Alts again

Back to playing an alt. Even trying to get pvp gear got boring to me, which shows just because there is an "easier" route to purples doesn't necessarily make it a fun one.

I'm trying to participate in 5-man instances this go around. My other two alts just leveled to 70 (I can't remember doing a single post 60 instance on them sans Ramparts) and got parked for the most part. So just like with my priest, I'm trying to force myself to group more.

It's already been a year?

If it weren't for Tobold's blog the 1-year anniversary of the Burning Crusade would have passed me by.

But since he reminded me, I'm going to give BC a grade based on several areas. From personal experience and from what I've read on forums the past year.

Raiding
* More challenge
* Decreased raid size
* Prohibitive attunements
* Improvements to consumables

While attention was paid to making encounters challenging, and the decrease in raid size helped Blizzard do so, it also ended up blocking out a bunch of players.

I actually was a supporter of the decreased raid size, I was tired of waiting for people to show up when said they would. Those casual players who bumped up the 35 man raid to 40. Cut the chaff! Cut the chaff! I chanted. Until I became that player. While I never would leave a raid hanging, I did become more casual. I wasn't willing to commit to a raid schedule anymore. Pre-BC I still would be able to raid on and off. But with BC attunements requiring you to be a part of kills (within instances no one wanted to run anymore) and gear requirements -- filling in for someone became almost impossible in some cases.

I can't remember the last time I've heard someone complain about consumables, but considering I don't raid anymore that might explain it.

I can only imagine raiders would give Raiding in BC a B- (The minus due to the raid size transition and initial bugginess of many encounters).

As a retired raider, I'd have to give it a C. No longer having the chance to take part in an area of the game where I used to spend the majority of my time garners it the lower grade for me.

Leveling
*No more leveling dead zones
*New starter & middle area(s)
*Respectable quest loot rewards
*Gear reset

Blizzard fixed the dead zone areas, those times while leveling you have trouble finding quests. In fact, if you spent time instancing you'd have several areas left to quest in at 70.

With the introduction of the new races, you had brand new starter areas to level through.

Finally quest rewards you could use and not just vendor. And not just in the Outlands (starter areas had some loot that seemed more thought out). Some classes were a bit left out (warriors come to mind - to make them tank?) while others seemed favored (MORE pally loot?)

Can't please everyone though, because the same loot many of us where happy about, some complained they felt their "work" in Pre-BC had been for naught. (Blue just confirmed it will happen again in WotLK so get your whining out now.)

And leveling on alts, from 60-70 wasn't bad either because you could solo it just fine.

I give it a A. I can't imagine anyone giving it less than a B.

Endgame
*Dailies
*Flying mounts
*Heroics
*Reputations
Raiding kept me busy at 70 for a bit. Saving up 5.2k gold for a flying mount turned out to be "content" of its own. But once I had my netherdrake and when I stepped away from raiding, I wondered what I would do with my extra time.I took to leveling alts and focusing on professions a bit more. If I just did dailies I wouldn't run out of things to do, but it obviously is its own form of grind.

Heroics is supposed to be the casual players content. But after you do so many heroics (even they are part of daily quests now). It loses its, if not challenge, luster.

Grinding reputations come easier than they did Pre-BC. But in a genre defined by time-sinks, reputations is the mother of time sinks. I still like that they gave us the ability to increase many of them by more than turning in rare bat back hair.

Many players, like Tobold, took a break after the hit max cap. If you're not a raiding type or pvp type, endgame still is a tad "end of the game" for some. Even the first raiding guild to kill Illidan did it back in the summer. But I've realized you can't fault an mmorpg for this. Some use up content faster and either find something else to do, like another game, or another area of WoW.

I give it C+, considering I'm still playing I should give it a B- huh?

Which leads to

PvP
* Honor grind removed
* Arena introduced
* New BG
* More accesible gear
* Gear tier equivalent

PvP has changed the most, yet changed the least. In the scheme of things only one more BG was added. For someone who only PvPs, I can't imagine they wouldn't complain more about this.

Hardly anyone lamented the removal of the old honor grind. But the players who hit Grand Marshal and High Warlord were (justifably?) peeved to see their weapons so easily obtained. I don't think they care it was replaced by better gear, just that they allowed anyone (including me) to get it.

Arenas accomplished (some say diminished) what raiding could not. By making top of the line gear available to just about everyone who spends time trying to get it.

Some raiders, I have to assume ones who never really like raiding, jumped ship because they felt they could get just as good gear from pvp than pve. Nevermind, many pver's wouldn't use pvp gear and many pvper's wouldn't use pve gear.

I want to give PvP a A for effort, but it loses points because of the imbalance and issues with AV. Since I pvp as an alliance pugger it gets a F. But anyone with sense wouldn't pug! I'll drop it down to a B.


Miscellaneous
*Headless Horseman event
*Beerfest
A++, would have received an A+++ if the Beerfest hadn't bugged out and more people had opportunity to get a ram.

So

Overall
I guess that means the Burning Crusade gets a B from me. They did a nice job with it. And some of its flaws stem from me just playing too much and soaking up more than they can provide.

Not bad, not bad at all.

PvP taking the m out of mmo?

I have been dabbling in PvP as a filler, since raiding as pretty much become non-existent for me.

I'm not good. But its something I can do without sticking to 24 other people's schedule. I can stick with my own time zone for the most part.

I read alot about the state of PvP on the forums, once again not exactly the best barometer of what's going on. But reading rants is always fun.

The latest is about AV (Alterac Valley). In some battlegroups (several realms share these) Alliance kept losing, but instead of getting a fraction of the honor they got 0. So they boycotted AV and quit queueing. This lead to horde, used to instant or 5 or 10 minute queues, sitting and waiting in hour long queues. I'm biased, but Alliance didn't seem to complain as much about getting 0 honor, well not verbally. Horde claimed Alliance did this on purpose to punish them. But it's easy to see if you get zero honor you're not going to spend hours to accomplish essentially nothing.

Blizzard latest attempt to fix things was to make some of the npcs harder to kill for horde. And obviously horde are now complaining about that.

But the underlying complaints are what interest me most. That AV is just a place to honor farm. And that some say hardly anyone really wants to pvp there, they just want a place to gain honor, and buy their gear because, well the "real" pvp is in arenas. But arenas are only 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5.

And that leads me to this: Someone on the forums asked "What killed pvp?" and someone answered "That and making the most important aspect of PVP being small scale...in an mmo."

Do you agree? Did making arenas the be all and end all of World of Warcraft pvp ruin it?

WOW Resolutions

1) Play WOW less
2) Enjoy WOW more

I pretty much am at a point where I've found myself several times in Azeroth/Outland. The place where I know I'm not getting as much enjoyment out of the game as I could simply because I spend too much time in it!

I burned out on raiding because I'd raid almost daily. I burned out on PvP because I'd spend entire weekends in AV. I'd burn out on characters because I'd spend weeks leveling them non-stop.

I want to play the game less. It will be good for me as far as the game is concerned and definitely as far as RL (sunlight!) is concerned too.

What's your WOW resolution?

WOW went downhill from there...

I've heard that for many games...I don't remember exactly but it usually goes like this:

*Star Wars Galaxies went downhill after the combat revamp
*Everquest went downhill after the Planes of Knowledge

Everyone can predict what will happen in the future - predictions like opinions are free.

I predict, many many years from now, people will say after the introduction of Welfare Epics the World of Warcraft went downhill from there.

Making epics so easily available seems like a good idea, and while I do personally like an alternative to raiding at endgame, what carrots on sticks will that leave for us to chase after?

I'm not predicting gloom here, WOW has already lived a nice life and will continue to do so. The pushback of Warhammer seems to have knocked the only upcoming contender off the block before it even had a chance to compete.

Holidays

More time to play!!!

What are you going to do in WoW during the holidays? Are you going to play at all?

I plan on participating in the BG weekends more than usual, and take advantage of the leveling changes (less xp required per level/more xp gained for quests and kills).

How much "content" will ZA give us?

Our guild is able to field several 10-mans, and one of them has already cleared ZA. Others are still going at it, but are close.

That's much different than Karazhan. Karazhan took our fastest group a few months, if I recall correctly and our slower group finished up just a few months back.

Of course at the time there were no 25-man dungeons funneling better gear for us to wear.

I am guessing Black Temple and Hyjal guilds don't bother with ZA at all. Well maybe they take their alts in there, and I've heard its an "offspec" place. There is also one recipe, but it drops off arguably the easiest boss in there.

For many of us the loot is an upgrade, if not for our main gear but our off-duty gear. Going somewhere and not having to watch things get sharded is a thumbs up.

And I assume SSC/TK guilds are gunning for the chests. Chests only open up when you kill each boss within a certain time limit.

So far, I have no idea how we're supposed to beat all of the timers. But just like Karazhan the same time it might take to learn the first boss for some, others can do the whole place, I imagine outgearing the place will do it. But that is just a matter of going back and doing it over and over.

As far as new content goes, that's not really offering months and months of entertainment as I see it.

I'm so glad to be out of Karazhan and into some place new, its really hard for me to complain.

I don't like the people I raid with...

Actually I do.

But I got this sentiment off the General Forums from the official WoW site.

Apparently raiders are upset that epics are so easy to get from PvP they are slowly running our of people to raid with. Someone bemoaned the fact that all the people who only raided for epics are gone because they could get their epeens enlarged elsewhere through arenas.

My question was do they really miss these people?

And then it dawned on me, people have been raiding with people they don't particularly like or care in the name of progress since raiding began. Of course. And that's why you have raiding guilds who won't put your Aunt Charlotte in that last dps spot.

The desire for epics have fueled the raiding machine for years. But people are refusing to pay the high cost of fuel in form of repairs and only a chance at an epic versus the guaranteed epics at the end of a few weeks or months of arenas and battlegrounds.

Someone else finally started another thread stating the problem isn't PvP "welfare epics", but raiding itself is what is turning raiders away. The randomness of drops, the trash and trash respawns, the repair and consumable costs.

With Patch 2.3 PvP rewards supposedly better than what you can get out of the hardest raid dungeons, I'm guessing it isn't just epeen chasers that are asking why am I bothering to raid.

Season 1 PvP Armor 4 Sale

I think today you can purchase the S1 Arena armor for honor points instead of arena.

Being able to do this makes more and more sense to me.

Those who are able to achieve the rating required to get the gear when it means the most are able to. Those who aren't are given the opportunity to do so 2 seasons later.

Those who couldn't kill bosses back at their original "hard setting" are able to once the bosses are nerfed. Once again, much later when it doesn't rank on some boss killer website.

I think the term elitist applies when you don't ever, ever, ever want someone to have what you had. This way of thinking fails when it comes to gaming, especially in a never-ending game.

I will be able to purchase something many players have long since sharded, sold, deleted, or stuffed in their bank. Why those people care, I have no idea.

It's a myth

Zero pressure raiding?

Yes ontherocks you're right, I can do better. But it was more of a bookmark for me, to come back to later.


And, here I am.

In that post I saw the history of raiding in the guild I'm in:

*Finding out if many in the guild want to go the direction of end-game raiding
*Discovering which ones really mean it - by always being prepared
*Discovering those who don't - by being late, no consumables
*The break down of the so-called "relaxed, friendly atmosphere"
*Having to choose certain class mixes, some tried and true members falling by the wayside
*Hearing comments of how the "guild has changed"
*For those who decide to stay and thrive, the camaraderie of working as a team
*For those who stay and struggle, watching from the sidelines

And where I've struggled personally
*Deciding "not being quite casual enough but succeeding at group content is better for most guilds than being too casual and failing."

Why I say its a myth? I just think you can't be casual, not really. What I've heard people call casual (imagine spending 3-4 hours a night, 3-5 nights a week bowling or softball or soccer) really isn't.

"Winning" with a stacked team

I play on a server where it was a while before any guild killed Illidan. The first, like many guilds, had recruited from off the server. Recruits were players who had already been to BT/Hyjal. When they listed who got drops, none of the names were recognizable. When giving out grats it was like cheering complete strangers on. A few weeks later guilds of server veterans downed Illidan too. We could actually give personal congratulations.

For PvP, players wanted to go where the action was, so many flocked to Battlegroup 9. A group of servers know known for having the best pvp teams. I guess we're lucky so many are confined to one battlegroup. And I feel sorry for any casual players, how often do they get owned?

Battlegroups made queues much, much shorter for alliance on servers like mine, and they did so by introducing names we had never seen before. Rivalries tried to form - "Our server is better than yours!" But without specific names to taunt, they fizzled as quickly as they arose. There are no pvp heroes anymore, because no one knows anything about the battles they have fought and won. When someone won the arena mount (for being in the top percent of arena players) they only way many of us knew was because the player themselves kept posting about it, not because any of us had fell at his hands on the battlefield.

When Karazhan was released there was mention of intra-guild friendly rivalry. Groups formed around cliques, families and schedules. As it happened, color me shocked, those with freer schedules and extra hours to spend, kept going at it until it was clear. There was no competition. The rest of the groups eventually cleared on their own timetables. Something I envy now. Yes I was in the first group.

Recently a few people were cherry picked from the normal groups that had done Karazhan for the past months, to form a "supergroup" to clear Zul'Aman. In the past when the guild accomplished first kills I felt some sense of guild pride. But what obstacles did this supergroup overcome?

It just seems the strategy for winning du jour is stacking teams. Not just in the best guilds where its expected, but for the mom-and-pop guilds who aren't supposed to care as much about progression.

With 25-mans, several guildmates were pushed aside for "better" players, with the intent of bringing them back in when we had a better handle on the new dungeons. Needless to many of those players decided not to come back. Is this how its supposed to be done?

Will ZA be a hit?

Tigole the lead designer in WoW has said "Karazhan has been a big success and I think a lot of players really dig the 10 man raiding size."

Will Zul'Aman continue with that success?

I say yes. Players like having that alternative to 25-man raiding. Aside from heroics, Karazhan and Zul'Aman are the only games in town.

It's also on a 3-day reset which will allow for more swapping in and out of people.

And so far, from what I've seen the trash is minimal. They seem to reward you for your efficiency of getting through trash.

But I think its going to be a bit bumpy. For one there is no attunement. While people cry about attunements, they forget what attunements are. They are a way of preparing you for what lies ahead. Some groups, like hardcore guilds don't really need attunements and they look at it as a speed bump to their progression. But on the other end, you have players who think if you can get inside an instance you should be able to do the instance - regardless of gear, preparation or organization.

With Karazhan you had to run a few instances to get keyed, by getting keyed you at least got some gear and practice with a few encounters that weren't just tank and spank. But with ZA you don't need any kind of key. I wonder how many fresh 70s will try to find a group for ZA, simply because they can, when it has already been said that ZA is Prince/Nightbane starting difficulty (meaning it gets harder from there).

I think tackling ZA in less than average gear is going to be met with some surprise. I hear that people are going in with blues - I'm interested to know how far they are getting.

In the chat channel, people were looking for more to pug ZA. Perhaps my view of pugs are a little bit low. But I wouldn't pug ZA with a 10-foot amani hex stick.

Our group first night in, one of the many groups our guild fostered, was decently geared for ZA (Kara and T4 mostly) and we made it through a few bosses. We kept ourselves to only spending a few hours there. So I look forward to experiencing the rest in the future.

As long as you don't go in expecting to fly through it and take it for what I think it is, I think players will like it. If you clear it under the timer the first night out, this content is not for you. Unless farming for badges counts for content.

It's a new area for those either done or pretty much done with Karazhan, yet perhaps not willing (due to scheduling) or able (due to guild size) to tackle all of 25-man SSC/TK.

The gear in ZA and from heroic badges (which drop from Kara and ZA now in addition to heroics) may also get you better geared up for SSC/TK battles if you're so inclined.

Remember I've only been through some of it, so this is speculation. My guess is it's a good fit.

Oh, don't forget to pick up the quest to get a 20-slot bag.

Patch 2.3 & Zul'Aman

It was announced that, baring any unexpected issues, the next patch will be released next Tuesday. This includes the opening of the next 10-man instance Zul'Aman.

I have been looking forward to ZA since I first heard about it. I tried to spend time "casually" raiding 25-mans and even that is a chore. In order to be able to raid sometime, you pretty much have to be prepared to raid all the time. Which was more work than I realized I wanted to do.

Since 25-man raids exist and Zul'Aman is 10...there the whole matter who fitting square pegs into round holes again. Before I had the common goal of Karazhan just being a step toward 25. But this time around I'm treating 10-mans as my endgame.

What I foresee this meaning is me not being able to find a place to do 10-mans, if all the 25-man raiders group up. I never thought it would be an issue. But things change.

For the first time in a long while, I'm wondering should I find another guild. I just need something my speed, more conducive to WoW being less of a time commitment.

Its very easy to stay up late when everyone around you is doing the same. Its easy to think raiding for as many hours as I have in the past as being normal when everyone I play with pretty much does the same thing.

Lately, I thought about how I'm the same gamer, just the raiders in my guild are pushing to raid longer and more often. This...just when many raiding guilds have broken up or were merged into other guilds. I get the feeling our guild wants to play catch up more than just go at their own pace.

They don't really seem to care if I make that push with them, and maybe that's telling in itself. If Zul'Aman doesn't work out how I've been hoping it does - a more casual raiding opportunity - perhaps a change of surroundings is in order.

Legendary Randomness

I'm not inclined to seek out the numbers and crunch data...but I swear legendary weapons sure seem to drop more often than you'd expect.

The Burning Crusade was released in China back in September, yet one ambitious guild has downed Illidan already and guess what? A legendary dropped.

IIRC, the first Ashbringer dropped early on when one of the top guild's during the Naxxramas era.

And it didn't seem long after Blizzard added the druid epic flight form quest that players were coming away with the raven mount, I think the next day?

Now I'm not complaining, and WoW does have a lot of players, but I wouldn't put it past Blizzard to conveniently have a much looser loot table at the beginning of things, just as advertisement.

Welfare epics

Welfare epics describe the arena epics you can purchase. They are called welfare epics because of the presumed ease at which you can obtain them.

The biggest complaint is the fact that you only have to participate in, not win, the arenas matches to earn points. You can essentially have a losing season and still come away with rewards.

Of course, you gain less points this way and players tend to gloss over how long it takes with the 10 games a week method.

Players also complained about the Headless Horseman helm and epic rings. The helm may have been on the level of tier 4 or better and the rings were exactly like the ones you can buy with heroic badges.

As a result, these higher rated pvp teams and players who had ran heroics over and over felt their efforts were diminished.

Blizzard is changing the arena awarding system with patch 2.3, but there are no plans to change the HH event to make it harder or remove the epic drops.

To those who think casual, not-so-skilled, or whatever category these welfare epics are ascribed to shouldn't have a chance at what some take for granted I say this:

This is a carrot-chasing game. We keep the cart moving by trying to bit at the carrot. For some of us it takes weeks, others months. Why one donkey cares what the other donkey is doing I'll never know. But to stay in business they have to let us nibble on the carrot sometimes lest we lose sight of why we're playing and get a taste for apples.

Boo!

After the seemingly abrupt end to Brewfest, the Halloween events have started!

The Headless Horseman is a level 70 5-man (recommended) elite boss found in the Scarlet Monastery graveyard. He drops some great purple treats - epic ring of some type is guaranteed, as is a broom (of various speed levels). There are chances other epics will drop as well. The best one, gear-wise is the plate [Horseman's Helm].

But since we all have different tastes of what we think would be a great drop, arguably the best overall may be the non combat pet [Sinister Squashling] or the mount [Swift Magic Broom].

Always good to see they add to events instead of just rehashing old events!

gg ret pallies?

After further discussion and testing we’ve decided to add threat reduction deep in the paladin's retribution tree. Fanaticism will now reduce threat caused by all actions by 6/12/18/24/30%, in addition to its current effect.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog

Let me try to steer the blog away from my priest concerns, what a surprise they only come up when I'm spending time playing one!

Back to fun stuff like Brewfest!

Were you lucky enough to get the quest to head back into BRD before they disabled it? The reward is a glowing off-hand [Dark Iron Tankard]. It's not as detailed as the main hand [Yellow Brewfest Stein], but I'm sure most dwarves only care about what's inside their dual-wielded mugs.

Priests - The Utility Class?

I think I may have figured out what has been bothering me about the priest class.

We have moved away from healing as our #1 selling point and now our buffs (and debuffs in terms of shadow priests) have taken top slot.

Now, this isn't really a problem per se. I just have to get out of the mindset that the class I rolled for a specific purpose has a new role.

However the problem arises when the utility I can offer is already offered by another priest.

If BC is all about buffing damage output instead of healing damage input then they need to give us more ways to do so.

Jack of all healing

...master of none.

AKA today's mini-rant AKA spent time playing my priest main recently.

If you check WoW's official site for class descriptions, the first words that describe the priest class are as follows "Priests are the masters of healing". I, like I'm sure many others, took that to mean if you want to play a healer play a priest.

Times have changed for the career healer. In my limited experience the master of healing in BC is the paladin. With this in mind, I understand the hard feelings warriors have when tanking is usurped by paladins and druids. Or when mages feel pushed out by warlocks. You picked a class because it was tailored for it. Yet another class does your pigeonholed job just as well if not better.

It's hard to describe without it sounding like nothing but sour grapes. But I can bitter it up even more. A priest can do the grunt (no pun intended) work. But becoming Master of the 5-man when no one can find a paladin wasn't in the job description.