A quick round up:

Raiding:
Before Christmas, work/social stuff was incredibly hectic and I didn’t make either of the two nights we raided Dragon Soul. So it was pleasing last week to finally experience some of it with real people, as opposed to the Turing test candidates in LFR. We were a bit rusty, and co-ordination problems and rogues wanting pickpockets slowed us down, so we actually only killed the first three bosses, but as the cobwebs were removed it seemed straightforward enough. I have done the first four in LFR a couple of times, and (based only on a DPS perspective) I think the difficulty levels are pretty well matched between LFR and “real” raiding — the extra co-ordination and control you have in a “proper” raid and which is lost in LFR is compensated for by the reduced difficulty. Of course it does mean that, if your group is paying attention, LFR is a touch processional, but that’s ok.

Guild:
As ever, being a small guild can be tricky. Of course there’s the game-whose-name-must-not-be-mentioned turning heads and hearts, poachers (hands off our warlock!), different playstyles and goals to accommodate, the ever-present risk of a long-term player just running out of WoW-steam plus those tricky real-life issues like jobs eating into personal time and spouses accidentally leaving laptops on public transport (!). WTB reliable, fun and remunerative jobs with sensible and predictable hours for my guild (and myself) please.

Hour of Twilight
Well they listened. The 5mans seem (unless you end up in *that* group) 30 minutes-or-less-and-done affairs, there are a few fun mechanics, Illidan is campy enough that I don’t (yet) want to bludgeon him with a butter mallet and the loot tables appear balanced such that I’ll be running the damned things forever to fill out missing slots (*grumble*). Even with distinctly subpar DPS you can make it if people can move out of bad stuff. That said, I can’t decide whether it’s the change to holy paladin mechanics or the way healing works in these particular dungeons, but I am finding healing trickier. Once my shaman’s resto gear is ready, I might better be able to judge where the change lies.

Difficulty
I imagine that the forums are once again filled with people complaining that the new content is “faceroll” and “for the bads”, although I’ve not been to check. Certainly both the 5 mans and DS feel much more gently tuned than the Zandalaris and Firelands did at launch (with the caveat here that I’ve not done the back half of Dragon Soul, which I understandis something of a step-up in difficulty). It’s the ever-present tradeoff. During FL, only towards the end did I have more than one character I thought of as “raid ready” — Gwyddeon (bear) has tanked FL a couple of times and my DK or hunter could have filled a spot if need be (but weren’t ideally placed). The idea of running the troll instances on multiple characters really didn’t appeal that much, and it was only as I ran out of things to buy with VP on Ano that I really put effort in on the others.

Admittedly it was my first week back and I was a little like a desert wanderer at an oasis, but I’ve maxed VP on three characters so far this week and can see a number of my characters having fun in LFR in the next few weeks. The shorter run times, (apparent) relative lower difficulty and the novelty of the new means I’m quite looking forward to running the 5′s and the first half of LFR on as many characters as I can find time for. Quite a change — I wonder if that’s just me, or whether others are feeling the same way?

Altitude
Another one made it to 85 — Neposlushnyj, a Enh/Resto shammygoat. I’ve not done much in the way of healing at max level yet as I prioritised gearing her enhancement set, but I’m finding enh fun, if occasionally a little strange. It’s nice to see fairly consistent DPS on singles and pairs of trashmobs (vs the RNG yoyo of retribution) but it is a little disconcerting to get to a boss fight and not have any cooldowns to press (other than wolves, which sound great but don’t appear to do all that much). AoE is great when it works, but can be a bit of a ‘mare if individuals die before I can spread flame shock with lava lash. It seems that the better the group’s DPS, the worse Nepo does at AoE :S. Otherwise she’s a lot of fun and I think I’ve finally managed to block out her silly wobbly-bum-walk. Meanwhile, other mothballed 85s are pushing their way out of semi-retirement and complaining that their mailboxes still smell :O

LFR
I like LFR as an additional thing I can do for fun and to maybe grab some loot¹, but I’m not sure yet whether it’s ultimately going to be a good thing for the game as I like to play it. When people who are in relatively low-intensity guilds (like ours) who have never really cared overmuch about heroic modes kill Deathwing in the second week of the patch, I can easily see it affecting their desire to work through the same content on normal mode. It makes me wonder if WoW won’t echo the economic condition of the world in general here: the rich (hardmode/hardmode-aspirant guilds) get richer (more access to loot, set pieces etc) and the poor² (less focused normal mode guilds) get poorer (struggle to motivate their raiders who have already seen the content on LFR and aren’t necessarily bothered about their epeens).

Community
There have been a few departures from the blogging world recently that I’ve found… distressing. People who were funny, or amusingly bitchy, or informative, or informatively funny, or some combination thereof. New directive: from now on, if you’re going to stop blogging about wow,  please be one of the people I added to my feedreader aeons ago whose posts I barely skim. It won’t make any difference to you, but I’ll feel better.

–

Gah. Wordgasm — babble everywhere.

I’m off for a lie down and a post-prose cigarette. Adieu!

1. ha ha, have you seen how many paladins and priests there are in the average LFR?
2. I’m not for a moment suggesting that there’s something “poor” about not being a hardmode raider. It just works for the analogy, ‘k?

Anyway: on the eve of 4.3 we finally conquered the attendance boss sufficiently to have two consecutive nights working on Ragnaros. Yesterday we got the transitions to a point where we could reliably get through them without dying to massive raidwide death. Tonight, after a heartbreaking 0% wipe (ow!) we finally did it. The night the patch deploys in Europe, we killed him.

And just to make it personally special, I nabbed both the tier token (completing my t12 4pc set) *and* Sulfuras, as the only melee in our group this evening.

I *don’t care* that it might be irrelevant tomorrow. Tonight it’s awesome.

Cheers! *raises bottle*

It’s a shame that it took a couple of goes, and a greater shame that it was necessary at all, but he does cover all of the bases. Granted, he doesn’t say “and we’ll do our best to ensure it doesn’t happen again”, but I think we can probably take that as implicit.

–

No, not a “don’t take a shower, push into queues” deal like the other couple of “how not to” posts.

If you’re reading this, you’ve undoubted already read Ratshag, Vidyala, Prazdja, ze Pancake, Grimmtooth and more on the subject of the L90ETC gig and the charming video which preceded one song.

There’s a petition on change.org which contains a comment that I thought summed it up nicely, which I’ll repeat here (emphasis mine):

As a gay man, longtime metalhead, and avid Horde player, I have to say that Corpsegrinder is NOT an ambassador of the Horde I cheer for. I’ve sent a lot of tickets for this kind of language in /bg and trade chat; GM responses were overwhelmingly positive and supportive, so I felt like my concerns have been addressed even though I can’t actually verify what had been done, if anything. Is the situation in in-game chats so different from a huge promo event? After all, people pay to play the game and to attend Blizzcon; Corpsegrinder’s homophobic slurs were bleeped and there’s a profanity filter in the game’s interface, so the GMs could start responding with “turn on the filter, f****t”.

I don’t truly mind Corpsegrinder having a homophobic mindset. He’s not the only one. However, I DO mind seeing those attitudes endorsed by a representative of Blizzard; am I expected to believe that nobody in the entire company bothered to look up the un-bleeped video and find out what was actually said? I certainly hope not – the clip didn’t edit itself from a larger interview. It stands to reason that a Blizzard employee thought it would be just dandy to show a minor celeb nerdraging and using expressions that can [and hopefully do] get players tempbanned when used in game. GG, that’s some consistency right there.

Someone from the Blizzard AV team grabbed a copy of the original video, trimmed it to fit (they played an edited version) and inserted it into the programme. Someone from the Blizzard AV team added the “bleeps”. The company president was onstage for its playback.

And then as an apology, we get:

Hey guys, we read and heard all the feedback from BlizzCon this year. The Corpsegrinder bit was never intended to be taken seriously. We are sorry that we offended anyone; everything at our shows is just meant in fun. Thank you all for speaking up. We’ll definitely keep this in mind for future shows.

Our humblest apologies,

Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain

So very close. If you’d just gone with

Hey guys, we read and heard all the feedback from BlizzCon this year. The Corpsegrinder bit was never intended to be taken seriously. We are sorry that we offended anyone; everything at our shows is just meant in fun. Thank you all for speaking up. We’ll do our best to make sure nothing like this happens again We’ll definitely keep this in mind for future shows.

Our humblest apologies,

Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain

You’d probably have gone a long way to making things better. A concise apology for something which shouldn’t have happened and sincere  intent to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It doesn’t undo the mistake you made, but it acknowledges it was a mistake, and gives us hope it won’t be repeated.

“The Corpsegrinder bit was never intended to be taken seriously … everything at our shows is just meant in fun”: we think using “homo” as an insult is funny! Don’t you think it’s funny? It’s funny! Tee hee.

“We’ll definitely keep this in mind for future shows”: Pat pat. “I’ll keep it in mind” is one of the great lies — when does it not mean “never EVER going to happen”?

One more thing. If you watch the original video, there’s a *tonne* of stuff Blizzard could have clipped together for an intro without including that particular bit.

“I’ve got four accounts”
“World of Warcraft is life for me”
On priorities: “My family, and World of Warcraft.”
“When it comes to World of Warcraft I’m a pathetic nerd — but I’m not Alliance!”
“This is supposed to be an interview about Cannibal Corpse … I’ll talk about World of Warcraft all day”.

They could have edited those clips together, slapped the “…but I’m not Alliance” one at the end (if they still wanted to do the rawr, horde thing) and everything would have been ok. Sure, people would have dug up the original and perhaps a few questions would have been asked, but it would have been completely different. But they didn’t — they *chose* to include the segment they used.

Including the stuff which, if it had been said in a chat channel, would most likely have been sufficient to earn the speaker a caution from a GM at the very least.

How not to instance as a hunter (concise edition)

• Aspects are tricky, and you’re quite new. Stick to Aspect of the Noob (Aspect of the Pack)
• Definitely have problems with your misdirect
• Be sure to let your guild know that you had the wrong aspect on in the last pull.
• Bonus points if you’ve already done this once in a recent guild raid.

How not to tank Baradin Hold as a Death Knight

• For Occu’thar, definitely don’t make use of AMS to counter the nasty breath attack. Those blue bars are unsightly, make them go down
• For Argaloth,  *do* make use of AMS for the cleave (does that screw up the damage sharing? Not sure…)
• When running between Occu’thar and Argaloth (which you might do if you have a fresh-ish 85 alt in your run) don’t bother with Unholy Presence. The raid will wait for you.
• Just before you get to the room, switch Unholy Presence and forget what you just did. Lower GCD > threat and survivability any day
• Definitely complain that the other tank is taunting or overthreating, even though they’re waaaay more experienced than you. I guess I lose a potential bonus point for the other tank being a guildie
• Try not to realise the problem before most of the other group are already dead to the cleave.
• Announce to the raid full of guildies that you have “Aspect of the Noob” switched on. Be reminded that it’s a “Presence”¹.

1. but still very definitely Presence of the Noob

I have read through a few of the summaries which the various Wow Insider class writers have written, and some of the comments. And I’m quite prepared to hold opinions, however misguided .

Hunters
Minimum range *can* be annoying (I’ve been playing my hunter a fair bit recently, and the bear boss in the zulroics can be a PITA if the other players don’t move out far enough) but to me, an admittedly fairly new hunter, it’s a core part of the class. How do I know I’m not a good hunter yet? Because I have a nasty habit of finding myself in the wrong place when a fight’s moving around. If I was a better hunter, that would happen much, much less. Apart from anything else, it’s something I can measure as I play — how often do I end up with greyed out shot buttons? Also, if hunters have no penalty for being in melee range, then I’m afraid disengage has no place. And you can have my disengage when you pry my cold dead dwarven fingers from it. Assuming you can get past my scorpid.

Mages
Pretty please, can some of the yo-yo RNG be taken out of fire spec? I *like* that there’s an RNG proc element to fire — it’s one of the things that appeals — but it seems to me to be a bit too critical (ha!) to the spec’s capabilities. Good RNG = ZOMGburnallthethings. Bad RNG = respec arcane, nub. Centrella (my mage) was rather enjoying being a fire mage before having one too many bad RNG patches and switching to arcane. Not because of it’s theoretical higher DPS, but because it leaves her, or possibly me, with the lions share of responsibility for how well she does. Not a fickle and easily distracted goddess.

Arcane *is* an interesting spec, I think, although only for longer fights. For shorter fights, as we all know, arcane is 1-button spam with a couple of cooldowns. And, bizarrely, I’m quite happy with arcane AoE being centred on … er … Cent.  Yes, it can be hugely limiting. I don’t mind. It’s an interesting variation and distinct from fire/frost AoE. The flavour tastes good to me.

Holy Paladins
Another patch, another rewrite of paladin abilities. Still, the idea of having a targeted AoE and possibly an AoE healing priority,as opposed to “hit Holy Radiance, hope people are nearby, spot heal/light of dawn if you’re well placed, maybe”, could make things interesting. Right now I’m back in the DPS camp, where the atmosphere is more raucous but the facilities are much dirtier, so I’ve not been as focused on this, but conceptually it sounds promising. Plus the opportunity to turn other players into little beacons of light-based healing sounds like a giggle.

Ret Paladins
I still don’t get all the wah-wah about the retribution “rotation” in cataclysm. Don’t get me wrong, I loved ret in Wrath, it was manic and fun, but there’s so much more to it now. The biggest problem with ret is probably that keeping track of inquistion and to a degree, holy power, is a PITA with the default interface. Fix that (which Blizzard probably should do, but which is trivial to handle addons anyway) and you’re away. It’s been a while since I played it, but I did find that when I wanted a quick blast of the old ret playstyle, Unholy DK dps could stand in as a “hit the button that’s off cooldown and remember the priority when you have choices” and served as both a patch of simple fun and a reminder that the “new” ret is, long term, more engaging for me.

Other than that, I think Antigen‘s post hits most of the major markers. I confess, I don’t do a lot of seal swapping mid fight precisely because it feels like the GCD loss either side is in many cases going to override the benefit of the cleave damage gain, but with a GCDless seal, that’d be a different thing. Although there’d *would* need to be some kind of tradeoff (like the increased mana cost) otherwise you’d just macro seals to crusader strike and divine storm and it’d be invisible. I’ve only just hit the “gearwall” of not being able to get any meaningful upgrades without winning a head/shoulder token (the 378 trinket from Hyjal rep appears to be a fairly minor upgrade over the Caber) or killing Raggy and being lucky enough to grab Sufuras (pleasepleaseplease), so I don’t know firsthand how much variation there is on boss fights due to RNG. My *feeling* is that it’s nowhere near as bad as Cent’s fire spec, but I’ll know better soon.

All that said, I’m not feeling particularly underpowered, There are still aspects of my personal play to improve which are likely to contribute more DPS than buffing X or twiddling with Y, and I like that.

–

Other nice things about 4.3: it seems like, once the initial run-the-new-dungeons-because-they’re-new phase is done, and once the run-new-dungeon-X-until-the-blasted-[item]-drops is over, running heroics for VP will be a) much less boring, and b) probably less essential. With actual tier pieces only dropping from raid bosses, the whole “should you cap VP” debate could well become moot. Of course, it could be replaced by the “should you run looking-for-raid groups to gear up?” debate instead, but that’s the wow community for you — if we didn’t have something to complain about, we’d complain about the lack of problems instead.

I’m in two minds about LFR: I’m not massively keen on raiding with a selection of randoms from servers all over Europe just to get interim pieces, but it could be a fun thing to do when you’ve got a little time and aren’t in the mood for a 5man. I’m a little concerned that it might effectively kill raid pugging though — call me a freak if you like, but I do actually enjoy joining the occasional pug raid on my alts and part of that is the possibility of meeting friendly people whom I might play with again.

–

On the Firelands nerfs:
I’m not especially keen. For our guild, which is as much limited by available players than by gear/skill, it’s trivialised everything except Ragnaros. Post patch, every single encounter up to Ragnaros is made so much easier I actually think it’s has negative effects on the Ragnaros fight, which we’ve just started working on. Players’ full attention simply isn’t required anymore, and errors which would have made fights incredibly difficult or possibly caused a wipe can now be compensated for by other members of the raid. Which means a drop in concentration in time for a new boss which still requires us to focus.

The other downside is that it takes some of the joy out of the other bosses. It’s just less satisfying killing a boss you know is now fighting with one hand tied behind their back. It feels a bit unfair.

I just hope they don’t look at the number of guilds who were making slow-but-steady progress pre-nerf who are now stacked up on Ragnaros, and nerf him further, because that would achieve NOTHING, and really strip from me any satisfaction I might get from killing him. Guilds like ours who have made slower progress (for whatever the reason) are by their nature not filled with people desperate to be raiding heroic modes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I have no interest at all, but we obviously don’t feel like we’re “doin it rong” if we kill the end-of-raid boss before the next patch/expansion and don’t do much else. So if we have a good run through a tier, and naturally progress into hardmodes, great! But the nature of these nerfs make me feel like I’m being told that normal modes are completely irrelevant, which is a) crap, and b) rather missing the point of having bosses and “modes” at different difficulty levels.

I’m not looking at this as a “if you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough” deal. It’s personal. By trying and failing, I learn both a fight’s mechanics and to better use my character’s abilities to manage them. This, along with the gradual process of making my character more powerful through gear upgrades, is my personal progression. Obviating that by eliminating the requirement that I play a little better and/or upgrade my gear a little takes away one of the things which make playing fun. It’s not the whole of the thing, but it’s a significant part.

<imagine an embed of the Monty Python “Yorkshiremen” sketch, which acts as a study guide for the preceding paragraph. Right, that’ll do. You’ve all seen it, no need to watch it again>

Given that *every* time I attempt to comment on WoW Insider their comment system has a complete freakout and attempts to persuade me I don’t exist, I thought I’d post this here.

–

One problem with the oft-proposed “make purples raid-only” is that it would feel odd when you were replacing purples from the first raid of an expansion with blues from the second or third set of heroics 5 mans released in that expansion. I know there’s already some interplay between blues and greens when levelling (e.g. Throne blues being replaced by quest greens from Uldum/Twihigh) so it’s not unheard of. Still, I’m not sure it makes lots of sense to throw away the epic hat you earned in by defeating the first tier-end boss of the expansion in favour of a blue drop from a five-player dungeon in the same expansion that took 28 minutes from pull to valor points.

Aside from that, I don’t get this obsession with tooltip text colour. Gear upgrades are great, but the important questions are “will this let me do more dps/more hps/take less damage?” and “does it look cool?”, not “what colour is the icon border in the character view”. Even iLevel is only important insofar as there are content gates based on it (the various dungeon finder requirements).

We’ve all encountered people playing waaaay less effectively than their gear should allow.

We’ve *also* all encountered players who are comparatively less well-geared but who are making up for it with good play. The difference with this second group is that, unless you habitually inspect every new player you meet at the start of a run, you don’t notice these people. It looks like they’re doing an ok job, not the best, not the worst, so you think nothing more of it, and don’t realise how well they must be playing to do as well as they are with the gear they have. For both of those people, while their gear sets the upper boundary of their performance, it’s the way they play that most determines their effectiveness.

Ironically, if I’ve read correctly, Blizzard are implementing a variation on this in t13, where actual tier set pieces will *only* be available via raid drops. Valor points will allow you to purchase more-or-less equivalent pieces, but presumably without the set bonus attached. Perhaps the tooltip text of t13 setpieces will be ultraviolet…

–

In other news, it would appear I’m a DPSer again. We’ve acquired another fulltime healer *wave* which has meant that my heal-arious holy-ing (sorry, sorry) hasn’t been required. It’s been interesting.

Pluses:

• Hitting things is fun. This is very important.
• My DPS gear is better than my healing gear
• I won a shiny new axe from Shannox
• I still might get to ninja healing plate drops anyway
• It’s much more satisfying to charge in and hit stuff at the start of the fight (vs. lurk at the back waiting for incoming damage)
• There’s lots of running about and a few fun jobs (DPSing Beth upstairs, chasing doggies on Shannox, steering Rhyolith, stupid stupid sons of flame)

Minuses:

• Healing is also fun
• The healing view is generally better, provided one remembers to look up from the green boxes.
• I could try to blame my healing failures on gear or on “not being a mainspec healer”. I’m supposed to know how to DPS *eek*.
• Welcome back, faceroll jokes. Oh how I’ve missed you. Much like my consecrate button. Clearly I need bigger ears.
• I’ve lost all my lovely tools. Farewell, aura mastery. Please, please, PLEASE, please can I have speed of light in retspec? PLEASE?
• HOW much running about? I swear Riplimb was laughing at me. And those stupid whackamole druids on Alysrazor.

1. of the best of the best of the best, repeating of course

–

I’ve just about had enough of “generations”. I’ve been reading wowblogs and forums and apparently, the young generation or the twitter generation or the ADD generation or the insert-perjorative-generation are ruining everything. Yoofs. Damn them.

It’d be more accurate, perhaps, to say that game companies are ruining everything, by designing games which cater to the lazy generation. They’re just in it for the money, chasing the LCD to maximise shareholder return. Capitalists. Damn them.

…except don’t all of those studies about gamers seem to suggest the “average” gamer is somewhere in the 30s-40s bracket? So surely they should be designing for those people instead? People of middle years with money and lives. Damn them. Er, us. No, them.

Best not to think about that too carefully, I suspect.

–

For those who don’t already know, I live in London. In Catford, home of the “famous” Catford Cat, should any of you feel like dropping by for a chat and a dram.

Although it wasn’t extensively covered by the news, Catford had its own small share of “fun” during last month’s UK riots, with a few stores looted and/or damage. Damage was light enough that, during the #riotcleanup twitter phenomenon, the council posted a tweet which effectively said ‘thanks for your support but we’ve got this.’

Aaaaanyway, the news aftermath was largely what you’d expect, with sensible discussion in some places, liberal handwringing in others, and a goodly dose of old-fashioned string-em-up, hanging’s-too-good-for-’em, bring-back-national-service shoutiness as a constant backbeat. And lots of “generation”s.

The selfish generation. The Me generation. The feral generation. The yob generation. So many generations.

My concern: generations don’t spring fully-formed from the mind of Zeus. Each generation is shaped by the generation before it, by parents wanting their children to have the things they didn’t or couldn’t have. By parents seeking to avoid the “mistakes” that *their* parents made. They’re shaped by the society they’re born into (which is shaped by the preceding generations). They’re shaped by the events of the time.

Did I just take a long time to write “parents are responsible for their children, and should feel so.”? I guess in a roundabout way I did.

–

Back to Warcraft. If you’re finding yourself cursing out WoW’s generation Z’ers, it might be worth considering what your contributions to their attitudes and the way they have developed may have been.

If you are one of the many World of Warcraft players who play other games too, you’ve probably noticed the spread of the plague that threatens to engulf us. If WoW is your only game, you may yet be unfamiliar with the dire situation the world faces, so allow me to summarise.

Zombies. Thousands of ‘em. 

I thought perhaps the disease had been stopped, but no. We’re still neck deep in games where, bereft of any ability/desire/willingness to invent new “bad guys” (or even the ability/desire/willingness to choose a different trope), the design meeting must have gone something like

“Ok Bob, settle down. We’ve some great gameplay elements in the bag already, but we need a story. A structure. A narrative that ties together the encounters you’re designing and the abilities we’re giving the player.”

<silence>

“C’mon guys, help me out here. Let’s brainstorm a bit, throw some scenarios out there, some characters we can build on.”

<silence>

“Please. Seriously. We *need* this. I’m already responsible for the website, managing our forum community, keeping our social media presence lively and responsive and more. I write the docs. I do the accounts. I even sent for a hygienist to deal with Alex’s… problem. Can’t you guys wake up a bit and help me here? I can’t write a whole new scenario by myself.”

*pause*.. “Hey, I thought of something!”

“Brilliant. Let’s hear it!”

“If this is officially a project meeting, can I expense my lunch? It’s 12.03.”

“Fuck you guys. I’m not slaving away if you lazy bastards won’t help. Zombie apocalypse it is. AGAIN. Hell, at least I won’t have to rewrite the box copy.”

 

There’s only one solution to this plague. And no, it’s not to take off and nuke the site from orbit.

STOP BUYING THE DAMN THINGS.

*pant*

I was getting bored of buying my own food for raiding ‘n stuff, so decided we needed to get the recipe for the lobster jacuzzi. A fishing competition seemed like the thing… but with a little guild like ours, a “first person to get X number of fish” competition wasn’t going to work. Neither would a “everyone get together on X day and fish”, unless we decided to forgo raiding for an evening to do it (no thanks). So… the fishing and poetry competition was born.

Entry requirements: 120 fish from pools plus one poem, haiku or limerick. Delivered in about a week or less.

Results: well, we got the fishing achievement before all of the entries were in. And guildies are now voting on their favourite poems, with the winner taking away a unique guild rank (tbd) and their choice of a pet from the Blizzard pet store OR a bike mount. Whichever one is left will then be awarded to another entrant by that most capricious of judges, Lady RNG.

To give you an example:

There once was a man called Ano
Who thought he could play the piano
But his thumbs were too big
On just his first gig
They compared his recital to guano

He sat at his desk with a pen
And thought about hobbies again
Where is the thrill
When your hands have no skill?
And you fail nine efforts in ten

He decided to put us to shame
And started a dragony game
“But which class to be
With these phalangees
I’m tired of being to blame”

So he took up a paladin mace
And flourished in dungeons with grace
But his method was flawed
We thought he tapped the keyboard
But the whole time he just played with his face

And no, I didn’t write that. Bastards.

–

Also, I’ve been playing too much to write, but I have been reading. This morning, I read this post on wowhead news, linking/quoting from a couple of articles about “why cataclysm is bad” or “why WoW is dying”. There’s very little point in commenting on it there, and not much more point in writing about it here, but what the hell.

1. “Most people dislike Cataclysm”. Really? I see no hard data on that (feel free to point me at some). I see a lot of forum bandwagon jumping, but that’s normal. I see a bunch of people who don’t like specific things. I’m not sure that adds up to “most people dislike Cataclysm”. Not even slightly. Anecdotal: I’m having a good time. So are the people I’m playing with.

2. A study quoted in the Gamasutra article surveyed 2865 self-selected WoW players, 72% of whom were from the US, 70% of whom had played for three years or more. And which was published six months before Cataclysm was released. It’s an interesting study on the subject, but as far as I can tell it’s got nothing to do with the article quote from the author, who says “I think people get bored more quickly”. Than what? And, er, ok.

3. Again from the Gamasutra article, there’s a quote from a staff writer and wow player who says ”There isn’t a lack of content in Cataclysm. The problem is the lack of strong appeal for anyone in particular. The gear doesn’t carry enough psychological weight for the hardcore players, and the raids are too difficult for more casual players, especially relative to the rewards they provide. The last raiding tier was significantly nerfed in 4.2, but its rewards are now behind what casual players can acquire by doing 5-mans, so there’s no incentive to raid older content beyond doing it once or twice just to see the new bosses.”

The thing is, that’s not really true. You can buy chest, legs, hands, bracers, one ring, one neckpiece and a relic/wand from the VP vendor, all of which are better than gear from tier 11 but it’ll take you several weeks of dungeon running to buy them all. You can buy boots, a trinket, another ring and a cloak from the JP vendor, which are *as* good as, not better than the drops from tier 11 (give or take, depending on your stat priorities), plus you can pick up t11 chest, legs and hands which might be better than raid drops once you have two items (for the set bonus). The rest is raid only, unless you want to spring for BoEs or crafted items.

Also, there we go with the whole “casual” bullshit again. What’s a casual player in this context? Someone who doesn’t raid regularly? Someone who only pug-raids? Someone who can only commit 90 minutes to any one gaming session? If you’re that “casual”, you’re hardly likely to be drowning in VP/JP so … eh? That has a bit of a smell of the old “if I raid, I want to be massively, visibly and demonstrably better looking/better geared than you nooby scrubs” thinking, which I tend to dislike. If you’re interested in that sort of boasting, send people links to the RSS feed/screenshot of your battle.net character newsfeed, with the date of your first kill prominently visible¹.

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That last point comes back to something that makes me twitch a bit. Are there really so many people who play until they’ve ticked off every item on their “I want this” gear list, and then unsubscribe until the next patch adds in a few new weapons or what have you? The reward mechanism for WoW (group content) is pretty well known, but I always thought it was a combination of things: exploration (new bosses/mechanics), teamplay, social interaction (raidchat/voicecomms), personal performance (execution), group performance, progression (next boss/harder mode/achievements for difficult things), “tangible” rewards (loot). Is the last item >>>> all of the others?

1. PS: if you do this to me as some sort of boast, it’s possible I will conclude you’re a knob.

• I could be making sure I do my firelands dailies every day.
• I could be doing those dailies on one of my level 85 alts, preferably one with a useful crafting profession (vs Ano’s leatherworking/skinning combo).
• I could be making sure I hit the VP cap
• I could be running heroics/trolltroics: with Tremble to replace his pair of <333 tanking trinkets, with Grammy to replace the various bits of PVP gear she’s still wearing, with Cent to replace her remaining blues
• I could be attempting to earn cash and stockpile materials for a new weapon, or at least remembering to make use of Grammy’s transmute cooldowns more profitably.

I really struggle with doing things I “ought” to be doing, unless they’re things I’d do anyway because I like to. I’ve actually VP capped a couple of times already, not because I feel I should do but because I like running dungeons and find bad pugs a) generally rare, and b) easily dealt with or ignored. Anyway, that aside, I’m not really doing any of these things. Instead, I’ve been playing with my baby bear and pugging a few T11 raids.

Pugging tier 11 

Blizzard did say that part of the reason for the huge nerfs to T11 was to encourage and enable pug raids, and this seems to have worked. Entertainingly, now pug raiding is common (as it was at the end of Wrath) a familiar annoyance has resurfaced: gearscore. Well, not “gearscore” per se, but looking in trade I see an awful lot of “LFM BoT, must have ilvl 361+, /w spec and chiev” which puts us straight back into “can a bunch of overgeared players please carry me? kthx” territory. I even found myself forced to intervene in one conversation  in trade¹, in which a person whose average ilevel was 350 was told that wasn’t enough for t11, and that he should run more trollroics to gear up. *wail*

I’ve now joined a couple of different PuG T11 runs. Firstly, Centrella the mage was  reunited with an RP guild she accompanied on a few ICC runs towards the end of Wrath. While definitely not cutting-edge raiders even by my standards, they’re a friendly and fun bunch, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Another guildie joined us on her DK and we were able to amble through the first four bosses, in what turned out to be the first visit to Cataclysm raid content for a number of people in the group. Sadly, the run offered fairly conclusive proof that Centrella’s RNG-defying streak of luck is definitely over :’(.

I also joined two guildies to form an all-Enthusiast healing team for a group with Atramades and Nefarian left to kill. It was interesting to note the people who hadn’t really processed the nerfs to T11 content, with a vocal segment (including the raid lead) insisting that if we didn’t get Nef down to 65% or less during the pillar phase, it would be a wipe. That might have been the case before 4.2, but most certainly isn’t now. In any case, after a couple of false starts we got it together. Still no bloody loot, though .

Angry baby bear

The other thing I’ve been doing is chainrunning low-level instances on my little druid, who’s journeyed from ~30 to ~50 exclusively via dungeons and dungeon quests. It’s been a mixed bag.

The good: I just like being a bear. It’s nice that my in-game avatar is hairier than me and has a fatter arse, for example. Also, the snarling sounds are great, as are the angry ghost bear effects for some of the abilities. It’s pretty simple to play (at this level) so I should, in theory, be able to concentrate on awareness/positioning rather than mastering ability usage. Being able to switch to kittyform and sprint is handy for all sorts of out-of-combat things. The cat dance is great, the bear dance is awesome. Bears have the most brilliant “sit”.

The not-so-good: Bears (and presumably warriors) with no rage are sad, pitiful creatures. It seems that, in the lower-level dungeons, this is a common occurrence with trigger happy or just plain asshole DPS present. Heirlooms and enchants notwithstanding, there’s only so much a bear can do if someone else pulls at the wrong time. The most extreme case I’ve encountered so far was a run with three hunters, two of whom would open with multishot on every pull, and took the appearance of a skull over the head of a target as their personal green light. Cue desperate taunting and praying for rage, and a decent amount of cursing on the human side of the screen. After 5 minutes of this, I said in chat “Just so you know, if you open every pull with multishot when I’m not yet in melee range, I’m not going to bother chasing them down.” The current “easy” state of low-level dungeons relative to your typical lowbie dungeoneer (often an alt fully loaded with heirlooms) meant this didn’t have quite the “behave or you’ll die” severity I might like, but they did ease back a little so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Also, I’m sure there’s more to play with later, but right now I have what feels like an odd mix of abilities. I’ve got loads of charges, stuns, debuffs and taunts, but only three abilities that do damage. It seems rather odd — for pretty much every low-level bossfight, once the pull is underway and I’ve applied my debuffs, I can just drum the 1, 2 & 3 keys like I’m tapping my fingers on the table until the boss falls over or I do. I have no survival cooldowns yet (potions are all I’ve got) and from the bosses I remember, there’s only been the occasional knockback to interrupt me, easily dealt with by feral charge or skull bash.

Perhaps this is because I’m supposed to learning the mechanics of the pull rather than the mechanics of a rotation/priority system, and I understand that Blizzard have said that they want tanks to have less-complex threat rotations to allow more time/focus for the other parts of their job, but right now it’s a bit… plain.

Productivity

Actually, since this was first drafted, I have done one “productive” thing. Last night we ventured into the Firelands². After a couple of calibration attempts, where I got the measure of the Shannox tank’s incoming damage, we killed him. On the fourth pull. This slightly confounded all of us, as we’d made no real plans for the evening beyond “try to kill Shannox”, expecting that we’d kill him in a ok-last-pull-of-the-night-guys-concentrate moment. When he was dead shortly after 9pm with another 90 minutes remaining before end-of-raid, we were completely flummoxed.

Sensible folks that we are, we elected to do some exploring before heading to Baradin Hold, and found an interesting miniboss (whose name I don’t remember) who pelted us with fireballs and meeeleons of little adds on the way up to him, to the delight of our warrior tank whose name was glued to the top of the recount list.  We also had an amusing death: while considering a proposal put forth by a guildie that we should be pulling and interrupting some little fellas who were channelling a spell  at a nearby portal, a *giant* flame elemental appeared and smooshed us all.

“Perhaps so,” we concluded. Fun times.

1. which is much like discussing politics or religion in the pub: never a good idea
2. my first trip with the guild as I missed last week’s unsuccessful attempts