine Aegis.

Crit still suffers from the major drawback of its unreliability however, meaning that even if you have loads of crit there will be occasions where you don't crit. Theoretically you could do a whole fight without crits. It won't happen, I know, but it points at a flaw of the stat I simply don't like about it. Haste is now considered weaker, but at least it delivers. When I have one point of haste, that haste will give me haste to all my casts (with few exceptions), whereas a point of crit might only benefit me occasionally. And maybe not even when I actually want it to. Crit is dealing with probabilities, and I've always wanted to cut uncertainties out from the equation.

There is obviously a point where crit is so useful that the stat on average outweighs its own uncertainty, in the end this is something you have to notice for yourself depending on your playstyle.

TLDR!
So to conlude, here is my personal suggestion for how you should prioritize your stats. You might not agree, your friend might not agree, some other blogger somewhere might not agree - this is my personal preference, it works very well for my playstyle and I couldn't recommend you more to test different things yourself if you have the time and interest;

1. Spirit (until satisfied with combat mana regen)
2. Intellect
3. Mastery
4. Haste
5. Crit (crit being the joker here, you either love it or hate it).

And what should I gem/reforge/enchant to?
The obvious answer is that you should reforge/gem to whatever boosts the stat you need. Below are some suggestions, there is also the Perfect cut of the green quality equivalent. Here is a good list too.

Red - Brilliant Primordial Ruby (320 int)
Blue - Sparkling River's Heart (320 spirit)
Yellow - Quick Sun's Radiance (320 haste) or Fractured Sun's Radiance (320 mastery) or Smooth Sun's Radiance (320 crit)
Purple - Purified Imperial Amethyst (80 int + 160 spirit)
Orange - Reckless Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 haste) or Artful Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 mastery) or Potent Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 crit)
Green - Energized Wild Jade (160 haste + 160 spirit) or Zen Wild Jade (160 spirit + 160 mastery) or Misty Wild Jade (160 crit + 160 spirit)
Meta - Revitalizing Primal Diamond (432 spirit and +3% crit effect) or Burning Primal Diamond (216 int and +3% crit effect).

For enchants I suggest you check out Icy-Veins list, it's good and probably better than anything I could produce.

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 1 - Talent Choices

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:58:00 +0000

Welcome to Zinn's Disc Priest Guide for 5.2!

I won't claim this to be the ultimate guide for all you struggling (or not so struggling) disc priesters out there, and there are plenty of good resources to go to if you want someone elses information. Here are some suggestions;

Icy-Veins - Very good and simple guide.
Elitist Jerks - More of a discussion forum, of varying quality but good information can be found.
Noxxic - Similar to Icy-Veins, concise.
HowToPriest - Another discussion forum about everything priestly. Here is their guide on disc priests.

This will be a more personal style guide, with comments and little discussions around skills, talents and stats, to hopefully give you more of an idea not just what you should spec or what spells to use, but why and how you should think about them. I've always thought that the more in depth understanding you have regarding these things, the better you'll be at adapting to new situations. Also, it's interesting facts if you're more interested in the priest class than just the basics! The most important thing to remember about any healing class is that eventhough timing is essential, few other classes require as much quick thinking and decision making as healing because you're not just dealing with the encounter, but also the actions of your group.

Don't let this deterr you, this is what makes healing so much fun! Discipline priests can seem confusing at a first glance, what with their absorbtion techniques and damaging healing spells (although they have gotten company from Mistweaver Monks in that area lately). Beside the standard questions any healer asks themselves, things like - "Which stat is the best?", "When do I best use my cooldowns and how do they really work?" and "Do I spam aoe heals or do I focus big heals?" to mention a few, discpline priests also have to work with questions like - "Do I use mostly absorbtion heals or regular heals?" and "How much should I use Atonement?". I hope to answer these kind of questions, and most other you might have about discipline priest healing in this current content, which at the moment of writing this is patch 5.2 in Mists of Pandaria. I'll gladly answer any questions you might have also in the comment section. In this first part we'll take a closer look at our Talent Choices.

Talent Choices

The proper term should probably be Skill Choices since Blizzard made away with talents as we know them and replaced them with the form of skills that we have now. But I suppose people would get that confused with the more traditional skills, and so we just kept calling them talents. Eventhough I like the new system, I sometimes miss the good old fashioned talents, they just gave a pretty good feeling of progression. The problem with talents however was the talent point inflation that occurred somewhere around the third expansion. The increasing amount of levels forced Blizzard to give us more things to put our points in, and so they had to give us some that weren't overly necessary. I can still remember when discipline had Wand Specialization in the first tier of their tree, which increased wand damage with 5%. Holy had skills that increased the healing by Greater Heal by 5% and stuff like that. In the end we had many talents that didn't make much of a difference, especially considering it cost 5 levels to spend in (and later on 10 levels when they changed it so that you got a tp every other level). Blizzard tried a couple of different systems but in the end decided they'd just give us a few, important skills to pick from and get rid of all the filler points. I use the word "important" because the choices we make now actually make more of a difference, depending on fight and whether you're a pvper or pver. So enough of the history lesson, and let's look at the choices that are interesting from a disc pve healing perspective.

Classic tree. No one played disc in Classic though.

Level 15
Nothing in this tier actually matters much for dungeon or raid healing, so here you can basically choose whatever you like or whichever you think might work best for you solo-needs. Personally I've gone with Void Tendrils, it's kind of fun and handy while I do quests or stuff like that.

Level 30
Here we get our first skills that might actually make a difference. Most people choose between Body & Soul and Angelic Feather, whereas Phantasm is more of a pvp skill simply because there are like no movement impairing effects of significance in dungeons or raids. So which should we go for, B&S or AF?

The big difference between these two is that B&S gives you more control over when, how and who will get the speed boost - this can then either be something you want or not depending on the encounter. More control also means this is something you need to keep more track off, also timing B&S hinges on you not having used a shield just prior since then the Weakened Soul debuff will prevent you from casting it again. If you know someone else in the raid needs a speed buff and you don't want to spend brain power into keeping track of when and perfectly timing a shield, it is way easier to place a feather in the right place instead. Also, a fellow player might not be ready for a sudden speed boost through B&S, while they'll know they're getting one with AF. With AF you give more of the speed boost control over to someone else, in the end you have to decide which one works better for you. In short - B&S responds quicker to situations if you're fast, AF is easier used by people around you (and requires less of your attention overall).

Burning Crusade, where playing discipline was made viable. I first really tried it out in Zul'Aman, and loved it.

level 45
At this level we get a choice of three good skills that all intend to save your mana in different ways. Which you decide to choose will largely depend on the encounter you're at. For dungeons and unless your mana regen sucks ass, Mindbender is probably the simplest because of it's set and forget nature. For raiding, your choice here might require a bit more thinking.

A lot of maths has been done around which of these three skills will provide the most overall mana, but it's important to remember that it really depends. From Darkness Comes Light (FDCL) requires you to be doing point healing, Mindbender requires you to have a suitable target for your little worm to hit on and PW:Solace requires you to be able to hit something (I will continue to call it that, although now the talent is actually Solace & Insanity. The actuall skill is still PW:Solace though). Now, they've changed PW:Solace from how it originally worked - before one of the big problems with Solace used to be the fact that you had to basically pause your healing to dish out some casts to regain mana. This meant the usefulness of Solace depended heavily on how much the encounter allowed you to do this, varying from almost nothing to quite a lot of the time. Because of this I often swapped between Solace and Mindbender (I will explain shortly why I never really use FDCL).

Now that Solace has been changed however, the requirement to pause your healing and spam out some dps has basically vanished. Now that Solace has a cd and a healing component it is a lot more comparable to the Mindbender, which also has a cd - both require a target and will when used every cd return a set amount of mana, so which will give more? You can read some maths on it here and here.

These are some things to consider;

Mindbender replaces Shadowfiend, which means if you go for Solace you can have both Solace and the Shadowfiend.
Mindbender and Shadowfiend are often preferrably used in conjunction with Hymn of Hope.
Solace also procs (ie gives a stack) of Evangelism.
Solace heals, whereas Mindbender allows you to heal as normal when used.
Mindbender is affected by haste whereas Solace with the glyph (which you will want if you have this skill), is not.

Simply, Solace is best if you're using Atonement healing and Mindbender is best if you're not. But even if you don't like Atonement healing (I don't use it overly much so far in the expansion) I still recommend always keeping a stack of Evangelism ready to boost your healing with Archangel when needed, and for this Solace will come in handy. A problem I often have with Mindbender is also that I don't have a target for it when I need it, that also will stick around long enough for my Mindbender to get full use of its duration. Solace is just easier to time well, assuming you can spare the gcd. Like I said, most of the time you will want to use a gcd every now and then to keep up an Evangelism stack anyway (which usually is Holy Fire that Solace replaces) meaning you're basically enhancing your regular rotation.

So why not FCDL? I've never been a fan of FDCL, admittedly it is far from awful but it's just nothing like how it worked in Wrath. Back then, if I remember correctly, it was called Surge of Light. The concept was similar, with crit heals having a chance of giving a free, instant Flash Heal, but the proc rate was very much higher - something around 30-50% - and it procced off of any heal. It had some nice bugs like proccing off other priests crits and having the free heal crit occasionally, proccing another free heal. Yeah, it might sound op, and it probably was, but you can see why I loved it so. I can understand the changes they made to the skill, especially since they made Flash Heal so much stronger than it was in Wrath (where it was basically what Heal is now). The problem I have with it now is that it's just too unreliable to feel comfortable in regular healing, not to mention the factor of it requiring me to use spells that are not in heavy use in normal raid healing. Let me put it this way, it's a proc and it's not procced from our most commonly used skills, and it should be pretty clear. The other two choices simply offer more control and in the end probably a lot more mana return.

Straight off, I'd recommend going with Solace. I can see two reasons to want to go with Mindbender instead; 1 - You don't have a problem with your mana regen and are lazy (ie, don't want to use your Atonement) or 2 - the fight just doesn't allow you to use that many gcds on Solace because you need to spam Prayer of Healing the entire fight (a scenario that will rarely happen, so really there is only one reason).

Wotlk talents. These are getting long now. Disc was really good in later Wrath.

Level 60
At this level you'll get to choose your defense talent, it's basically a choice between Desperate Prayer and Angelic Bulwark since Spectral Guise just isn't as cool (or useful) as it sounds. When I first read the description I hoped it would work by shifting me out of existence, thus renderring me impervious to damage for the duration. No, that's not how it works, and if I hadn't been stupid about it it's pretty obvious, since it says that taking damage will actually break the effect (after 3 hits). Even then I thought "direct attacks" still might mean it would work against aoe, but before I make this rant more boring than it already is, you can safely ignore this skill unless you're a pvper. If you're reading this guide that's not what you want to know about anyway.

So on to the interesting ones - Desperate Prayer or Angelic Bulwark? As with the Body & Soul vs Angelic Feather talents, one is leaning more towards personal responsibility, and thus flexibility (Desperate Prayer) whereas the other works automagically and therefor doesn't require you to divert brain power when you probably have the least of it to divert anyway (Angelic Bulwark).

Desperate Prayer is a strong talent and allows you to choose for yourself when you really need it. This obviously means its effectiviness highly relies on your capabilities to use it properly.

Personally, I am a big fan of Angelic Bulwark. It has the drawback of possibly proccing when you don't really need it and then not be off cd when you actually do. But instead it has the benefit of actually saving you from certain death automatically. Desperate Prayer is an after the fact heal, like any other heal, and if you're playing a disc priest (and I dare say you are if you've come this far into this guide) you should know how powerful and overall more useful absorbs are over heals. Angelic Bulwark has saved me from insta-death and even once saved what could possibly otherwise have turned into a complete raid wipe. I even have video proof. It's slightly less flexible, but on the other hand more reliable - at least I think so. So generally I would recommend Angelic Bulwark, but of course there are fights where having the control yourself with Desperate Prayer is more handy. I just haven't noticed it.

Level 75
This is your output level, and the choice here can be a bit more tricky than in the previous levels. All the skills in this talent tier are good, so let's take a closer look at each one of them.

Twist of Fate - This one works in a pretty obvious way, and is a strong skill if you know that you're going to fight something that will have your raid (or more rarely your dungeon group) down below 20% health for long or many portions of the encounter. If you're doing progression raiding or you simply all have shitty gear, ToF will end up being a nice output boost. Obviously this relies heavily on said factor, that you'll be healing a lot of people below 20% of health. This is slightly similar to how shaman "Deep Healing" mastery works, and if you've heard the amount of whining coming from them regarding that you'd think that it's a shitty thing to aim for. The difference is obviously that they don't have a choice, leaving a big portion of their healing reliant on something they are actively trying to avoid (ie having their targets on low health). We, on the other hand, have a choice, and ToF is definitely worth considering for those fights where everyone just seem on the edge of dying all the time. It's also worth noting that damaging an enemy below 20% will also give you the buff (eventhough it clearly says in the tooltip it is easy to forget as a healer). This of course means any low health adds or the last 20% of the boss, making this skill great when used in the right encounters.

Power Infusion - My personal favorite, partly because good old PI and I go way back. To me it's always just felt great knowing I have a special "god mode" button to press for when shit really hits the fan. It has a 2 minute cooldown, which really isn't much and it also lowers you mana usage by 20% which is exactly what you want when you start throwing out extra amounts of healing. For most fights Power Infusion is a safe card to have up your sleeve, with the only real drawback being the same as with Desperate Prayer - it's usefulness is first and foremost based on how skillful you are at using it. Power Infusion puts your output control into your own hands, and with output control is such an important thing to have. As long as you know how and when to time it, and consider the combination of cds you can use (Archangel, Spirit Shell and Power Infusion for the really big blows for example) Power Infusion is a very powerful tool indeed.

Divine Insight - I've never really considered DI overly useful for discipline, let me explain why: DI is procced off of Penance, which has a 12 sec cd but most of the time is used off cooldown (except when there is heavy aoe damage, this matters) and procs being able to cast another Shield on a target that already has Weakened Soul on it. Weakened Soul has a 15 sec cd, where you might be wanting to throw another Shield on your target. When does this happen? Blizzard have long wanted holy to be the aoe healers while discipline where the strong single target healers. In the end, discipline where ever only rarely better at single target healing than for instance Paladins or even Shamans and were mostly put on aoe healing duty because they, just like holy priests, had the pretty awesome Prayer of Healing.

Now, DI will make your disc priest a better single target healer than without it, but the single target healing is still mostly handled better by other healing classes and is in most raid fights I've fought rarely the big problem to deal with when healing. Disc priests as aoe healers is further established since Blizzard gave us the all-might Spirit Shell, a skill so over used that Blizzard has recently felt the need to nerf it. Even with the nerf, Spirit Shell is probably among the strongest aoe healing tools there are in the game at the moment, when used properly. This simply boils down to disc priests very rarely being put on single target healing duty. What you want to have out of this tier is a skill that further boosts your aoe healing, because that is what you are most likely going to do.

TLDR on Divine Insight - Unless you know you're going to be put mainly on tank healing duty, this skill is not as useful to you as the other two ones will be.

Overhaul of the talent point system reduced the size of the trees again.

Level 90
And finally, the last tier of talents. Which one of these you want largely depends on which encounter you're facing and how big a group you're healing.

Cascade - This is the choice of many, if not most, discipline priests (though I base this off of discussions, not statistics). I used Halo briefly, but since I swapped back to 10 man raiding Cascade has turned out to be a lot more useful. What you have to consider is the mechanic of the skills. None of the skills in this tier are "smart" heals like Prayer of Mending, and either one you choose will often end up being mostly overheal. Cascade is medium expensive mana wise and fairly easy to use. It doesn't require overly much thinking, just to remember that the more spread people are the more it's going to heal (as long as people are within range obviously). It is the simplest when it comes to positioning and use, to get the most out of it, and this is probably the main reason it seems to be the most popular choice.

Divine Star - Divine Star is somewhat similar to the paladin heal Light of Dawn, in that it requires people to stand in a line in front of you to be able to get much use of it. If you choose to use this skill you will chime in with the paladins about making sure the raid stacks properly, and it also means this skill is pretty useless whenever they're not. Cascade and Halo have the opposite problem, with being pretty useless when the raid is stacked. Divine Star is the cheapest of the three skills in the tier, and in fights where the raid stacks a lot it might be worth considering. In most raid encounter however, being spread out is more often the name of the game than anything else. Also remember that for stacked groups (or groups that stand somewhat close to eachother) we priests already have a tool - Prayer of Healing - and complementing that might be more interesting than adding to it.

Halo - Halo has one massive drawback, as I realized when using it in my 25 man raid. When unleashing it on a 25 man raid group it has tremendous healing power, if you're positioned in the right place. This might seem like a small if, but it's a pretty big if. The last thing you want to think about when your raid needs big aoe healing is whether you're standing in the exactly right place to use your skill. Both Divine Star and Cascade can also be used as hostile attacks, but both of them are very simple to avoid using so that you accidentally attack a mob you don't want to. Halo not so much. In fact, one of the biggest risks when using this skill is that you will also accidentally break some cc or pull some extra pack standing close by. This means that whenever you want to use it you might first have to re-position yourself to make sure you're not going to hit any mob. I am sure most of you have done runs where an oblivious shadow priest (it's mostly them who end up speccing Halo) has pulled extra packs, this is a risk you run as a healer as well when using this skill. It also makes Halo really hard to use at all in certain fights.

Halo is the most expensive skill out of the three, making it too expensive really to want to use in anything less than a 25 man group. The net average healing per mana just isn't worth it when compared especially to Cascade, or so my experience says anyway.

And now, we have this.

Conclusion - TLDR
So if you simply want a simple answer to the question: What the heck should I spec then? Here is my answer;

15 - Void Tendrils
30 - Body & Soul
45 - PW: Solace
60 - Angelic Bulwark
75 - Power Infusion
90 - Cascade

Angelic Feather for fights where you want to give boost control to raid members.
Mindbender for when you're lazy or don't use Atonement at all.
Desperate Prayer for more self healing control.
ToF for fights where you dont' feel like timing Power Infusions or now you'll have a lot of ToF uptime.

Personally, I pretty much run with the same setup for any raid fight I do, and it has worked well for me. Once you're comfortable with your healing style you can tinker around yourself depending on the fight, but the above suggestion is a pretty solid one for most fights you can encounter.

Big Project Underway

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:17:00 +0000

The other day a friend asked me if I was still doing priest healing guides, in this particular case he specifically asked for a discipline one since he was playing one but considered himself "noob" at it. He wanted some easy hints and tips on what to think about as a discipline healer and I was honored that he chose me as the target for his questions. But at first I was taken aback. How to priest heal? I can't even remember the last time I did a proper guide on that. The Priest Guide section on my blog hasn't been updated since mid-Cataclysm (shame on me). The only thing I could offer him at the time was some quick tips off the top of my head, but it planted an idea in my brain. Maybe it's time for me to make another priest healing guide?

When I first sat down to write this post there were some things I needed to clear out for myself before I could get anywhere. First of all, this had to be a discipline healing guide, because I haven't properly played holy since somewhere in early Cata I think (it is true that I have done some holy healing since then, but it hasn't been my main spec for ages). And most importantly - how much could I actually claim to know about disc priest healing anymore? On the one hand I have mained a priest healer since early BC, without any longer breaks to speak of. I don't think I'd blow my own horn too much if I claim to at least have very long experience in priest healing, the changes it's gone through and that I might even by now have a certain feel for the class, sort of making me a Dr House of Priest Healing (ahem). I might use some unconventional methods at times, but they always lead to succesful results in the end.

On the other hand, eventhough the healing class might be the least affected by it, it is also true that WoW is a game unforgiving when it comes to stat weights and "best ways" to gear. In all honesty it doesn't leave very much room for personal preferences - in the end, whether you like it or not, the game promotes a certain way of playing based on simple (well, maybe not so simple) numbers. Numbers that I can not claim to have full knowledge of at the moment, that I am raiding once every two weeks and especially now that 5.2 is out and things have changed yet again. Where does that leave me?

Because of my interest in priest healing, I do keep track of things every now and then. Nothing like in my golden days, of course, where I would scour blogs and forums and do my own test runs with different stats, talents and skills to see what seemed to work best. I have a rough idea as to what seems to be the way to go nowadays, and it has worked pretty well for my raiding needs. Other than that I can only look at my performance. Although I'm not in a server first progression guild anymore, my guild is far from bad when it comes to raiding (25th of March they had done 5 bosses in ToT). And when I compare myself with the other healers in the guild, I consider myself among the best, especially taking into account my lack of experience of the encounters, my gear mostly being several levels lower and my overall lack of practice with priest healing at the moment. Fortunately my year long experience of priest healing has made most moves hard wired into my brain and I can focus on trying to being as efficient as possible with my skills for certain situations in the encounter rather than struggling with the elementary stuff. This is also where the biggest difference is noticed, it is when I am not ready to use a cooldown properly because I don't know the encounter inside out that I drop behind on the meters, never anything else.

In essence, if I wrote a guide now it might not be old Elitist Jerks material or agreed upon by every priest out there. It should probably be seen as thoughts from a priest veteran, someone who has been around long enough to say "screw stat weights" and give a general idea on how priest healing works, now and probably forever. I'll be like the old, looney lady in the corner with wisdoms of ypnder year, things that modern players might shrug of as crazy talk but that hold truth to them if understood correctly. It won't be mumbo jumbo, it'd be words from someone who knows that eventhough there might be a "best" and "worst", when it comes to healing so much comes down to feeling that it is ok to go your own path, at least somewhat. I've played a priest pretty much since the start, although like I mentioned I started raiding with it early BC, and I can tell you - they haven't changed overly much. I can still recognize myself in the priest, in how the heals work and the way I use them. We get new toys - the Barrier, Spirit Shell, Chakra - we argue which stat is the best (mastery, haste, intellect, spirit, spell power and so on) but the essence is still the same. In this I think Blizzard have really succeeded in keeping priests all about being priests (if that makes any sense) and I can only think that is why I have stuck with them too long. What I loved about priest healing five years ago, I still love about priest healing. And I do love writing guides, so let's get down to business, once again.

A Game of Guilds (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 09:56:00 +0000

Welcome to my second part of this mini-series of my history of guilds in WoW. This part will offer a bit of the best and a bit of the worst of my guild experiences in WoW. You can read my first post here. Let's get right to it.

Mayhem
Mayhem was going to be my home for more than three years to come, and is still the guild I have the most and the best memories from. It started with my ex joining them because he was approached by someone in the guild who needed raiders who were also swedish, since Mayhem was an all swede guild. It turned out they needed a healer for their raid group for Karazhan and my ex asked me if I was interested. I was maining my warlock then because I was sick and tired of healing from Classic and just wanted to do some dps. For some reason or other I still decided to give it a shot and that is how the story of Zinn as a raider was born. The new 10 man system suited me perfectly and Mayhem was just a much better guild regarding raiding environment than any other guild I had been in. I realized I loved healing the way it had become in BC and stuck with it, all the way until now (and still love it, 5 years later).

Mayhem was filled with loads of great people of which most became close friends, especially since I ended up knowing most of them for years. I went to meet them in Stockholm and we spent endless nights raiding and instancing together. We did quite well in Karazhan (which I still consider one of my favorite raids) and I loved every single fight in there. We did Zul'aman, which was a really difficult raid, but fun. Malacrass is still top three on my list over most difficult raid bosses. Mayhem was far from a pro guild, but definitely not bad either. We mostly did 10 man raids, but occasionally had enough people for 25 man, allowing us to try out Gruul's Lair and SSC. The Mayhem raiding was a blast up until late Wotlk, when it became too much of a difference between the people who wanted to progress and the people who just want to raid every now and then for fun. Along the way we had lost a few really good players (the guild leader among them, although he was replaced by another really good guy) who just lost their interest in their game. Some had kids and had to cut down on their play time for those or other irl-reasons.

We were a few who still wanted to give it our all in the raids and who, especially, still had the time and energy to do so. We started clashing with the group of people to whom raiding just wasn't very important anymore, but we were a very good and solid raid group for years before this happened, and you probably won't see that often anymore. I spent my best and most fond times in WoW when I was with Mayhem and eventhough we eventually grew apart I still really love them and the people in it. I have so many proud moments in memory thinking of what we achieved. Finally downing Prince Malchezaar, Leotheras, Sarth 3d and Professor Putricide. We finished with a bang, finally managing to bring down Lich King on 10 man in one of the last really good raid groups that we managed to get together. Thank you for all those great years you Mayhemmers.

They eventually swapped server, long after I had left them and I think some of them are still playing, but I have very little contact with them nowadays.

Dignitas
When it eventually became clear that the people in the raid group in Mayhem wasn't pulling in the same direction anylonger, some started to look in different directions. When I got an invite to join the 25 man raid guild Dignitas, which by then was a pretty good and well thought of raid guild on the server, I had to take one of the hardest decisions of my life - leaving Mayhem that had been my home for several years and the people in it, basically choosing between friends or the game. I chose the game, mostly because I naïvely hoped that I could also keep my friends in the process by keeping alts in Mayhem. That didn't really work though, since playing together with your mains is a massive part of the glue that keep people together, as it turned out. It's not a decision I regret, but it is true that things started spiraling downwards from here. Maybe in a way it had already begun when we started losing raid people in Mayhem, triggering my move in the first place.

When I first joined Dignitas I remember the feeling of insecurity over my own capabilities, for the first time. Because I had been with Mayhem for so long, my place and role in the raid group had been firmly established for ages, and no matter what I was considered a veteran. When I first joined them I was a scrub and didn't know what I was doing, but neither did anyone else. I was allowed to make my mistakes and learn from them without anyone glaring disapprovingly over my shoulder. I can't imagine a better way of learning things, if you have people around you who have the time and patience. Suddenly I was thrown into a guild which had better progress than us and was a 25 man guild, they had (and probably still do) a much higher status than 10 man guilds in Wotlk. Going from considering myself pretty pro, I was ready to be humbled by the healers in this new guild. This never happened, allowing me to view myself for the first time as a really good player. I had always considered myself a good player within the Mayhem setting, but Mayhem was a small guild with modest achievements. Now I knew I could actually tag along with the "big kids". Unfortunately this led to a few problems. My decision to leave Mayhem had not been a simple one and I was hoping I had done the right choice. When it turned out Dignitas, announcing themselves as a hardcore progress minded raid guild, allowed people to raid without headphones because "they were uncomfortable with talking" I was flabbergasted. Don't get me wrong, I don't care if people use or don't use headphones. But if you don't, you can't claim to be a hardcore raid group aiming to get realm firsts, because heroic modes required (and still do) the use of headphones and microphones. I hadn't minded that raiding environment for more than three years, but I had left it for a reason and I felt like Dignitas had simply lured me in with false advertising.

Nonetheless I still had many months of good raiding with Dignitas, and shit didn't really hit the fan until a couple of raiders, who were also annoyed with the lack of progress minded raiding, decided to leave and start their own guild, called Astralis. Dignitas lost a handful of their very best raiders in a night, a blow that would strike the guild leader, a priest named Relgen, particularly hard. He had already irl issues and felt like the joy of guild leading had gone completely. He decided to quit WoW, and unfortunately left the guild in the hands of a megalomaniac.

I've already written many posts about my battles with the new guild leader, needless to say we didn't agree on very many things. If you're interested in some details, you can read about them here and here to mention a few. Eventhough I was invited to the new guild Astralis, which was run by my then boyfriend and a couple of irl friends, I decided to stay with Dignitas out of loyalty. Dignitas new guild leader had a different view however, accusing me of spying on them for Astralis. It might sound ridiculous, but it is true. At the time I had never heard anything so silly, but the guild leader was adamant. He eventually replaced me with other, way less skilled (if I may say so myself) healers and when I still refused to leave he simply kicked me.

Astralis
I joined Astralis in the summer of 2011. Firelands had been out for a couple of months, and Astralis had been getting most of the realm firsts, making them the best guild on the server at the time. Since I hadn't been allowed to raid much in Dignitas I was well out of practice and was immediately thrown into heroic modes in Firelands where I barely had experience of the normal modes. Obviously my performance was way behind the other raid members who had been doing the fights for months already. The insecurity I had been ready for when joining Dignitas instead hit me full on when joining Astralis, and this at a point when I already felt like I had to constantly excuse and explain myself. This, coupled with all the issues I had had within Dignitas had made me lose a lot of the fun and enjoyment I had had with WoW and raiding. I had been in arguments in Mayhem as well, but this was the first time I was caught up in proper, and especially completely pointless, guild drama. I didn't see a good way to get back into raiding, since Firelands mostly required two-man healing and me, with my lack of experience of the fights, was never in the top with the other two healers to be chosen - further increasing my experience gap with them.

I still had some good times with Astralis, albeit brief. Astralis enjoyed some 9 months as the kings on the server before another guild managed to recruit a bunch of really good players and most importantly increased their raiding days to 5 over our 3, giving us some really hard competition (I say us, although I was rarely in the realm first kills myself). When the winter holidays came and people went on vacation, they still continued raiding, and so beating us to many of the realm first kills in the new instance Dragon Soul. Although the reason for them beating us had less to do with skill and more to do with hard work and time, this killed Astralis. People left and I was left to go to a new guild again. At this point I was very close to quitting WoW all together. But I didn't.

Casually Addicted
Instead, I did something I had never done before. I advertised myself, in the hopes of finding myself a new, decent raiding guild. Hopefully one without too much drama, and some consistency. I got a fair amount of interesting suggestions on my forum post and decided to go with a guild called Casually Addicted. This meant having to change server and race, but the server I was on - The Venture Co. - was already bleeding out people. All the bigger guilds had left at this point (also Mayhem and Dignitas had moved) and most people I had been playing with were no longer there. But it still meant leaving the server I had spent more than five years playing on. It meant leaving all my alts (9 of them, one of each class) and all their professions behind. It pretty much meant starting all over, with just my Zinn.

I did it, knowing that it was either that or quitting WoW, and I wasn't ready to do that just yet. My first impression with CA was very good. The people were nice and fun, they received me in a great way and I actually felt at home. I joined them in January, managed to get a couple of months of really fun raiding out of them before the guild died, for reasons I don't know. All of a sudden some people had left, or at least the raiding stopped. I had decided to not be too involved in the guild politics at this point so I didn't have much of a clue as to what was going on. But there I was without a raid group again. I knew I didn't have the energy to advertise myself again, and by this point I didn't even have much to offer. My work schedule required me to work evening shifts, making my attendance dodgy at best. I couldn't promise my new guild much of anything, and so I realized I wouldn't be very interesting on the guild market.

A couple of people from CA invited me to join their new guild (or old guild, don't really know how that was, Defiance, and after a while I accepted (again I had trouble leaving the guild I was in, I always make sure I have exhausted every option in the guild before I go).

Defiance
And that takes us to the guild I am in today. Because of my irl demands on me I was clear with the leaders of Defiance from the start - I couldn't promise I'd attend to many raids, but I'd sign for as many as possible. In return I only asked for the possibility to raid every now and then. They were ok with the idea, since they didn't really have room for me in the raid anyway (it was a 25 man initially, but eventually turned into a 10 man because of a loss of players, yet again) I was put as back-up raider, and it has worked well for me so far. I sign once every ten days or so, and most of the time I am allowed to join. It doesn't give me much raiding or phat loots, but it's exactly what I want - just some raiding every now and then, reminiscing the days when it was one of the most important things in my life, the hours I spent on it and the people I met doing it.

A Game of Guilds

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:47:00 +0000

I've realized lately that I'm a really sociable gamer. Well, I always considered myself as an originally sociable gamer, becoming the grumpy loner-nerd-gamer as I grew older, but thought that I had changed. Turns out, I have not. When I first started gaming I barely even looked at games that weren't outspoken multi-player games. Although I've been playing a bit of everything, the ones I enjoyed the most and put the most time into were games like Mario Kart, Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, HoMM 3 and the like. Even most single player games I preferred playing with friends, taking turns (exception - Settlers 2). Games like Yoshi's Story or Super Mario World I rarely played on my own. I even played through a game like Final Fantasy VII with the company of a patient friend who, luckily for me, had nothing against simply watching me play. I also really love watching other people play, and this is how I've spent many fun gaming nights with the bf, cuddled up next to him playing Resident Evil together, where he actually does most of the controlling (and me being the wise backseat driver).

Forever alone

To me, WoW turned out to be something of the ultimate multi-player experience. Eventhough few memories can beat the one of me and 6 friends screaming at each other while playing Mario Kart (we took turns) in my parents living room on our 16 inch TV, WoW offered a whole new multi-player experience to me, allowing me to meet new and really great people from all over the world (well at least all over Europe). And I've spent so much time in WoW interacting with other people, I mean how can you not? Even when I've been logged on to a completely odd server just playing some little alt, I often had loads of friends logged whom I could talk to, I would talk to people in pugs and I would randomly group up with strangers for the harder quests.

I thought that now that my interest in single-player games had increased, maybe my interest in playing with other people had diminished. I was wrong. Eventhough I might be playing Kotor2 or Divine Divinity, I don't enjoy doing it when I'm just sitting home by myself. I want someone else to be there, even if they're not even taking part in the game. I want to be able to reflect over and share what is going on in my gaming, otherwise the experience feels stumped. I want to be able to point out interesting situations and funny things and have someone else take part in it, even if it's just a little or just with a smile and a nod.

Realizing this made me take yet another look back at my gaming habits in WoW. It's true that my gaming in WoW has gone from more than 5 hours a day to less than 5 hours a week, in average. I already knew that the sociable part, the fact that all of my irl friends and most of my in-game ones as well, had quit playing had a big part in it. But maybe I didn't realize just how big that part was.

It made me reminisce past acquaintances, looking back at all the people I have known, briefly or over the course of years and that are now mostly out of my life - leaving as quickly as they entered for the most part. And I felt like I wanted to remember all of them and all the things we accomplished together, always. This is something I do every now and then and even something I've written about before. This is my way of remembering them. They were an important part of my life at one point, and I shared loads of fun and loads of grief with these people. So here it is, my history of guilds and some of the most memorable people in it (although I am bound to forget one or two).

The Void
When I first started playing the game, even then as a little priest (although not the same priest as Zinn), I spent most of my time stumbling around, be awed by everything around me and having not the faintest clue as to what to do or what was going on. Somehow I managed to get recruited by what I remember to be my first guild - The Void. I am not 100% sure about the name, but it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the guild, which was relatively small, was run by an Englishman named Jacques and he really took me under his wing. He escorted me from Tirisfal Glades to Orgrimmar and I still remember the feeling of walking through those massive gates and into the city and just not being able to think anything at all because it was all so awesome. The server I had chosen to play on turned out to be pretty unstable (this was back in the day when you still could en up in really long log in queues, and this server really suffered from it) and him and me decided to swap servers. We chose the more stable Stormreaver, which my brother also happened to play on. We also swapped from horde to alliance and he helped me get from Darnassus to Stormwind with a summon. I swear I would've spent hours, if not days, randomly running around trying to find my way without his help and he became a really good friend of mine. Unfortunately he was in the army and was shipped out before long and eventually our contact got severed. I've tried finding him since, without success, and he is still one of the friends I regret losing the most in WoW.

Swedish Kings
With my english friend gone from the game I decided to move on to other guilds. I probably tried many before I ended up in a relatively big guild called Swedish Kings, this is where I first met what would turn out to be my now ex boyfriend. I don't remember much of the guild, but I do remember the first conversation me and my ex had in the guild chat with me running around in Duskwood, talking about world domination. We eventually met up and were together for 6 years before we split up, and some 6 very good years those were.

Lore
Me and the ex also formed numerous of our own guilds, one that I remember the best was Lore. As far as I recall it was my first shot at being a guild leader, and I remember how stressful and personal I took dealing with guild matters. Eventhough the guild was really small, I was almost personally offended whenever one of the members decided to leave for something else and I tried very hard to keep everyone happy with guild events and what not. One of the most memorably members we had was a danish girl whom I approached because her character had the same name as me, which also was her name. She turned out to be quite special, saying the most profound things in guild chat. She also became completely nerd ragey when I once questioned the danish counting system (like the french they don't say fifty, sixty, seventy, basically five-ten, six-ten and so on like the rest of the world, but say half-three-twenty (50), three-twenty (60), half-four-twenty (70) in what for me at least is a very confusing system. We also had a couple of other guilds that usually ended up being a sort of hub for our own alts and friends characters while they didn't play much or just weren't in any "proper" guild.

Suicidal Spoons
This little guild would turn out to have massive consequences in my personal life long after I had joined and left it and even swapped server once more. Me and the ex joined the guild mostly because of the witty (or so we thought at least) name. The guild was run by a young, swedish kid whom also had a couple of his irl-friends in the guilds. I quite liked the guild leader, a warlock named Smedius, but didn't care much for the rest. Way later, when we both (me and the ex) had swapped many guilds and server, we managed to stumble across Smedius again (I instantly recognized his name) and invited him to join our then guild Mayhem (which I will mention later). With him he brought one of his irl friends and that friends girlfriend. This girl, who also was Smedius ex-gf, would later end up in a relationship with an irl friend of mine (who was also in Mayhem) and then eventually also with my own bf. It was almost like an irl soap opera in the end. It's funny how things turn out.

Aventian Exiles
I don't remember much about Aventian Exiles except it was run by a british guy with the character name Gravy, that name kind of stuck with me. This was back when twinking started to get really big, and his rogue twink was called Mockery. Considering how extremely annoying level 19 rogues were then I always thought that was a very suitable name. I remember Gravy as a funny guy, and Aventian Exiles as a nice guild. It was already a very big guild, this was before spam-inviting people for no good reason was implemented into the game (well, people still that, but a lot less than it is done now). Although AE already numbered in the hundreds, for some reason they decided to merge with one or two other guilds, forming Band of Exiles.

Band of Exiles
The merge turned these three guilds (I think it was three) into a mega-guild. Really big guilds are common nowadays, but they weren't back then. In fact Blizzard hadn't even thought of the possibility of a guild containing more than 500 members, meaning that everyone would not show up on the roster depending on who was logged on, because the roster only showed 500 people. Band of Exiles had somewhere around 700-800 members at its peak (obviously far from everyone were active and many were alts). If I remember correctly we used to organize huge treasure hunts for members, were usually loads of people showed up. Even if just a tenth of the guild came, it was still 70 people! I was quite fond of Band of Exiles and only swapped because I became interested in raiding in early BC. Yes, all of the above guilds I went through mostly in Classic WoW (and I haven't even counted them all then!).

This was originally going to be one post, but I realized it was way too long, so I cut it in two. Stay tuned for part 2 for the most important guild in my WoW-gaming and some of the more dramatic guilds I've been in! Now tell me; what guild experiences do you remember especially well?

Let's Go Back In Time And Play...

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:29:00 +0000

Maybe, just this once at least, this blog could be about something else than me and my thoughts. It's probably true that it takes a certain kind of people to write blogs, people who, at least somewhere deep inside, deem their own ramblings interesting enough to share with the rest of the world. Personally I don't really care whether other people like what I write, I am egocentric enough to enjoy it just for my own sake. Don't get me wrong! Having people reading and commenting on things I write is a great feeling and definitely adds a lot to the fun of doing this. But I did go almost a year of writing this blog with near to no feedback in the beginning. I kept at it for the fun of the writing itself. But look at me, I am talking about myself again. When this post was supposed to be about someone else.

A friend of mine, one of my best and oldest friends messaged me the other day telling me had started filming himself playing old games with his own comments. He asked me to check it out and tell him what I thought about it. This guy is the closest I've come to a "real" gamer in my vicinity. And by "real" I mean he plays basically any game and has spent so many hours at it it's ridiculous. What I especially like about him is that he seems almost incapable of disliking a game. He seems to always be able to see the fun in any game he plays, making it more fun for anyone who watches as well. This can be devious of course, just because he says a game is awesome doesn't mean anyone else will agree.

This is also the guy who really got me into gaming and showed me that there were other types of games than just Mario Kart and Mario Party out there. Some of my fondest memories are us sitting at his place, playing through some game all night with a soda and grilled sandwhich to snack on. Watching his play-throughs of Castlevania 1-3 and Zelda (so far, I think he'll add more) really were a nostalgic moment for me. It took me back to us playing together and I watched them through with a smile (yeah, this post is still mostly about me).

These are amateurish videos, in the first ones you'll have trouble hearing him speak because the in game music is too loud. In some other parts the editing is wonky. His english is hilarious. It is clear he is learning as he goes. But there is so much heart in these that you can't help but liking them and I really had fun watching them. I am obviously biased since they're made by one of my best friends that I get to see all too seldom nowadays because we live really far apart. But if you have any interest in "Let's Play" videos I really think you should give these a looksie. I especially enjoyed the play-through of Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, that's a recommendation (he even makes the game look kind of fun!). I hope you'll at least have some fun with these videos, made by someone with a genuine interest in old-school gaming (and any other kind). Because I am definitely not ashamed of plugging them, so there you have it - Let's Go Back In Time And Play.

Games Vs Games - A hipster among sheep

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:35:00 +0000

I usually keep some sort of game magazine subscription going to keep up to date with what's new and cool in the gaming world and also get some ideas for which games to invest time and money into next. As I have become more and more interested in computer games and less in the newer consoles (a price issue really, I have a computer and can not afford new consoles) I've decided to switch from a console gaming magazine to a PC one.

Regardless of TV or computer games, I've noticed a trending theme in these magazines. Inreasingly more and more articles are written about how games can transcend their lowly state as mere games and become more than simply entertaining, because we all know having fun is for stupid people anyway, right? You may have noticed a hint of sarcasm there but don't worry - there will be plenty more before I am done here.

It's no news or surprise to anyone that the gaming industry, and games generally, have something of an inferiority complex towards other means of entertainment. If you tell people you're really into books or movies they will most likely think you're cool. You're even cooler if you start quoting books or movies, or have deep discussions about them. Not so much for us gamer equivalents, unfortunately. Although more than 30 years have passed since gaming became a thing, we're still reluctant to tell people how much games mean to us and how much time and effort we spend on them. I used to be like this but feel like I have mostly overcome it and can now gladly tell anyone that I can spend hours a day on gaming. That probably 80% of my free time goes into gaming. Fortunately for me, in my line of work this has actually turned out to be something of a benefit. As I work a lot with young people, I have an easy way to open up a conversation with almost anyone, as long as they're into some sort of gaming.

I miss my undead...

I've become something of the "corky gamer girl" at work (because that's what you are if you like games), and I haven't noticed anyone having a problem with it. I do get reactions when I first tell people, like "really? That much time?", but no one really cares what I do in my spare time. There are people around me that I still can't talk about this with of course. My grandpa would have a hissy fit and probably not speak to me for months if I told him how much time I spend with games, although that time is equally matched by his time watching TV. It doesn't matter. To a lot of people today gaming is still seen as a menial form of entertainment. That it is in essence mostly dumbing anyone who spends "too much time with it" (whatever that is). There are many reasons for this and discussing them might be another post all together. That's not what I wanted to talk about today however - instead my point is that even after all this time, we gamers still sometimes feel bad about what we love to do most. Shameful even, we hide and lie about it like we're talking about drugs. In the past I've said things like I was "going to this event with friends" when talking about raiding, because that's what it basically is anyway and I couldn't be arsed with the looks and trying to explain. No one would question a movie night or a book reading club. But oh I forget, they're sociable. Yeah, sarcasm again.

Because of this, gamers have constantly seeked to transform games into something that all the non-gamers can understand and accept. Sure, you can argue that fuck everyone else, if they don't like your gaming then what's the problem? Well, there is a problem if you're living at home and your parents refuse to let you game at all because they just don't understand it, or if like mentioned you constantly have to hide and lie about your gaming because your "irl" friends think you're weird otherwise. I think, trying to increase the status of gaming as a form of entertainment worth to spend a lot of time and money on is a mission worth working for. But there are good and bad ways to go about it.

We're already seeing a form of trying to get games into everyones hands in the form of "simple" games that are Angry Birds and Farmville. Many gamers would argue that these are barely games at all, which of course, they are. There is a danger with these games that goes beyond the scope of this post, but is still necessary to mention - the fact that more and more gaming studios will focus on these small (ie cheaply developed games) that are easy to sell rather than the big, risky projects that we love. This is a real fear going through the gaming community at the moment, but I'm not overly worried myself. As long as there is an interest there will be a product, somehow.

Happy birds are much cuter though

These two things however, gamers low self-esteem and the market being flushed with "mindless mini-games" has led to an interesting development, and this is where this new trending theme comes back into the picture (you remember that thing I mentioned in the beginning?). More and more articles in gaming mamagazines are about games that are not supposed to be games. They are not designed to be fun, they are designed to be... important. To tell a story. To make you think. To make you feel something. You know, unlike regular games which you just play like a mindless drone because you can't help yourself (whoops, sarcasm!).

I don't mind meta-games, or "deep" games, or poetic games at all. I think they have their time and place as well, and thought we could all live in happy co-existance although my personal interest in them is generally low. I can find it interesting with wanting to create a game that is primarily designed to make you reflect over your own gaming behavior or the meaning of life, rather than to "just" entertain old school style. I even subscribed to a magazine that started a couple of years ago called "The Enemy" in swedish (Fienden) which was a gaming magazine about games without a single review in it. It discussed games in a sort of abstract, study of ideas kind of way instead and I was intruiged by the idea. Sadly it was cancelled after the first issue.

But then I read an article that somehow really wound me up. It got me furious in fact, because of one little quote. The quote was from Michaël Samyn of the Tale of Tales game studio, and you'll have to bear with my amateur translation as the magazine is in swedish;

"The problem with games is the 'game' part. That a game per definition is about learning rules, use them to overcome an obstacle and then win, and which therefor is almost always suited to tell only one story - the story of someone who's constantly challenged by enemies and defeats them. It's because of this that games can never be a meaningful form of expression." (Paraphrased, Svenska PC Gamer p.30)

I don't even know where to get started with this quote. What really grinds my gears is saying that games can't be a meaningful form of expression. In the article, Samyn continues discussing how the core structure in games is what is standing in its way to.. what, really? I'm not sure what he thinks "regular" games are lacking at the moment? The possibility to make us feel? To make us engrossed, entertained, to think and contemplate? For some reason I take this personal. It's like he is saying "remember those awesome memories you have of playing FFVII? Remember how cool you thought it was and how happy you were, and how still today it makes you smile? Yeah unfortunately that was just a lowly experience, it wasn't really meaningful". Then what is, I must ask? And who is Samyn to tell me that what I feel playing a good game isn't "real", "worthy" or "meaningful" enough? How can you even use such a word, "meaningful"? I thought I was the only one who could say what was meaningful to me or not.

You will not take this experience from me

The worst thing about it is that it doesn't even make any sense. That is like saying "The problem with driving a car is the 'driving' part. You have to shift gears and turn roads and stuff. That's why it can never be as fun as flying a plane". Or like saying reading Harry Potter can never be as meaningful as reading Frank Kafka. You're comparing apples and oranges here! I'm not saying Samyns own games are shit, frankly I don't have a clue. I'm saying that his games are not designed to give me the same sort of experience as say, Neverwinter Nights, so how can you even compare them? If I have fun playing NWN, then that is exactly what I am after and the experience is meaningful to me.

Yes, games have rules. In case you haven't noticed, everything in the universe has rules. I can't walk through walls even if I wanted to, and have to obey to the rules of physics (although in quantum-physics you can go through walls theoretically, but that's beside the point). I am sure the games Samyn creates have rules too and I am sure that if they didn't they wouldn't be very fun games. Wikipedia states that;

"Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction"

Although there is no clear definition of a game, I am sure that without a goal to strive to and challenges to overcome, it wouldn't be much of a game. An interactive story maybe, but not a game. When I play a game I want that challenge, and I want that goal to make the challenge fun to overcome. That is why I play a game rather than watch a movie or read a book. When I want a story without interaction, goals, rules and challenge, I go to those forms of media instead. So what is Samyn trying to tell me?

In fact, Samyn has started an organisation called "NotGames", focused on creating games (well, not games) that have risen above and beyond what regular games are trying to accomplish. Even the article goes on to point out that by saying you're making "NotGames", you're basically saying you're making anything, because anything except a game is a notgame, and who would be the target audience for those creations? In the article some game studios that have hooked on to the idea admit that they don't want to call their creations "notgames" for the fear of losing potential customers. You know, gamers. Who play games.

And what kind of a concept is that anyway? You wouldn't see anyone start a car company called "NotCars" or a sausage brand called "NotSausage". If they're not what they're not trying to be, then why even point it out? By saying you're not making a game, you're immediately connecting your product to games, unless you're just trying to be Captain Obvious.

I'TS NOT A CAR!

Why make THIS an issue to fight for when there are real issues within the gaming industry. Like the above mentioned fact that games still have a really low status as a form of entertainment, besides the fact that basically everyone plays some sort of game sometimes and that it's at least as big as the movie industry (I'm guessing). Or how about the fact that anyone not conforming to general play style in the increasingly popular online games is often ridiculed and turned into an outcast, basically making gaming into a "do it our way or no way at all"-style. These are things I think are worth addressing and trying to change - not that regular games are not "meaningful" and "deep" enough.

The last few years I have been thrilled to see indie developers getting a chance to disitribute their games and find markets through systems like Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter, to mention a few. The gaming community doesn't just need yet another FIFA or Medal of Honor, there is room for pretty much anything. And it is true that one of the most popular games of recent years, Minecraft, came from a no name creator rather than one of the big developing studios. It is clear that good gaming can come from anywhere. Of course there are differences between these games, just as there is differences between movies and books. And I don't mind us comparing the games, discussing which and what is better. But let us not discuss gamers. Let us not go there where one choice of games is held as better than another choice. Is the person playing To the Moon living a more meaningful life than the person playing LoL? I find the choice in games can hardly say anything about that. Gamers are already fighting the view of gaming being the lower choice of entertainment, do we really want to faction up within the community as well?

In the end all of these creations want to be games, no matter what they call themselves, and I think they should be treated equally, within their own merits. When a movie reviewer reviews Die Hard 5, he's not comparing it to Shindler's List (I hope). He's not telling us which one is more meaningful. The review is not based on anything else but the quality of the movie - as a movie within it's own genre. I think IGN reviewers Anthony Gallegos did it right when he gave To the Moon a 7.5 because of a great story but weak gameplay. If you choose to tell your story through a game you need to think about all aspects of the game. It is true that really great stories can make you forgive mistakes in graphics, gameplay and physics. But if you're playing a game these will all still matter - just look at practically any Bethesda game of late. And if you want to make games, don't belittle the competition and even worse, the choices of potential customers.

The article writer points out that it's easy to write off the whole idea as Samyn being a pretentious wannabe whos creations will be art - but not games. Those creations will have their place in the world as well, but they'll have as much to do with games as anything else - inspired by and from perhaps, nothing more. And I am perfectly fine with that. Like I said, I believe in letting anyone create, like and play whatever they enjoy whether it be Mass Effect or Okami or something else completely. What I don't believe in however is gamers looking down on other gamers for their choices. Like I said; It's tough enough having to defend what I do to everyone who don't play games, I really don't want to start doing it within the gaming community.

Right now I think Samyn and others like him are doing themselves a disservice. They have a really interesting idea on their hands, but decide to go all hipster with it, alienating the very people that might be interested in it by calling them and their game choices sheepish. Yes, philosophical games can be great, but so can regular games. Because there is no denying that no matter how much you strive to find that thing that make people really think, enjoy and feel like they've made something meaningful with their life it's hard to beat a plain old simple, awesomely fun game. These don't have to be exclusive and the one is not better than the other. As long as I get happy from playing it, it's meaningful to me. Just look at Tetris and say I am wrong.

Game Review: Broken Sword 2.5

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:30:00 +0000

Although I consider myself a gamer-grrrl (yeah, I went there), there are very many game genres I love in theory, but suck at and hence very rarely play in practice. Genres such as shmupps (Gradius), beat-em-ups (Turtles in Time), run & gun shmupp (Contra), shooters (Half-life, System Shock) and horror games (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Amnesia and so on). Each of these genres hold a ton of games I would love to play, in some cases I've tried and failed miserably, in others I've just haven't had the nerve to try yet and so I've left them for now. Hey, at the moment I'm just proud with myself for finally getting into strategy and adventure gaming somewhat.

And then there is point-and-click adventure games, which I also totally love but by the sweet mother of all Red Herrings am I bad at puzzle solving. I'm not even very fond of puzzle solving, outside of games that is, and I suppose that reflects on my skills (or rather lack thereof) in puzzle solving games. I still love them, but the problem is that if they're either not involving enough, story-wise, or just plain too hard, I usually leave it at loving them from afar. Because of this I haven't played overly many point-and-click adventure games, but got around to finishing a couple from the Monkey Island series, Full Throttle, The Dig and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. All from LucasArts, I know. They know how to do point-and-click adventures, what can I say?

Then I've played Broken Sword 2, which I actually really liked. Unlike the LucasArts games, well especially the Monkey Island series, the Broken Sword games are less crazy in their puzzles and could maybe therefor be seen as easier. I don't think they're easy at all, but at least they rarely ask you to combine the rat hair with the pen and the paper sheet to create a fake lollipop to give to the blind kid to get the key to the door to... well you get the idea. The Broken Sword series has given me an opportunity to play a different kind of point-and-click adventure and I loved it.

I was therefore very happy to read that a couple of fans had taken it into their hands to release a "proper" sequel to Broken Sword 2, lovingly called Broken Sword 2.5 or Baphomets Fluch (that's german for Curse of Baphomet, I guess they were germans who did it). I say "proper" in quotation marks because there already is a Broken Sword 3, it's just not as popular as the second game, and I've never played it either. Apparently these fans, along with most other people, didn't like the turn the game had taken from pretty hand-drawn 2d graphics to 3d graphics, and wanted to see if they could make it better themselves. Since I haven't played the third game, I can't say if they succeeded, but I can tell you whether I think it's a worthy sequel to Broken Sword 2.

Recognize this we do

I really liked the art-style of Broken Sword 2, so I too was quite bummed to see the switch to 3d graphics. I am glad to say that BS2.5 looks pretty much exactly like it. In fact, the title makes it justice since this feels more like a DLC or a little extra play on the original BS2 than it's own game. Although it takes place several years after the story in BS2, this one borrows heavily both in characters and locations. If this game wanted players to get a nostalgic feel of the good old days of BS2 with the possibility to play a new adventure at the same time, they've definitely succeeded as you'll recognize a lot if you've played BS2.

Overall this game follows the recipe of BS2 by the book. The puzzles are similar, everything looks the same. I am amazed that they managed to get voice actors for all the characters, not only in one but in two languages - German and English. I only listened to the German voice actors shortly, but thought they sounded good. The English voice actors also do an ok job.

Since I am completely daft at puzzle-solving I struggled a lot with this game. Like I said, I've always loved Broken Sword for it's, relatively, logical puzzles and that goes for this game too. That's not to say that some of the puzzles are quite difficult. In the end you resort to simply combining everything you have with everything you see in a routine pattern, but there are less things to click on here on each screen than in many point-and-click adventures which makes this a little less time-consuming. And once you figure it out you'll obviously think "ah yeah, of course".

Since George (the main character) travels all around the place, it must be difficult to design areas where you make sure the player gets everything he needs to continue elsewhere, without making it too obvious or simple. This is something BS2 did at some points, if I rememeber correctly you for instance find a "heap of garbage" towards the end that conveniently contains everything you need to continue. BS2.5 only suffers from this mildly, and only a few of the puzzles feel like they should've been better (the dog in the train for instance). There are a couple of instances where you die (ie Game Over) if you don't act quickly, which I find is a fun break to the usually slow pace that is common in point-and-click adventures, as long as it's not done too often.

Yup, still familiar

The story is, in all honesty, not very interesting compared to BS2, mostly probably because it hinges so much on you having played that to have any interest in the plot in this one. So much that it doesn't offer much on its own. George finds out his girlfriend Nicole has gone missing, The Knights Templar from BS2 seem to have something to do with it and he sets off to find out what. If you haven't played BS2 the story of BS2.5 falls completely because of its shallowness. This is forgivable since it's probably pretty much assumed that you will only play this game because you liked BS2 so much, and then mostly as an excuse to relive that game rather than offer anything new.

This leads to me often getting the feeling that characters and situations are put in there just to be a nod to BS2, but again this is forgivable because that is really what this game is all about. It just means that if you have no interest in the Broken Sword games you probably won't understand much of what is going on (or read this review in the first place, so there is that). There is no characters development or any real explanation to some characters existence, it's a long series of cameo appearances mostly.

And this is BS2, not much of a difference right?

Now, I make it sound like this game isn't worth you time at all, but that's not it. If you liked BS2, all I'm talking about above are exactly reasons why you should give this game the roughly two hours it takes to complete it. All through the game you will smile to yourself and think about where you met that character or what you did in that location in BS2, and that is all this game wants to do. Reminisce, while also offering a little puzzle-solving fun. And if you finish it, you get a little bonus at the end, I won't tell you what though! But it's little things like that, that make me extra happy and like a game all the more.

It took these guys 8 years to complete this game and it is completely free of charge. If that's not dedication I don't know what is. It's fun to know that the creator of Broken Sword, Charles Cecil was contacted about this game before the creation began and gave his consent and thumbs up. In fact I am amazed at what they have managed to accomplish and think it's blasphemy that it hasn't got more attention. The only problem I have with it is that it is a bit too short and I only wish they would've had the money to go even further with this story. Maybe because I too really wish for a "proper" BS2 sequel. It's extremely true to BS2, as a game trying to honor its legacy should be, and if you had any fun playing BS2 you should definitely check this out. It is worth a couple of hours of your game time.

5 Games That Need a Remake

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:16:00 +0000

So, System Shock 2 has "finally" been released on GoG.com, apparently a highly anticipated re-release of a game this year. I put it in " (quotation marks) however, because personally this might as well have been the first release - I completely missed this game the first time around so I can't really say finally to this happening. The game was released in 1999 the first time, when I was only 14 years old and considering I still sleep with the lights on occasionally I am sure 14-year old me would've shit herself just looking at the cover of this game. Besides, back then I only had a Mac and this game probably didn't run on that (always find somewhere to sneak some Mac-whining in if I can).

This time around I was intrigued though, the game looks really interesting. I love what they do over at GoG.com, releasing old games in playable versions again is a genius idea and now I've put both this and Planescape Torment on my list of games to buy. I might quite possibly add Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale to that list. So I have been, and will be, playing a lot of old school games lately, both on console and computer. And it has got me thinking a lot about stuff like graphics, game play, controls - then vs now. A lot of the games I play are perfect the way they are, like for instance Settlers 2. They've tried improving on that concept numerous times but I honestly think that it can't get much better than how they did it in the second game. Not even the graphics need to get better, they're perfect already (both in the original and the 10th anniversary edition). I can see and understand what I need to see and understand, I don't need it to be HD 3d or what not. In fact I think it would be worse off with more schmancy put in it.

Sarah Kerrigan?

But then there are a ton of games out there that are so much fun to play, they are basically perfect, but they could do good with a little face lift. System Shock 2 might well fit into this category. I'm not talking about changing the story or the characters or the gameplay in any way, simply hotting up the graphics a bit (or a lot) or change a couple of bugs here and there, just to make the game look and feel the way it truly deserves. Since there are so many games out there that would deserve this treatment, this is not going to be a top-list, simply five games that I, off the top of my head, really feel need this and that I would throw money at in an instant if it was made. See it as a part 1, and there might be a part 2 in the future.

5. Stalker
I'm a pretty big fan of the concept built up by the Strugatskij brothers short-story Roadside Picnic, although I'm actually not overly fond of the book itself (might be the horribad swedish translation of it that I read though). The story, as Wikipedia puts it;

"Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event (called the Visitation) which simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth for a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local population who lived inside the relatively small (a few square kilometers) area of each of the six Visitation Zones. Such zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties."

The book spawned a movie (which I like) and a game series of three named Stalker: Clear Sky, Stalker: Call of Pripyat and Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. Now, I will admit that I have never actually played any of these games myself, but my ex loved them fiercly so that I got to see a lot of gameplay from them. And I will agree that they look like a lot of fun, and like I said I totally love the concept and the games follow the book idea very closely, making a really interesting game series out of it. It is scary as shit and really requires you to think as a survivor to make it through the game.

It desperately needs to be remade though, but this one probably needs the graphic update the least of the games on the list. What it does need however is a total sweep of all the bugs and sometimes weird design choices that riddle the game. Because this game is so good, yet so filled with sometimes crippling bugs it has a fairly big fan base that has taken it into their own hands to remedy the situation. There are loads of good mods to download to all three of these games that ease up on some of the worst bugs and issues. Creds to their work and dedication, but it only goes to show how much this game series needs, deserves and would joy the fans to get a complete overhaul.

4. Escape Velocity
This is probably a game not many of you have heard of and I don't blame you. EV is a modest little space game, and actually there are three games in the series although they are all very similar. You shoulder the role as the captain of a ship and... that's pretty much it. What you want to do with that ship and how you want to spend your space traveling days is completely up to you. You've got a vast expanse of space and loads of star systems to explore. You can choose to trade, do quests or turn into a pirate if you like. Considering how small this game is, it really offers a lot and I remember spending hours with it when I was little. If I remember correctly it was one of the first games I paid for, since if you don't a little space shuttle comes and pesters you for money (it's a shareware product) and in the end he is out to kill you. Once you've paid the 5$ or whatever the game cost back then, he leaves you alone though.

Pew pew

When I was little I usually stuck to trading, keeping track on which goods were wanted in which systems, where I could buy them cheaply and sell them expensively. If you venture too far away from the center, that is the Sol system, you will eventually enter creepy regions held by rebel confederations and even further than that is not much more than pirates who will attack and rob you on sight. If you feel up to it you can upgrade your ship in many different ways, either getting bigger freighter models to ship more goods, or getting combat models to fight the pirates yourself. If you don't feel like fighting but want to be able to defend yourself, you can hire escorts and bodyguards that will do the fighting for you. If you're skilled enough you can disable ships and board them and well, there are just lots of things to do.

All systems lead to Rome

So this game offers a lot in terms of gameplay and fairly much in content, but it has an extremely simplistic graphics style. It doesn't really need more, in the sense that it's perfectly playable and fun the way it is, but I just always feel it could give so much more. For instance most planets, moons and space stations can be landed on (if the local government allows it), but is only represented by the one screen, with a picture of the planet landscape and a few different places to go to like "Trade Center" to trade, "Shipyard" to buy new (or used)ships or "Bar" to get quests and hear gossip from around the galaxy.

I just try to imagine how awesome this game would be if it had actual 3d graphics, or at least a bit more than it offers now. If this was turned into a game with a million dollar budget rather than what it might have had now, something with graphics similar to Mass Effect maybe. It could be an MMO too with people trading, pirating and rebeling all over the place. Come to think of it, maybe this is what EVE Online is?

3. Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster
I'm a pretty big fan of Jackie Chan, I'd honestly give just about anything to meet him and I am super excited just at the prospect that he might be in Expendables 3. I wish he wouldn't age so that he could just go on and make magnificent movies his entire life, if someone deserves immortality it's him. But just because Jackie Chan is just about the coolest person alive, doesn't mean any of his games are any good. I've only played one though, and it is pretty awesome - Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster on PSX.

I read a review on IGN about it and the author mentions one of the things I really like about the game - that there is so much of Jackie in it. It isn't just his name on the cover, the entire game feels pretty much like playing one of his movies. Jackie has done motion capture for the character you play (which obviously is Jackie himself) meaning you do loads of cool kicks, punches and jumps just like him. He has added a lot of little Jackie-lines, quirky one-liners that crack me up each time and are sometimes nonsensical in a hilarious way. Here and there on the levels are items lying around, really random things like a big fish, a paint roller, a plunger, anything really, that can be used as a weapon for a short time. Each weapon comes with it's own unique combination of kicks and punches where Jackie combines the weapon into his fighting. Everything about this game oozes Jackie, so if you're a Jackie fan this game is a must have.

Name one other game where you can smack people with a broom?

But even if you're, not this is still a pretty good beat-em-up (although I suspect all the Jackie stuff gets annoying unless you love Jackie). I'm only on the third level and get my ass handed to me. The control is pretty sophisticated, with the possibility to counter-attack, roll, kick, target-lock, punch and combine all of those things in different combos. The AI isn't too clever, but damn are they fast sometimes, so you have to think carefully about offense and defense to not end up surrounded and beaten to a pulp. The game also offers some platforming and collecting, which is quite fun since it requires some good timing to do well (and not die).

So how cool would this game not be if it was updated to modern graphics? If Jackie consisted of not 10 pixels, but maybe 10.000 pixels (or whatever amount we use nowadays)? Funnily enough, the reviewer on IGN thinks the graphics are very good, and they probably were back then (the review was written 2000), but now they could definitely do with a lot of polishing to make Jackie look as cool as he can. The control could maybe use a little tweaking, but overall this game is pretty perfect the way it is. And it would totally rock ass if it was even prettier.

2. Resident Evil 2
I doubt this game needs much of an introduction, even if you've never played it you've most likely heard of it. This is the second game in the Resident Evil series, which apparently is Capcoms best selling game series (yes, even better than Megaman and Castlevania). A lot of people consider this second game to be the best, although I know many think the newer games like the fourth and fifth are pretty good too. Personally I prefer the first one just because it really gets the ominous feeling down perfectly and because it is the basis for the freaky story that is the RE series. The latter games take the virus to all new levels, where you mostly try to just reduce the damages of Umbrellas (possibly the best name for a villain company ever) plans of world-domination (or whatever, that's what it seems to escalate into anyway). But in the first one you simply discover all of these things, and that is also true for the second game that takes place in the same time but in a different location.

This...

Now if it wasn't for the Gamecube remake of RE1, that game would've been on this spot on this list. But since we got that, I feel like RE2 is next in line, not only because they've promised us this remake ages ago already. Where did that go to? I have no idea. If the RE1 remake didn't sell enough to make Capcom want to give RE2 the same love I'd blame that more on the lack of interest in the Gamecube than lack of interest in the remake.

...could be this.

I actually like the changes they did to the original game in the remake, they kept enough of the original to make it feel familiar but added a lot of new things to make it worth a replay not just for the updated graphics. Admittedly, the original is ugly as shit and needed that remake so badly, whereas RE2 is ok graphic-wise. But it would look so good with the same crisp graphics as the RE remake or the graphics of RE6 for instance. And like I said - it has been promised. Now deliver.

PROMISES!

1. Final Fantasy 7
Big surprise, right? I know it's a pretty obvious choice, but that's for so many reasons. FF7 is one of the games that really got me into gaming and I have so many good memories tied to this game. I'm not the only one, tons of people love this game for its great story and awesome characters (except Yuffie, I still hate her for stealing my materia). The music is superb and personally I think the replay
value is really high.

Nice eh... hands?

But there is no denying that this game is really, really ugly. I mean, I can look at it and think it looks kind of good out of nostalgic reasons. The fact that the characters hands are made up of one big square looking block and that they don't really even have faces in game is kind of charming, in a way. It does require you to fill in a lot with imagination, and I don't mind doing that. But seriously, I'd chop off my pinky toe for a ff7 that has the graphics of Advent Children.

Square Enix knows this! And it makes me wring my hands in furious agony knowing they're probably sitting on that gold mine to save them on a rainy day, the same way Nintendo is probably releasing Pokemon X&Y soon to beat the crap out of Sonys handheld (when they've probably had the game for ages). And they really wouldn't have to change anything about the game except the graphics, everything else is perfect!

Oh look, fingers.

I heard somewhere at some point that the reason they hadn't released a remake was simply because the data used for ff7 was outdated somehow, so that they would have to redo it all from scratch. That might be true, but Capcom did it with RE! And if Capcom didn't have to go through the work of redoing all the graphics from scratch, somehow, I am sure Square Enix will find that it is worth their time and effort, as it will surely end up selling better than their latest installment of FF. So Square Enix, look at these puppy eyes - > ._.

Hear my begging: Puh-puh-puh-puhleeaaaaaaase do a remake on ff7!

Yeah, that should do it.

Like I said though, I have a couple of other games that could fit on this list, but I needed to have some sort of limitation to it, or I would sit here writing a book about it. I'll save them for a potential second list! What other games do you think should get the remake-loving?

Field Report - Play ALL The Games

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:07:00 +0000

Wow guys, it's been over half a year (8 months!) since I last gave an update on what I'm up to. Why haven't you said anything?! I'm sure you're dying to know! Enough with all the videos of me pretending to heal and what not that I post on this so called blog, and back to a little good old face to face (well uh... computer screen to computer screen) talking, shall we?

Last time I took some time to tell you about what the heck was going on around here, which at the time I barely knew myself, I felt like my WoW gaming was definitely coming to a very slow end. Slow, because I don't really want to quit. I still have fun in WoW, but thruth is I play it less and less. But I think I am cutting ahead here, let's get back to June 2012. Life was looking up, WoW was somewhat looking down. I had just gone through a long playing period of "The Dying of the Guilds" (hey that's a pretty good movie name), where I just swapped from one guild to the next and watched them crumble around me. Admittedly not from one week to the other, but maybe that just made things worse in a way. Just as I got comfortable in one guild it felt like it was time to pack my bags and find a new one. It killed a lot of things within me, but especially my desire for progression raiding. Also my work schedule didn't really allow it. Now, finally, it seemed in the end that I found a guild that fit me. Apparently they did have some guild drama where a lot of the raiders left leaving them back on 10 man where they had been a pretty decent 25 man, but you know what? I didn't even notice. And I am really glad at that. So what AM I doing in WoW then?

World of Warcraft
The answer is, not much really. Nowadays I log on once maybe every other day, do a couple of dungeons on my alts and after no more than an hour I am satisfied. I raid on average once every ten days to two weeks. Eventhough I had a short period where I absolutely loved doing dailies (yes even me, although I've basically never done dailies before because they're so boring) and logged on every day to do at least that, nowadays I literally only do a dungeon or two every other day. Although I knew this day would come I couldn't really picture it in my head, but now I am there and I am quite happy with it. I still can't really get myself to quit WoW because I am STILL having fun with it. I still love, love, love to heal on priest. Really, I do. My work doesn't allow me to raid very often but I don't even want to. Four hours every other week is fine by me. My guildies are lenient and nice, they suit my current gaming needs just perfectly.

All this time not playing WoW has led to something I've been longing to do for 7 years of being hooked on WoW however - play all the other good games that are out there. Before I finally felt like I was somewhat done with WoW (not just yet though) I just couldn't really find the time. Although there are loads of games I love to play, WoW was always just a little more interesting. So what have I been putting my time into lately?

Kotor2
I remember watching my brother play Kotor (the first one) ages ago thinking "that looks pretty fun". For some reason I had a fear of any but the kindest of games (the ones without enemies), a fear that I've finally overcome with the help of WoW among other things (I think actually growing up helped a lot too). So I decided that I wanted to play Kotor2, remember vaguely the story of the first game. Mostly I remembered really liking the combat system, and I was right - I do. There are a lot of things about Kotor2 that makes me pull my hair in frustration though, especially all the bugs and crashes that anyone whos played it is well aware of I am sure. I intend to do a little write up on the game when I done playing it however so I won't go into too much detail with it here. Let's just say that that game should be grateful it is as interesting and fun to play as it is, or I would never be arsed to try to plow through all those weird crashes I am having with it.

Guild Wars 2
I bought GW2 just a month or so after release, tried a race I can't even remember the name of right now and decided I didn't really like it. A couple of weeks ago however I thought I would give it another shot, probably after reading some sort of review or article on it (those always peak my interest). This time I did a Charr Warrior and that definitely suited me a lot better than the Necromancer I had been. There are a lot of things I like about GW2, and I think they've done a good job with getting me to want to discover the map and do the quests. Giving you almost everything for a one-time sum is just extremely generous when I compare to how much money I've put into WoW. I can only hope more MMO's try that because unfortunately another monthly cost is what is keeping me away from trying games like A Secret World. What I especially love about playing GW2 is how extremely noob I am at it however. This might sound strange but it makes me think about all the noob players I've encountered in WoW, how it amazed me that they knew so little about the game and also (at least some of them) seemed so uninterested in learning. Now I am walking in those noob-shoes myself and I totally get it.

As I play GW2 I am mildly interested in grouping and dungeoning, or even finding out how and when to do those things. I am perfectly fine with playing GW2 as a solo game that happens to have other players crossing my path every now and then, at least for now. I did join a guild, but mostly because I accepted some things that came up on my screen. And also so that I could ask someone about things I don't understand in the game. I have little to no interest in crafting or selling things on the Auction House (that I assume exists, I don't actually know!). I just got my first Trait, or so I think and I don't have a clue about what to do with it. I run around and bash enemies, but biggest goal with the game being to discover the world really and I have missed that feeling. Nothing is important or feels like a must-know or must-do. I am glad with doing everything wrong, probably gearing like a muppet but as long as I can kill stuff I am happy.

Pokemon
I've pretty much continously played some sort of Pokemon game ever since I got my hands on a Pokemon Blue. So far the only generation I haven't played is the second one, with Gold and Silver, but I will remedy that soon as I've got Soul Silver now. Currently I am playing Fire Red however, and loving it of course. I also decided to buy Pokemon Conquest after reading some good reviews on it and it is actually loads of fun. I agree with the people who say that it manages to combine Pokemon and strategy gaming although it does seem impossible. It is a fairly simple strategy game, which suits me. I actually quite like Strategy games and have tried many different, from FF Tactics to Disgaea, but I don't always have the patience with all the tinkering. In a way Pokemon Conquest is a good way to get started on strategy games and I might give my other ones a new chance once I am done with this one.

Console games
I started out as a console gamer actually, it's only in the later years that I've gotten into computer gaming. Nowadays I actually prefer the computer when it comes to newer games. My interest in ps3, xbox 360 and the wii (and now wiiU) is very limited. I just can't bring myself to pay that much money when I only want to play a handful of games, most annoyingly obviously is that I want to play a few on each console.

I am playing a lot of older games for consoles nowadays though. I'm only really missing a Sega Mega Drive to be able to play all the cool old games, and for some reason my NES doesn't want to work at the moment. The last couple of months I've been playing some PS, PS2 and Gamecube games (mostly Resident Evil, but I hope I will get around to playing Suikoden V and finally finishing FFVII), and also recently plugged in my SNES for some Super Mario World action.

And a little bit of this and that
And then there are a load of other games that I give a half an hour here and there. I started playing Settlers 2 again just the other day, I don't know how many hours I've put into that game in the past. I'm playing SimTower too, damn that game is addictive. I used to love it as a kid. I've been playing quite a lot of Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers too. I really love MtG and only wish I had someone to play it with, but this is a decent substitue. The fact that you can't really build your own decks doesn't bother me. I've been away from the game for so long I wouldn't know where to begin anyway so this is the perfect way for me to just jump into it to get a little bit of MtG fun when I have 20 minutes to fill somewhere. I did buy Skyrim some while ago but I feel that I'm already juggling too many games in the air and need to finish some of them before I get started on that one, as I suspect that might want a whole deal of time from me. My plan is to get Kotor2 done and then get started on Skyrim, it's not going anywhere so I'm not really in a hurry.

In other news I am really, really looking forward to the new 3d pokemon game, X & Y, but who isn't right? I have a DS but not a 3DS (the bf does though) so either I'll have to buy one or if I can contain myself I will wait until he is finished and play after him (but who am I kidding).

How is the gaming treating you guys anyway?

Will of the Emperor 10 Man Disc PoV

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:59:00 +0000

Just yet another little video of a raid boss kill from me. Again, since this content is getting outdated (and the kill in the video was done in November or so) I'm not going to do a guide of this unless someone would like me to. Otherwise, if you have any questions regarding the encounter feel free to ask!

I find this fight quite worthy of being the end boss of this raid, it's challenging without being annoying really and has some tough bits for every role in the raid.

Sha of Fear 10 Man Disc Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:26:00 +0000

Here's my texted video guide to healing Sha of Fear on normal 10 Man. Personally I quite like the fights in ToES and this one was actually a lot of fun to heal. I had never done the fight or even heard of it before last night, but my guild allowed me to read up on some tactics during a break and we went and downed it. It's not an easy fight at all, but I feel that this fight takes more skill and less luck into consideration (at least I like to think so ;) than most raid fights. It's some hectic healing, it requires quick thinking and quick decision making which makes it all the more fun when you succeed. We nearly wiped at the end since we were all hit by Breath of Fear for reasons unknown to us. Fortunately we made it anyway!

Elegon 10 Man Disc Priest PoV

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:47:00 +0000

Just a video of a kill me and my guild did on Elegon ages ago.This one won't be a guide since the content is getting old, but if there is interest I can add some information about what I think is worth thinking about when healing this fight as a discipline priest. Questions are always welcome of course.

Overall I am not very fond of this fight, I find it one of the more boring ones to heal in MV. There is a lot to heal admittedly, it's not boring because of lack of challenge. I think it is because it is pretty rinse-and-repeat in style, redoing the same thing over and over. I usually prefer the fights that require more of a quick think and reaction style of healing, maybe with some running around. This fight is quite stationary and timing of cooldowns and mana management are the two challenges here (although that goes for most fights). As a healer there isn't much to think about except that, and it gets kind of dull after a couple of wipes.

Games and Movies - The Faces of Evil

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:12:00 +0000

Last time I went to England I made sure to bring an issue of Edge, a video game magazine that I am sure many of you have heard of. I think it's quite good, but it's nigh on impossible to find in Sweden, and if you're lucky to find one of the few places that do sell them, it usually costs about three times as much. This particular issue had actress Ellen Page on the front, you know, the girl from such movies as Inception and Juno (the first movie I saw with her was Hard Candy though, which was just weird). Although she's probably quite popular in Hollywood right now, I was not expecting her to be on the front of a video game magazine. In fact, I was a bit annoyed. I usually want video game characters, or some cool screen shot from some of the latest games to be on the front of a video game magazine. When I opened up and read the article about her, it turns out this would actually fit the latter category, but somehow that only made me more annoyed. A video game with a Hollywod actress in it? Not sure I want that.

It's a pretty face though.

But maybe we should take a little step back here. Movie actors in video games are far from a new thing. Most movies and tv-series have some sort of licensed video game version starring the same main character from the movie/series- most are bad (can't help but mention E.T here of course), a few are good (hmm, how about... actually I can't think of one right now). And the video game industry have been trying to creep closer to the movie industry since forever, not just by releasing games based on the same stories and with the same characters, but also in concept, by making games that are less interactive and more movie like (like Dragon's Lair) or just contain a whole ton of FMV (like some Solid Snake games).

I can even remember the first time I played Dragon's Lair on a friends computer, literally thinking "how the heck is this a game?". It might've been cool when it was first released in 1983, but when I played it around mid 90's there were a lot more interesting things to spend your time on (and I bet there was 1983 as well). And the Solid Snake games are generally considered good games, but I know one big complaint often aimed at them are the overly extended cut-scenes. Hideo Kojima really wants to tell his story and build his characters, but many players don't agree that lengthy and often occuring cut-scenes are the right way to go about it in a video game - something people spend time with to actually be part of the action rather than just stare at the screen. And I totally agree. My patience with cut-scenes limits itself to either short or not often occuring. And even then I want them to have relevance, not just to show off some fancy effects. This can obviously be done in a good way, just look at the Walking Dead series (although if you ask my bf they are shit as well).

But other than stealing characters and concept from movies, some games have tried using real people - in some cases actors - to make their games seem more real and lifelike. One of the first examples I can think of is Mortal Kombat (and many MK clones) that sort of has the characters looking like moving pictures of actual people - frankly it looks like shit if you ask me. I find Street Fighter 2 way more eye-pleasing and fun to play although it's cartoony and therefor less realistic in a way. And then you have cut-scenes using real actors, like some Command & Conquer games. Maybe MK is a bad example, since part of the issue there is that the animations are so bad (or so I think). Today you can just model your characters around human motions, making them move more life-like and realistic rather than by just using CGI. Just look at what they did with Gollum for instance, that's pretty cool, right?

Even Sub-Zero doesn't look cool.

Sure, I find using actors to help you model realistic human (or human-like) motions is totally ok in both movies and games. I don't mind that at all. In fact, just imagining what it must be like trying to program and animate realistic facial expressions, when even acting them with your own face isn't particularly easy, makes it look like only good can come from using actors in games. We might forgive stiff and hilarious facial expressions on a face that only is comprised of twenty pixels, but now that we can actually animate really realistic faces, we might ask more of what they look like when they act in our cut-scenes. Soon reviewers might not just complain about bad voice-acting, but also bad actual acting in games (maybe that has already happened). Only good then, isn't it? No, I have one issue with it, a big one.

Eventhough I don't mind using an actor to base your animations off, I do mind using an actor as the actual character. Small difference you might think? Huge difference, really. Imagine if, if graphics had allowed obviously, Link had been played by Christian Bale or Lara Croft in the games really had been played by Angelina Jolie. It might sound awesome to some of you, I think it sounds horrible. A video game character is made special by the fact that it is itself. It is created and born if you like in the universe of the game and before that first game it didn't exist anywhere else. When we first pick up that game and play that character we normally don't have any attachments or predisposition towards that character. It might have backstory and personality, it might not. It doesn't matter, either way it will be something new for us to discover. If I pick up a game and play as Kirsten Stewart on the other hand (yeah, that got your attention, didn't it)... actually I probably wouldn't pick up a game where I played as Kirsten Stewart in the first place, but that's just pointing out yet another issue with using actual people in video games.

Real actors have real lives and personalities, and the more we know about them the more we will expect when seeing them. This is a good thing if I am playing a game based on a character that already exists. If I play a Terminator game I would love to play as Arnold Schwarzenegger. But every other time, I want the character to build itself and I want to have as few preconceptions of it as possible. I have this issue with movies as well, which is why I get annoyed everytime I see yet another Tim Burton movie with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, when in fact most of the best movies he's done the last 20 years don't actually have any of their faces in main roles (Nightmare Before Christmas, Big Fish, Mars Attacks, Batman, ok that is 1992 but close)! When I see Johnny Depp in some weird ass roll I know exactly what I am going to get, no matter if he plays a pirate captain or a chocolate factory owner. Sometimes the role fits him, most of the time I wish I could see a new face already. I might have expectations on a new Final Fantasy game, but I definitely don't have expectations of the characters in it. And I definitely don't want my group to consist of Bruce Willis the knight, Jennifer Aniston the white mage and Nicolas Cage the red mage. Think I sound ridiculous? IT COULD SOON BE REAL!

No, but seriously. It will probably never go that far (I pray), but that is what I pictured in my head reading an article about a game that made one of its biggest points being that it used a real actor as the main character. One of the advertisements even said "Starring Ellen Page" in top. No no no, I am the star here! Me and the character together discover this adventure, but some Hollywood actor sure as heck isn't going to steal my glory. In a way, anyone playing that game (called Beyond btw) will actually be playing as Ellen Page. We will get to control her, but in any cut-scene and in most of the game I will probably think more of Inception and Juno and Hard Candy and less of what is happening in the story of the game. This isn't even a new thing, games like Onimusha has done it already. It might be a good game but I really don't like that concept. Real actors change, they age and they die. A video game character is eternal, it might be forgotten but it will always be what it is and therefor always true to its game.

Maybe this is just a problem I have with faces - I connect them to everything else I know them from. Usually that is a good thing with video game faces. Seeing Mario, Metroid, Sonic, Thrall... any video game character really I can connect them to the different games they come from and their very own personality (as shallow as it may be) from those games. When I see Thrall I see Thrall, and not The Rock playing Thrall. It does matter, to me at least. So please - don't put actors into video games any more than you need to.

Zinn's Nostalgic Instances - Ramparts

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 21:28:00 +0000

Name any BC or Classic dungeon and I've probably done it about 100 times by now, with few exceptions. The Wrath dungeons are closing in on that amount. Whenever they change one of the old instances, and in the case of the Classic ones they've basically remade them all in some way by now, I both get happy and sad. Sad that the old instance is gone forever, because in a way it is, and happy that they're adapting it to the style of the new times so that more people can enjoy it. I think this is a reason I quite like the BC instances so much. They've been simplified almost beyond recognition, but overall they at least still look a lot like the originally used to.

By doing these instances on my alts, mostly burning through parts and bosses that used to be incredibly difficult, I chuckle to myself as I remember the olden times and think about the massive difference in challenge that the instance now holds compared to when it was current content. I think about boss skills and mob groups that used to require a massive cooperative effort from the group to pull off, and compare it to the mass-pulls of the runs I do today. Of course there is a difference in difficulty because I am doing normal rather than heroic runs on my alts, and I wouldn't even want the instances to be as hard as they used to be when I am only online for 30 min to do a quick pug run. Eventhough some of the old instances hold some challenge still (when done in the appropriate level) even on heroic most of them are something you just dance through without any thought.

But doing the pug run makes me remember how much fun I had struggling through these dungeons and I wanted to commemorate those memories and share them, somehow. So how should I put this. For anyone who was there I am sure you've got your own set of horrible and awesome memories connected to any or all of what was the dreadful heroics of BC. I hope this can be a little trip down memory lane for you. For you who weren't there, maybe this can be a tiny glimps into a world that just doesn't exist anymore. A ruthless, unforgiving time when Blizzard wanted you to sacrifice a lot more of your time and sanity than they ever do nowadays. They new they could ask for it because we were ready to give it to them. Over and over we bashed our heads against these walls and only rarely did they crumble. Only with the best of teamwork and group effort. Which only made it feel all the more rewarding. Like those rare times when I end up in a pug today who does well in an instance not because of overgearing it and steam rolling through but because everyone does their best and actually tries to help eachother. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that feeling, but to me it's like everyone in that pug just became my very best friend for a short moment in my life.

I don't know if this is something that will interest anyone else, but to me that kind of what a blog is all about anyway.

Unlike heroics nowadays, most mobs were pretty annoying in old heroics. This isn't necessarily a good thing, hence the use of the word "annoying" rather than "challenging". The BC heroics inherited stuns and fears that lasted more than five seconds from the Classic dungeons, back when Blizzard still thought it would be hilarious to see players struggle to keep aggro and eachother alive when being incapacitated for what seemed like an eternity.

The key for these instances was crowd control, and that is what I do like about them. Eventhough I think Blizzard overestimated how much puggers are willing to put into a group filled with strangers they'll never meet again, when it did click and everyone just felt like helping out it was one of the best experiences ever, like I already mentioned. You did need a lot of patience (and back then not only for the instance but for the whole group forming and gathering as well), and very few puggers had it which Blizzard soon realized.

Nonetheless, players are prone to look back even at the worst of times with happy nostalgic memories glinting in their eyes, including these. It's easy to forget all the struggle and frustration behind those horrible pulls, mobs and bosses, but this was back when we had the time for it and just didn't know any better.

Top 5 Horrible Resident Evil Bosses

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:02:00 +0000

I've been playing a lot of Resident Evil lately. Well, in all honesty, I let my bf do most of the actual playing while I watch and we try to solve the puzzles (which are quite simple really) and scream together. I take over occasionally when we get stuck or he gets too frustrated, but he does most of the playing. Nevertheless, we've decided to play through the entire series, from the beginning to the end and so far we've gone through Resident Evil (PS), RE2 (PS), RE3:Nemesis (PS), RE: Code Veronica X (PS2), RE: Survivor (PS) and are currently playing RE: Zero (which I've played half way through before). Next up is the RE Remake for GC (which I've played through a couple of times) and then onward to the newer games like RE4, 5 and 6.

Since I've been spending so much time with these games, which also happen to be among my favorite game series all time, I thought I'd make some sort of post about it. I could make a post about why I love the RE universe so much, where the first game really is my all time favorite (although I actually prefer the remake), which games I like the most and why, and I might do that some day too. But instead I thought I'd make a post about some of the bosses in the game, specifically the most horrible bosses. The RE universe has a butt-load of bosses, most of them are decent, some are lame (a giant moth, really?) and some obviously harder than others. By horrible, I don't necessarily mean overly hard or scary, but in some way really annoying. I'm sure you can all guess at least one boss on this list.

Since this is a list of bosses I can unfortunately not add some of the more annoying mobs, like the Crimson Heads from the Remake of the first RE and the Hunters from various games. This list will also just hold bosses from the classic games, the ones mentioned above, simply because I haven't played the newer ones yet (and maybe it's suitable considering the newer ones took a different direction). So let's get started.

5. Gravedigger (RE Nemesis)
The Gravedigger actually occurs in Code Veronica as well, or at least a similar version of it, but then it's called something else. The fight I am thinking of in Nemesis you don't even have to kill it, all you have to do is push two buttons to open the locks to a ladder and run away, sounds simple enough, right? No! To get to the buttons, you have to run dangerously close to the holes from which the Gravedigger emerges, and you literally only have a split second to push the button before he comes out and starts chewing on you. Once he's out, it's almost impossible to get to the button and you have to lure him away and try it again. This is true when you need to leave through the door as well, meaning you can die only because your character isn't facing the exact inch it needs to face to be able to interact with the ladder. Just watch the video and you'll see what I mean.

4. Nemesis (RE Nemesis)

You knew this bastard was going to be on this list, it's impossible to make a list like this and not include what is possibly one of the most annoying bosses in the series. Now, Nemesis isn't actually that difficult, the fact he's so annoying is because he refuses to stay dead. I've lost count on the amount of times he pops out like a jack in the box, screaming STARS!, that horrible music starts and he comes charging after you. Those times he's not even killable, trying to do so is just a waste of ammo. At best you knock him down long enough for you to be able to escape, but trust me - he'll be back. Every now and then he comes at you as a proper boss, and at those times it's not that bad actually. He's difficult but not too difficult and those encounters are generally decently made boss fights. Every single time you end up wasting him, thinking that's the end of him, but of course you'd be very wrong. He adds a stressful element to RE Nemesis that I am sure the creators are very proud of, and personally I can't decide whether I think it's great or horrible. Since he's on this list, it's probably the latter.

3. William Birkin, Second (Dog) Form (RE2)

You fight Birkin several times during RE2, and the first time you fight him he's pretty bad ass, the last time you fight him he's just weird. The second time you fight him however, he's turned into this dog like thing and this fight is annoying for many reasons. First of all, you fight him in a really narrow and enclosed space, where the locked camera angles of the older RE games really do their best to make sure you don't have any clue as to where the boss is or where you need to aim. Furthermore, the Birkin-dog is very fast, jumps around all over the place and if he gets to you and starts chewing you, you go from fine to danger at best. More likely you're one shot.

2. Alexia - Queen Ant (RE Code Veronica X)

The Queen Ant, actually a transformed Alexia Ashford, has a couple of phases as is a common theme for the bigger bosses in the RE games. The Queen Ant actually has two forms that are really annoying, although none of them are overly hard. First off, she threatens to kill Chris' sister Claire, and you have around 1 second to save her. This is simple, just shoot Alexia in the face. But the first time you do this fight you don't actually catch on quick enough and by the time you figure it out, you're way too late. Alexia has killed Claire and it's game over for you. That's such a mean thing to put into a game. Shooting Alexia will have her transform into her first proper form. This form isn't too hard, but it's very annoying for two reasons. She keeps spouting little insects that bite you. If you don't continously kill them, they will basically hump you into a corner and kill you, simply because you won't be able to shoot anything while you're being bitten.

Secondly, Alexia doesn't seem to have a regular hp bar in this form, but rather you need to shoot her as much as possible. If you have a hard hitting but slow weapon like the Magnum or the Shotgun, you're worse off than if you have a faster but weaker weapon like the sub-machine gun. There is no way to know this except by trial and error, and most people will equip their usual go-to weapons for boss killing which only makes this boss harder. And those little things are so very, very annoying. But it gets worse. For her last form, she starts to fly around the room throwing fire at you. Avoiding the fire is quite simple, but now you're supposed to shoot her down using the Rocket Launcher in the vicinity. Trying to target her is almost impossible, because not only does she fly all around the room, she also actually dodges your shots when you fire at her. That means you're only chance at hitting her is when she's close enough so she can't dodge. To shoot her you have to aim with the Rocket Launcher, which means you can't move or see anything since you're looking through the scope, which by the way is a bastard trying to control. I don't know, maybe we were just particularly bad at this, but this boss is definitely one of the most annoying ones we encountered so far.

1. Tyrant on a plane (RE Code Veronica X)
In Code Veronica X, not only do you have to deal with what probably is the most annoying character of any RE-game, Steve Burnside, but also what probably is one of the most annoying bosses of any RE-game - the Tyrant on the plane. When you get to this point, it's quite possible that you don't have any heavy weaponry and/or larger amount of healing still on you, in which case you're basically screwed (almost, I'll get to that). This boss is on this list partially because he's annoying, but mostly because he is damn difficult. There is no way to just kill him, you need to wound him enough to be able to throw him out of the plane using the crate-launcher in the cargo hold. To do this you need to shoot him, a lot and position him in the right place, in the middle and in the back of the plane. The cargo hold itself is tiny, the Tyrant will charge at you if you're too far away and slam you down if you're too close. He knocks you down from charging at which point you have a couple of seconds to get up and out of the way before he slams you. If he does slam you, you're basically DEAD. And the knocking and flailing about he does, does a lot of damage to you.

When me and the bf got to this boss in the game we had basically exhausted most of our stronger weaponry and had only three or so healing items. We had something like 12 grenade shots, which is way too little to do any good damage to this boss. We tried fighting him so many times, failing and failing. Eventually we took a break from the game and none of us had the energy to pick it up for several weeks. We had basically given up on the game, thinking that we would probably have to replay it and save some better items to be able to progress, when I read a tip on the internet. If you were out of the stronger weaponry, your best shot would be to knife the sucker down. Yes you read that right, the Combat Knife turned out to be our savior against this mofo. We tried it and managed to down him on the second or third try, unbelievable, or so we thought. But I still shudder at the thought of this fight, it's horribly difficult and unfair if you're unlucky enough to not have saved your very strongest weapons.

It'll be interesting to see what bosses RE 4, 5 and 6 hold in store, maybe I'll return with another list then.

Spirit Kings 10 man Normal Discipline Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 15:39:00 +0000

A little late video guide to healing Spirit Kings as a discipline priest on 10 man Normal. If I ever get around to doing heroic modes, this is one of the fights I look forward to trying the most actually, because in normal it is very simple but you can definitely sense some potential in it.

Garajal The Spiritbinder 10 Man Disc Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:02:00 +0000

My guide to healing Garajal on 10 man normal. Admittedly this is probably the easiest fight in the instance so not much needs to be said, but there it is anyway (you should watch it for the awesome music ;))!

Feng the Accursed 10 Man Disc Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 23:57:00 +0000

I finally got the opportunity to record some raiding material the other day. I say the other day, although this kill is probably from three weeks back, and I haven't gotten around to finishing it up until today. I hadn't raided for quite some time when I was brought into this raid, and I do some hilarious mistakes - my favorite is probably misclicking Hymn of Hope instead of Spirit Shell during one of the aoes. Fortunately my horrible performance in this fight didn't cause too much trouble for the raid and it's quite entertaining (at least for myself) to see me do all these little screw ups. Regardless of how I manage the fight, doing it allows me to get a general idea of how I should be tackling it, and that is normally what goes into the guide. Enjoy.

My Top 5 WoW Moments

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 19:37:00 +0000

WoW celebrating its 8th anniversary prompted me to take a look back at the roughly 7,5 years I have been playing WoW now. Through high and low, there is no denying it has been a huge part of my life, not only affecting my gaming (in some ways maybe even hampering it) but also my irl life for better and for worse. Me and WoW go way back - I started playing spring 2005, somewhere around march or april I think. I first saw my brother play it and thought WoW finally managed to do all those things I had been looking for in previous mmos. Here was a game that seemed to actually provide the player with an immense and immersive world to get truly lost in. And boy did I get lost.

At first I played on my brothers account, with the added fighting about computer time between us that caused, and somewhere late 2005 I finally decided to get my own account. If I remember correctly, my first character on my own account was a warlock named Cassiopeia on the Balnazzar server, I think she is still there. I didn't get far on her however before I deciced to go back to the class I had rolled from the very start - priest. And that is how Zinn saw the dawn of light (well actually darkness since she spawned in Deathknell), somewhere in january 2006. She has been with me ever since, and that is to date the longest relationship I've had - forever alone and all that - and one that has truly never had much of rough times but mostly good, fun memories connected to it.

I don't even want to think about the amount of days I've spent in Azeroth. I'm not sure spending that amount of time on -any- one thing can be considered good. It's not as much as some, but definitely a whole lot. I don't regret a single moment of those days, and I definitely don't regret having put in as much time into this game as I have. I've tried to hold myself to doing things that I actually enjoy, trying to refrain from classical "mandatories" like dailies. If it wasn't fun, I wouldn't do it. It has been a tricky balance at times, sometimes struggling to keep up with people who've put in a lot more time and effort than me, but in the end I think it has been a good choice, allowing me not to burn out too quickly and missing out on all the awesome and fun stuff this game holds because I am too busy doing the boring things (admittedly now I do dailies and quite enjoy them, but that is another story!).

I've been thinking back to some of my favorite memories of my time playing WoW, trying not to pick too many raiding moments since they are often the easy choice. Fidning only five was very difficult, but I have been trying to keep to defining moments, moments when I felt the way I played or viewed the game might have changed a little. So here it is, my list of my top 5 WoW moments;

5. The first epic
I haven't found overly many random world epics, and as any of you who have know, it's a very special feeling when you do. I probably found the most back in Classic, such as Fiery War Axe and some I don't even remember the name of anymore. I do however remember exactly where I was when I found it (I've written a post about it to remind me anyway). None of those epics, or any epic I've got for that matter, had the same feel as the very first epic I found.

When I first got it I didn't even consider it a major thing. It's actually in hindsight that this memory has grown fonder with me. When I first found it I was so new to the game that I had no idea just how rare such a drop was and I just didn't know to appreciate it.

I was questing along in STV on my then main, a druid, when a maxlevel character offered to help me out. I gladly accepted and we grinded some mobs when suddenly a purple popped up on my screen. I didn't react at all, for all I knew purple was worse than gray, but my brother who was standing behind me got all crazy, screaming at me to need on the item asap. Back then the rolling system only allowed for need or pass, but thinking back on it I do find it kind of cheeky of me to roll need on an item I couldn't use let alone had very little contribution into getting. Nevertheless I listened to my brother, rolled need and won the Green Tower. I eventually ended up selling it on the auction house for some 100g (a staggering amount for me at the time) which allowed me to buy my first mount (the level 40 one).

4. Downing Sarth 3D
Sarth 3D was definitely not the most fun boss fight I've done, and probably not even the hardest. But I doubt I've done any fight where we tried harder and been closer than this. We had him constantly on 1%, some tries even on only a couple of thousand of hp before we finally, -finally- managed to kill it. The margins where needle thin and everyone had to push their skills to the max for us to finally be able to get him down, even just a couple of crits extra would've made the difference. We tried to perfectly time our pot usage to get as many seconds out of them as possible in the pull, same thing with Bloodlust.

Another reason this is a special memory for me is that it is one of the few major kills I've done, while it was current content, that I didn't do with my main. For this we brought in my paladin as a tank instead, having one of my old guildies heal. This is my last memory of her as a proper healer, before she kind of stopped raiding seriously - us having been something of the priest healing pair back in BC I was sad to see her confidence and interest go throughout Wotlk. She did an awesome job keeping us alive on this fight however and that's why I really like this memory, my old raid group being at their best, something that would soon change.

3. Getting Anathema/Benediction
I'm not a collector and I have rarely gone out of my way to get anything in WoW. I have a handful of cool items, mostly because they're considered memorabilia now than because they were hard to get at the time. Most people call me out on Mimirons Head, but the item I am without a doubt most proud of having is my Anathema/Benediction. It wasn't the first epic I ever got (see above) or even equipped, but it was my first proper endgame raiding item, and the entire quest of acquiring it still one of my fondest memories.

Pretty goblin too

Getting the items required was actually quite easy. The Eye of Shadow was obtainable from the auction house and for the MC part, Eye of Divinity, I was summoned into the raid instance by a guild who sold it, back when you didn't have to be part of the kill to be able to loot an item. Both items cost me around 750g in total, I think 250 or so for the Eye of Shadow and 500g for the Eye of Divinity. This might not sound like much, but it was back then and for me it was a huge sum and pretty much everything I owned. With the two items you created a quest item, and by completing a certain quest in Eastern Plaguelands you were finally awarded with your epic staff.

This quest, similar to the hunter quest for Lok'delar and Rok'delar, was nothing for the faint of hearted. If I remember correctly you were supposed to save (ie heal) spirits of people from Lordaeron while they were constantly attacked by skeletons. Healing them would give you the aggro of the skeletons, so you had to heal while also dealing with them, running out of the tiny quest area would result in an avenging spirit coming to slay you instantly. Initally you were able to get help from other people while doing the quest, but eventually only other priests were able to join in for it. This quest required a lot of preparation and mad skill to complete, at first it turned out to be almost too big of a challenge for me.

I don't remember how many times I tried, but when I finally completed it was with the help of another priest, from one of the biggest raiding guilds on the server. Some alliance came around to give us a hard time, and he called on some guildies (around ten in the end) to come help us deal with them while we did the quest. In the end we had a massive world pvp fight around us while we tried to handle the quest objectives, it was hectic and unbelievably fun. The reward could not have been better and I really felt like I deserved it. I still transmog into my Anathema/Benediction whenever I can (which unfortunately I can't now since I am mh/oh wielding).

2. Getting into raiding
I did some raiding back in classic/vanilla, mostly whenever some guild was desperate enough to call on my poorly geared and completely unexperienced self for some healing. Because of this I did some of MC and ZG at least once, and did not like it. I can definitely see the appeal of it if you happened to be part of a 40man raid group back then - I did enjoy the feeling of being part of an army fighting the evils of the world. It had the same appeal on me that spontaneous world pvp battles still do, but much else was fun about it. I had zero chance on loot since I had some 7 priest healers ahead of me on the loot lists and the fights often felt more of zerging than actual skill. I know a lot of people consider the classic boss fights among the hardest and they probably were. But you could easily bring a handful of people that couldn't tell back from front (like me) and still down a boss (Naxx was probably the exception).

I didn't get into raiding for real until BC, when I joined a guild I was going to stay in for some three or four years. They needed a healer so I decided to dust off my priest which I had abandoned to try out some dpsing. This was the first time I really enjoyed healing and fell in love with my priest all over again (and have stuck with since). Raiding became one of my favorite things to do in WoW and eventually everything revolved around it, in a good way. Few things I've done, and this might sound sad I don't care, have had the same level of team work and feeling of achievement as being able to down a particularly difficult boss with people you really enjoy spending time with. For all the good and bad fights Blizzard have designed, they at least provided a good foundation for people to have good fun times together, and I absolutely loved it while it lasted.

1. Starting to play
This might seem obvious, or not make sense at all - but my fondest memory in WoW throughout these 7,5 years is those first stumbling steps I took on the very first character I created - a little undead priest named Lahmia. I instantly loved it, the setting, the feeling, the music. Questing, finding people to talk to, the massive world that was out there to explore. Walking into Orgrimmar for the first time, after having traveled for what felt like ages was a truly epic feeling. That city was huge. It felt like a real city, full of people and things to explore and see. No game, not even some of my very favorites, have put such awe and feeling of greatness in me as I had those first months of playing. And eventhough nothing felt like those first steps of exploration, when there were still things out there I had in fact never seen before, the feeling of awe over WoW stuck with me for a very long time.

Eventually I would get to know every nook and cranny of this game better than the back of my hand and having to cross long distances now annoys me more than it fills me with wonder, but I can still find places in WoW where I just stroll around and take in the scenery and simple grandness of it all. WoW is huge, on all scales (and we all know size matters). When I rolled that undead priest in early 2005 I probably had no idea what was in store for me and eventhough I thought WoW looked like a really cool game it beat my expectations ten times over. I still run back to Deathknell every now and then, or reroll a little undead, just to get a wiff of that feeling I had on my very first run. I can still remember what I thought and how it felt to see places like Duskwood, STV, Teldrassil, Darkshore, Eastern Plaguelands, Tirisfal Glades, Silverpine and Alterac Mountains for the first time (some of my favorite areas). I can only hope I'll get to play another game that can have that effect on me as WoW did then, maybe it's impossible - like a game virginity, you only lose it once.

And on an ending note, I'd love to hear about some of your favorite moments in WoW!

To raid or not to raid - Can I be casual?

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 20:40:00 +0000

A friend of mine, one of the best dk-players I've ever played with, quit WoW a couple of months back. It's not the first time he's done so and for many reasons, in short because irl was taking up more time and WoW was getting less fun for him. With the release of MoP I was talking to him about coming back to WoW, trying to tell him about all the new cool things there were to do and get him to get into the mood for some mmoprg-action.

"Why not come back to WoW?" I asked. "Even if you don't have a lot of time for it anymore, you could just play it a little now and then".

His answer surprised me;

"I just can't play WoW a little".

He is not the first person to say this to me, and I used to have difficulty understanding how people had trouble simply cutting down, or changing their gaming habits to suit their irl-needs. If you can't raid, just don't. Right?

But then I realized, I myself was struggling to get comfortable in the "casual" (whatever that means) role - is playing WoW just a little impossible? Or is changing your gaming habits that which is difficult?

As you may or may not know, I too have for various reasons needed to cut down heavily on my gaming. Not necessarily the hours I put into the game, that is still quite a lot in every day standards (albeit a lot less than what I used to play, don't tell my relatives). What's changed is not the how much, but rather the when - most importantly my raiding has been heavily impaired by the fact that I work so many more evening and night shifts than I used to. Raiding three times a week is out of the question, if I manage to sign once a week I consider myself lucky.

For someone who has raided pretty steadily at two or three times a week basis since early BC, this has come as a pretty big change in my gaming habits. I used to consider myself a raider, someone who, although far from top of the line, definitely put a lot of time and effort into being the best I could be for my raid group. I couldn't begin to describe how much fun and frustration I've felt during these years, as any of you who raid surely know all about. Most, if not almost all of that, has gone from my gaming now, leaving leveling alts mostly.

See, I could do dailies on my main of course, but since I hate doing dailies in the first place, I am even less motivated to do them when the chances of me getting into some proper raiding are so slim - meaning all that grinding rep for gear just seems close to meaningless to me.

Leveling alts is not a bad thing at all, in all honesty that is probably what I spent 70% of my gaming time doing while I was a raider anyway. But those 30% of raiding might've just been 30% of my time spent, but probably 80%+ of what I identified my WoW-gaming with. I was a raider, everything else was just peripheral stuff that I did to support my raiding. I love my alts, but a major reason for me to level any of them was to have all professions at my disposal and also other characters if needed for the raid groups.

I've been forced to cut away what probably was the most important thing to me in the game, I have been forced to reduce my gaming to logging on to an alt every now and then and do some dungeons or quests, knowing that I will never really get to feel like a proper raider again in the forseeable future.

And this is no ones fault, things like these happen. I am lucky enough to be in a very lenient guild, allowing me to sign whenever and as little/often as I can, and they bring me if they happen to need an extra healer that run. This has allowed me to do exactly one evening of raiding since the release of MoP, which is definitely far from my old self where I used to be in the number one group, leveling and gearing up together so that we could jump into raiding as soon as possible. I didn't even have to wonder if I was going to be picked and I was annoyed at the raiders that didn't take it as serious as me. Now I am not even sitting on the sideline, I am one of the spectators, watching as everyone else do what I once did.

I'm not even sure if I am supposed to be bitter over it. In a way I can't be, since there is nothing or no one to blame for the situation. In a way I can even feel like I am really done with three-times-a-week raiding anyway. Just thinking about the sacrifices I have done, the time I've spent raiding... I loved it then, but I don't actually want to go back to that, so what is the problem?

I am still having fun in WoW, I enjoy logging on every now and then and just do some dungeon on an alt, log off and do something else. I love the fact that I can read about how aggravated people get regarding the dailies issue, and just shrug about it. It doesn't affect me anymore! I hate the feeling when I actually do sign for a raid and I can't really decide whether I want them to pick me or whether I'd be really relieved if they didn't.

Yet I can't, I just can't help, but feeling like I am really missing out. Like there is not even a point to playing WoW unless you do endgame of some sort, like raiding or pvp. I level my mage and I think "why waste my time, because there will be nothing, nothing, for me to do once I hit max level. Just turn around, grab another alt and do it all over again. And why? For what?". It is a creeping bitterness that I am almost ashamed off, feeling like a washed up has-been trying to be cool like the new kids on the block and failing miserably.

Eventhough I was way less geared than the other healers in the group, and had never done the fight let alone raided this expansion, I did very well during that one raid. I held on par with the best in the group, just laying some percent after the one on top. It made me remember all the theory crafting I used to do back in the day, and I immediately went into it again, analyzing logs, differences in gear, spec and stat choices, pondering whether I should reforge into this and that or choose this or that talent instead, reading on blogs for more information and... realizing it didn't really matter to me anymore.

But I still had it in me, I still knew how to do this. And like a reflex, monkey-brain if you like, I just wanted to go back to how things were. Jump back onto the band-wagon and pretend nothing had changed. Except I don't want to. Or do I?

In the end the question isn't whether I am having fun in WoW or not, I am definitely having fun. The question is whether I can get comfortable in my new wow-persona, and that is a lot more difficult to answer. As it is now, I simply don't have a choice so I might as well start liking it.

Disc Priest Q&A - MoP Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Zinn) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:52:00 +0000

Q: So what is this?
A: Just a little Q&A to get some grip on what priest healing means in MoP. These are typical questions I've had and needed answers to, and I thought I'd compile a little list of information for anyone else curious about these things.

Q: What is this not?
A: This won't be a complete guide to everything priestly, nor will I sport any fancy spreadsheets on mana regen and gains from this or that stat. This will mainly aim at giving you a fairly straight answer, from my point of view. If you want more number crunching I suggest you check out these sites instead (to mention a few).

Elitist Jerks
MMO Melting Pot
Type H for Heals
Tales of a Priest

So let's get started!

Q: I'm totally confused, how has disc priest healing changed from Cata to MoP?
A: The good news are, not much. We've got some new spells, we've got some talents as baseline - but in essence, if you knew how to heal before MoP, you will know how to heal after MoP.

The thing to remember is that healing is always forced to change somewhat when going from the end of an expansion to the beginning of another. Regardless if you've been hardcore heroic raider or just strolled in LFR every now and then, your stats will change drastically when going through the leveling process from 85 to 90, most notably your stats will suddenly decline very quickly and you will probably notice that you're ooming quicker than you used to. Add to this that Blizzard decided to change our mana pools from int-based to fixed, meaning that you might have been collecting stats that are now a lot less valuable.

If you play a disc priest (and I dare say you are if you're interested in this post) you will find that all that juicy intellect you've been stacking is worth way less now, and all that spirit you've scorned suddenly is your new best friend. Until you've had the chance to remedy this by getting new gear, this change will be noticeable by the fact that you just don't have the mana and/or mana regen to go on healing (aka shield spamming) like we could at the end of Cata.

What does this mean? Remember how we were forced to heal in the beginning of the last expansion? If you don't, here is a quick rundown;

Renew will be used a lot more than previous, even for raiding.
Shield should yet again be considered more of an oh-shit-skill, and to get Rapture procs (less important until you've stacked a decent amount of spirit, I'll get to that further down).
Back to Heal spamming, rather than Greater Heals
Be pro-active, start healing before the damage is done - Renew, Heal and PoM can always be out there.
Because Evangelism and Atonement are now baseline, if you hadn't specced them earlier you should now consider using them. If you had them in Cata, not much has changed. Try to keep up an Evangelism buff to pop for Archangel when shit hits the fan. This doesn't mean spam Smites, just the occasional Holy Fire is enough, since you have more mana efficient heals than your Atonement skills. Getting profficient at when and how to use your Atonement skills, will make a difference for harder fights.
Our new skill, Spirit Shell, should be considered a preparation skill. If you know one or more people are going to take a lot of damage, you can "prepare" by throwing on some Spirit Shell shields in advance. A skill with very high potential in other words.

Here is a hobo-list of my estimations of the hpm of some of our skills. Remember that this is based on my specific stats and healing style, but they will at least give you an idea of which skills are mana-drainers and which are less so. I give no guarantees as to its correctness (especially regarding Holy Fire and Smite).

Shield - 4hpm (not taking Rapture into account)
Renew - 6,2hpm
PoH - 2hpm (per target)
Penance - 2hpm
Heal - 5,9hpm
Flash Heal - 3,2hpm
Greater Heal - 3,8hpm
PoM - 1,8hpm (per target, my healing style, not taking glyph into account)
Smite - 3,5hpm
Holy Fire - 1,5hpm (with dot)

Q: What talents should I choose?
A: I've got to hand it to Blizzard, talents have never been as much up to whatever you prefer than now, but there are definitely some talents that are more worth having than others - as always this does depend on what kind of content you're playing. This is the talent spec I choose for heroic instance healing, and I will discuss some of the talent choices;

Void Tendrils - I've found it quite useful to be able to root down any enemy that's attacking you. This might be mostly useful when doing dailies, but also occasionally in heroics, because if the tank doesn't get those adds off you, you want to make sure they hit you as little as possible. The other talents feel less useful in this regard.

Body & Soul - The choice here is really between B&S and Angelic Feather. For heroics I'd definitely recommend B&S, because Angelic Feather requires more cooperation from your team mates to actually do any good, and good luck with that in a pug. In raids however, Angelic Feather can turn out to be a good choice when properly incorporated in a tactic, and should be chosen whenever the raid group finds good use for it. As it is now I mostly use B&S to quickly move myself out of bad stuff, or if I know someone needs a little extra boost somewhere.

Mindbender - Early calculations showed that Mindbender was the best at overall mana return. It only has two drawbacks, one big and one minor. The minor one is that you have to remember to use it every cooldown to get the most out of it, the big one is that the Mindbender, being a pet, does live a life of its own and doesn't always do what you want it to - pretty much what we're already used to from the Shadowfiend. Since Mindbender replaces Shadowfiend you could argue that it's best to have the Shadowfiend and an additional option of mana return, personally I just think the other two choices are so unpractical that unless they change them or I end up in a fight that really works with those mechanics, I am sticking with my little Mindbender (and it is so cute too!)

Angelic Bulwark - This is not a talent where I will tell you one choice is better than the other, because I think AB and Desperate Prayer are pretty much equal in terms of usefulness. DP has the benefit of being an actual heal, AB on the other hand comes automatically after heavy damage which means you don't have to think about it (which might be useful right after a big aoe where you'll probably be busy doing other things). In the end it is really up to what you feel the most comfortable with, and I think personally I will swap between the two depending on fight.

Power Infusion - Out of our choices in this tier, I prefer Power Infusion, simply because of the freedom it gives me to choose whenever I want that extra output. Twisted Fate relies on targets being on a very low health to be useful, somewhere people will rarely be in heroics. In raids TF will probably be more useful, but unless I know the raid will be on very low health for a big portion of the fight I would still choose PI over TF. Divine Insight is more useful for holy than for us disc, and just doesn't provide enough troughput for me to want it over PI. If I knew I was focusing on tank healing, maybe - but probably not even then.

Cascade - All three of these choices are quite interesting and in terms of throughput they balance out ok. In terms of practical usefulness however, it's quite different. Cascade is probably your best choice for heroics. Halo will have you aggro mobs from all over the place since it is basically a 30 yard wide aoe. In my personal opinion, Halo is almost unusable in heroics but could prove to be quite the cooldown in raids depending on fight. Divine Star is too weak for heroics if you ask me, especially considering the very limited amount of targets. Yet again, it could prove to be quite useful for that little extra aoe healing in raids, depending on fight. Overall my recommendation is to use Cascade for heroic instance healing, and for raids choose among the other ones depending on what works for the fight at hand.

That being said, as Grimmtooth pointed out in the comments, Blizzard want us to swap around between skills like never before. This is something you should try and make the most out of, so don't hesitate to change to a different talent if you think it'll work better in a fight!

Q: What should I glyph?
A: Glyphs have a lot less impact on your healing now than they've ever had, but I still have some recommendations.

Fade - Especially good for raiding, if you remember to use it.
Inner Sanctum - That extra movement speed or spell damage reduction is handy in any situation.
Holy Fire - Very useful if you want to sustain an Evangelism buff for oh-shit-moments.
PW:Shield - Probably more useful in heroics, where you might want weaker shields for Rapture procs, and extra healing is more important (since there is no one else there to do it for you).

Occasionally useful;

Penance - Whenever you know you're fighting something with a lot of running or knock-backing, this could come in handy.
Levitate - If movement is crucial, this could be worth gold if used the right way.

Just as with talents however, changing between glyphs is something that Blizzard encourages, giving us a lot of possibilities to tailor ourselves for certain fights.

Q: What are our stat priorities now?
A: The biggest change, as already mentioned, is the one to intellect. Since it now "only" gives us spell power and crit, it is a lot less important than the go-to stat it was in Cata.

Initially, you're most important stat will without a doubt be spirit. Once you feel comfortable with your mana regen, for whatever content you're healing, you can focus on the other stats. Personally I feel like around 9000 combat regen works for me for heroics, try getting over 10k combat regen for raiding.

After spirit, mastery is our secondary stat that scales the best. This does not mean that mastery is better than haste and crit, this heavily depends on your healing style. For heroics, and probably initially in raiding, you will rely a lot less on absorbtion mechanics than you might later on. Because of this, mastery will probably be less valuable to us since it only affects our absorbs. Take a look at your own meters and find out how much of your healing is affected by mastery and work with that. Remember this includes the DA procs from any critted regular heal.

Haste doesn't affect your shield (or PoM, Cascade, Halo), but it does affect all your other heals and is therefor a potentially very useful secondary stat. Crit is a lot more valuable to us now than it was in the first half of Cata, this is nothing new but pretty much the same since they buffed the healing bonus from crits. For disc even more so because a crit means a Divine Aegis proc, but crit is still unreliable in that there is no guarantee but only a chance that you'll get something out of it.

This is further complicated by the fact that the more haste you have, the more valuable crit is, and the more crit you have, the more valuable mastery is.

Personally I am trying to find a balance between mastery and haste (with a slight favoritism towards haste). At the moment I am reforging crit into haste, while leaving mastery alone, meaning my own stats look like haste -> mastery -> crit. Looking around the interwebs you'll probably be recommended to go Spirit -> Mastery -> Haste/Crit, but I must repeat that there is no point to overstack mastery just for the sake of it.

Again - haste, mastery and crit are pretty much equal, and you must find a stat balance that suits your own healing style.

Where does intellect fit in all this? Int is, as mentioned, not the all-powerful stat it was back in Cata. It is still something we want, but not at the cost of every other stat. You can probably forget about the pure int-gems for now. The easy way to think about it is that int is about as valuable as the other secondary stats (except spirit, which is more valuable until you are comfortable with your regen). You don't want too little of it, but don't want to sacrifice too many other stats for it either. Try getting mastery, haste and crit to points that work for you (for instance go for the haste breakpoints) and fill out the rest with intellect.

Q: What should I gem and enchant?
A: Simple answer is to gem and enchant into the stats that you are looking for. Lists of proper gems and enchants can be found here.

It only got worse from here

Q: I've dinged 90, what gear should I get?
A: JP gear is now available without having to do daily quests, so I definitely suggest you start out there to fill out any gear you've gotten in normals while leveling. If you're lucky you won't need much to be able to do your first heroics, where you will probably get most of your gear. The next step is, unfortunately (depending on how you feel about it), to gather rep through dailies and buy VP gear. If you have a lot of money, you can always buy craftables. I could post a list, but other people have already done a much better job than I could ever do, and they deserve the attention - Here is a great list for gear to check out. Tobeume of Nonchalant Priest has written a nice list of gear that you can collect from heroics - check it out here.

I hope this sorted out things a bit. If you have any further questions don't hesitate to ask! All creds for the links go to the original authors, thanks a lot for the work you put in for us in the priest healing community!