Wicked Mortals!

I have been enjoying the opportunity to play Alterac Valley this past week, and Friday night my Questing Buddy and I participated in something I haven't in quite a while...

The summoning of Ivus, the Forest Lord:

Needless to say, we won this one.

Yeah, I didn't make the leaderboard, but I also was holding down Iceblood Graveyard so that we could keep our side in the fight. Sometimes, the smarter thing to do is do the small things so that the team can win.

#Blaugust2024

A Returning of Sorts

Under the header of "Everything is Cyclical", people are returning to WoW Classic Era.

How do I know, you might ask?

Because we actually have Alterac Valley Battlegrounds being played when it isn't even AV Weekend.

What you see here are the number of Alterac Valley Battlegrounds in the mid-afternoon on a Monday. 

For six months or more, the number of AV Battlegrounds you'd see --no matter the time of day-- would be ZERO. Unless, of course, it's AV Weekend, where you get bonus honor for playing Alterac Valley on those days.

This past weekend was most definitely not AV Weekend, yet there were on average three or so AV battlegrounds happening concurrently. Even at 1 AM Server Time. It felt good to see that BG window pop within 15 minutes, whereas it had been simply not popping at all. 

I don't know the reason why people are coming back to play in Era once more (go ahead and post your wild speculations in the comments if you're inclined) but it is good to see them here. 

#Blaugust2024

Like Riding a Bike, If It Involved Wholesale Slaughter

I was commenting on a post by Shintar about how I've been strangely optimistic about WoW the past week or so, and I think it has something to do with a couple of factors.

Well, there's this for starters:

Yes indeed.

I think my questing buddy was stunned when I told her I joined a Horde guild.

Now, before anybody says the word "raiding", Catalyst is a leveling and social guild. It's been quite a while since I was in an active leveling guild --I think Retail Orphans kind of qualified, but they fizzled out far quicker than this guild has-- and logging in to see about 20-25 people of all sorts of levels just doing things is refreshing. When you're in a (hardcore) raiding guild, leveling toons are few and far between. Or if you find some, they don't stay that way for long as they rocket up quickly so they can be used for raiding alts or to support your main raiding toon. Just lazily leveling along is quite the exception.

To be fair, I realize that my stay in Catalyst might not be very long. Leveling guilds tend to have a pretty decent amount of churn as toons reach max level and then move on to other guilds for raiding or other endgame content. But at the same time, having a guild that isn't constantly fretting over parses or following the meta* or arguing over various aspects of raiding is quite nice. 

Some people will tell you that my current raiding guild is relaxed and social, and to that I raise my eyebrows in disbelief.

If this is relaxed and social, I hate to find out what other hardcore raiding guilds are like. 

No no, scratch that. I once had an extended conversation with someone who was on the (at the time) #2 raiding guild on Myzrael, and he was telling me that he had to come up with about 1800 gold a week to cover all the potions and whatnot they needed for raiding multiple days a week.

"1800?" I was stunned. "Are you sure you had two zeroes there?"

"Oh yes. More than once I was tempted to just buy gold to keep up."

The irony is that I do know people who (at least in Classic) bought gold just to keep up with the demand, and their raid teams were nowhere near the top of the charts. 

But still, the stress of trying to be the best would have driven me bonkers. And my somewhat feeble attempts to keep up in TBC Classic --because I was a raid lead and had to at least set a decent example if I was going to ask others to do what they could to be ready for raids-- were frequently sabotaged by my desire to zag when everybody else zigs.

Like right now in the Isle of Quel'danas.

***

Someone asked me last Friday before Karazhan what I thought of the Isle of Quel'danas quests and Magister's Terrace, and I told him that I hadn't been there. "There's no real reason for me to go, since I'm not progression raiding, and I figure I'll wait until the crowd has moved on in a couple of months and then I'll go up there."**

"But right now if you get into a group for MgT with a decently geared team it's really easy."

"Oh, I've no doubt, but my experience in Magister's Terrace was when my Mage leveled through there. Imagine doing MgT on quest greens instead of raid gear."

"Oh... shit."

"Yeah."

For me, it's exactly like trying to tell someone who is kitted out with Phase 3 raiding gear (Hyjal / Black Temple) that the Zul'Aman bear run is hard to do, when your raid team is frequently a mix of Phase 2 and 3 geared toons and toons with a decent portion of quest greens or some Phase 1 gear. If they haven't walked a mile in your shoes, they won't understand it.

Or like my questing buddy telling me that I'm pretty much hiding from the guild these days, to which I'll agree completely. 

After all, being a non-raider in a hardcore raiding guild is like being a second class citizen. 

Things that you want to do for fun are shelved because there's not enough people to do them, but if it's progression raid related in some way people will show up for it. I have never forgotten being booted out of an instance run because I was just coming to help out but someone else who showed up right before the run needed something for the raid from the dungeon. The organizer felt that person's need --even though they logged in at the last second-- was more important than me volunteering to just help out and actually heading out to the dungeon entrance before getting the boot. 

There was a secondary reason, of course. I wasn't part of the guild at the time. And for me, even though I'd been raiding with them for months, I suspected that the dungeon run organizer hoped to give me enough of a kick in the pants to join the guild or something. But I don't work like that. I'm not a conformist just to do things so I can hang out with the cool people. I want to enjoy myself and do things that matter, because that's what friends do. Friends don't dump one another for others who login at the last moment.***

***

So, I'm in a Horde guild that is very casual, and it has reinvigorated my enjoyment in just hanging around and doing things. I don't have any pressure to be doing what's expected, or what my gear set is, or anything of that sort. Some people are more driven to level quickly than others, like one person who just joined because their uncle is hoping to get them into raiding, but I realize that person isn't going to be in the guild very long. So I'm not worried or anything. 

I can just do whatever, comment on things people bring up in guild chat, and once in a while get into a dungeon run. I've been on more TBC dungeon runs on Neve in the past 1.5 weeks than I've been on in Linnawyn total. Part of that is the lack of ability to get pugs together at this state of the game, but also that I'm trying to keep Linna on the down low for the time being. 

***

That does lead me to the other reason why I feel more upbeat about WoW lately.

See all those pink bars?
Paladins for everybody!!

I've gotten back into running Battlegrounds.

My Classic Battlegrounds adventures petered out when I began progression raiding, and truth be told I was tired of all the losing in Alterac Valley.  So when my questing buddy began prodding me to go capture fortifications in Hellfire Peninsula or capturing Spirit Towers in Terrokk Forest for PvP Honor****, I finally relented because she needed gear for an alt of hers and one way of getting it was through PvP. 

I went and did it, and dammit, the bug bit me. 

So I did it on both Brig and Linna. And then on Neve.

And then after another friend showing me what gear he was able to get just doing this sort of Honor farming while leveling, I realized that Linna could finally get a weapon that was at least within 50 miles of being close to what her Retribution Paladin BiS would be. Lugging around a quest green weapon into Karazhan was my nightmare, that I'd essentially have to be carried the entire run and not pull my own weight, and here was a chance of at least not looking so pathetic that all I did was engender sympathy. 

I had no idea that this was actually a remake.
This was the version I knew, but Lyn Roman
did a version in 1973.

So I steeled myself and queued up for Alterac Valley. And we won.

And again.

The next time we lost, but the speed runs that had replaced the terrible grinding losses were addictive.

And dammit, I could do this, even with my crappy gear.

So I kept running AV on Saturday night, one after another, until I looked up and it was 5 AM on Sunday morning.

Uh oh.

I went and lay down, but I couldn't sleep. I was too hyped up on this; I could run AV and get some positive direction on gear, and I could do it without running around and begging people for help. 

My honor goal toward getting Linna a weapon grew closer and closer throughout Sunday, in between yard work and eating and some other odds and ends. Having everybody else in the house out for the day had its advantages, since there are 4 drivers in the house and only 3 cars. So.... Oh darn, I can't go anywhere. I guess I'll just, oh, run another Alterac Valley.

I finally had to force myself to confess what I'd been up to with my questing buddy, and she gave me the "you need to not do this so singlemindedly and relax" bit that I typically give others.*****

"Yeah," I replied, "but I say that because I have those tendencies too, so I know what it's like."

And here I was violating all of that in pursuit of that high that had proven so elusive in Battlegrounds in Classic, and was also a big reason why I stopped playing Retail WoW. When all you feel is losing, it infects your mindset, so having an equal chance at winning is just so damn addictive. 

I did get enough Honor to get Linna her weapon --it took 25 hours, by the way-- and I took a deep breath and backed off a bit. I'm still running Battlegrounds, but not at the insane breakneck pace I did last weekend. If nothing else, I need to show I can master my emotions so I can be a good example to others. And if I can't, I need to tell people that so I can get some help.

***

Okay, so yes, I feel like things are moving forward after being stuck in neutral since, well, December.

And that's not even covering the changes to the code of conduct that Blizz is bringing to WoW soon. 

Thank goodness.

*Which, right now, involves running the Magister's Terrace dungeon and doing dailies out at the Isle of Quel'Danas for reputation. For... what exactly, I'm not sure of. Most of the people doing this stuff are doing it likely to get certain enchants and other items for their raiding gear, given that most people out there have Mount Hyjal / Black Temple raid gear which are much better than any reward from that area.

**There's another reason, of course. I feel that I'm, well, incomplete. My raiding career was cut short at the end of Phase 2, and I never got to even finish Tempest Keep before my last raid, so in my mind I don't get to skip straight to the end and go up there. I didn't earn the right to go to the Isle of Quel'Dans. I needed to be in the trenches, finishing Tempest Keep, and fighting my way through both Mount Hyjal and Black Temple with the rest, before I can say that "Yes, I deserve to be at Quel'Danas". Anything less would be dishonorable toward the Monday raid team, who earned the right to be there because they fought the hard fight. It doesn't matter that they've not yet finished Hyjal or Black Temple, that will come soon, I know, but I don't deserve to reap the rewards that they earned. I will not be the child of privilege who comes along after they did all the hard work and skip ahead straight to the end. So while I'd love to go there, I just can't. 

From The Incredibles.

***Sorry, I'm not saying who it was who did it. I don't need any more drama in my life, and I've pretty much cut him out of it anyway.

****One of the bosses in Mount Hyjal requires everybody to have a "get out of a stun free card", which for the raid team meant getting a PvP trinket that you can pop and get out of any stun once every couple of minutes. So, everybody had to farm PvP activities for the trinket. And when I mentioned that there's no way I'm going to get back into progression raiding right now because I'd have to study the fights and do PvP and get other gear, my questing buddy said "Oh it's easy, you just sit at the towers or the fortifications a couple of times, turn in the daily quests a few times, and you've got the honor you need!"

*****Okay, I should clarify this a bit. She tolerated my explanation, giving me the "yeah, gear is good" and a few other tidbits, before she said something akin to "I suppose I should say 'be careful and don't overdo it' that you usually say to others but you already know that," which I totally admit I earned. In a way, I'm glad she handled it the nonchalant way she did, because it snapped me back to reality much more quickly than I'd have expected. Must be a mom thing, because if you're used to whatever drama of the day your kids bring to you, my foibles are like small potatoes by comparison.

EtA: Corrected a couple of grammatical mistakes.

EtA: Clarified a part by adding "*****".

In Soviet Russia, Tentacles Kill You

Yesterday was one of those days where you kind of wish would keep going on and on.

And then you realize that it did.

Setting aside work for a moment, the evening began with this:

Yeah, and on AV Weekend, no less.

And ended with this:

Yes, Card is in there somewhere.

In between there were a lot of deaths.

A LOT of deaths.

The last one, by one of the Eye Tentacles, came right before C'Thun was weakened for the second time and those still alive were able to DPS it down.

And somewhere about an hour before first pull, I got pulled into a work call that lasted longer than the entire AQ40 raid.

So yeah, that made for an entertaining evening. 

But C'Thun is dead, and we proved we could kill it while trying AQ40 once a week.

Open Trade for Water*

I have further proof that the Alliance can win in Alterac Valley:

The numbers don't tell the whole story.

We had a lot of healers in AV --probably about 10-12 Priests/Pallys/Druids combined-- and that made a huge difference in the match.

But for me, this was my biggest takeaway:

Yes, you read that right.

I wasn't BG Leader until about halfway through, and the original Leader didn't drop, so I guess he passed it off to me without me noticing.

I even blurted out in Chat "Holy shit, why am I leading?" but nobody seemed to care.

It's not like I was on the front lines, either, as I stayed back on defense at Stonehearth Graveyard. There were four of us back --2 Mages (including Card), a Holy Priest, and a Rogue-- and we were able to keep the Horde from flanking as well as keep SHGY out of Horde hands while the main team did the dirty work. It did feel weird when the Holy Priest and I were pushing against three Rogues in advance of the rest of the Defense team, and the Priest was shouting "Nobody touches my Mage!"

Our defense team moved forward to protect Iceblood Graveyard when that was captured, and once more when Frostwolf Graveyard was captured. By then, my job was to make sure we had a tank and off tank identified while we waited on the Relief Hut to be captured.

I did rush forward once we got the Relief Hut and got in some blasts on Drek before he died, but really I was a small cog in the match. The healers did the hardest part of the work, keeping the team upright and out in the field, while the rest of us were disciplined enough to want to push for a win rather than rep farming.

It's not like I'll get this gig very often, so I'll savor it while I can. And I can say that my record as BG Leader is 1-0.

*The title references the fact that Mages are in charge of distributing Water and/or Food before any group event. After I started Raiding, I took my job in BGs as "Water Girl" a lot more seriously.

Charge of the Ram Brigade

WoW Classic's Alterac Valley has been heavily dominated by Horde wins ever since the Alliance was banned from creating premade AV teams. Even then, the map by default favored the Horde so it would take a superior game from the Alliance --combined with poor luck on the Horde side-- to eek out an Alliance victory.

That being said, in all of my AV runs in Classic I'd never seen Ivus the Forest Lord summoned or the Ram Riders charging into the fight.

I got to see both the other night.

I wasn't around to summon Ivus, as I was defending Stormpike Graveyard at the time, but I was around to help get the ram riders ready.

Here's a few pics for those who have never seen it before:

After the last ram turn-in, they appeared.

All that was missing was the theme from
the movie Patton. (Or Rocky, I suppose.)

Back when the commander led
troops into battle.

Cardwyn followed along
as they charged through Dun Baldar...

...across the bridge...

...into the ravine...

...and toward the Field of Strife.
The Horde never knew what hit them.

We ended up losing this match as it turned into a DPS race at the end and we didn't have enough people south to kill Drek before Vann went down. But still, it was an inspiring sight.

EtA: And when I meant the theme from Patton, I meant the march:

At Long Last

It only took from the beginning of Classic until now, on both co-mains, but this finally happened:

It was one of those epic 3+ hour AV fights that you hear people who used to play in Vanilla brag about. The battleground started like any other, where the Alliance held off the horde for a while but eventually we lost the Stonehearth Graveyard. That usually signals the beginning of the end, because the Horde gradually accelerates their gains from there. But something unusual happened: the Alliance was able to push back and eventually --after an hour-- to retake the Stonehearth Graveyard.

During this time I --on Az-- found myself with only another rogue for support, so we both sent back the Wing Commanders* and then I took the southern mine. That mine capture is typically a love-it-or-hate-it move, with very few people on the Alliance side in the "meh" camp. Luckily this time our side was happy for that, and I quickly gathered the 10 resources, killed off some wolves for the pelts, and made it back up north just in time to become a member of the backcap crew.

And there I spent the vast majority of my time in-game, part or a 2-3 man crew defending the Dun Baldar bunkers and graveyard from Horde who'd outflanked the main force.

During this time the main force continued their unusally strong push and had a breakthrough by capturing the Snowfall Graveyard. We were able to hold both graveyards, and in the process kill off the Horde Wolfriders and their Shamans.

When the Horde lost their Shamans, their morale broke.

We were then able to capture the Iceblood Graveyard, and our gains accelerated rather quickly until we finally downed Drek.

I've been waiting for what felt like forever for this, as this is the typical result we see:

So a victory like this, hard fought from beginning to end, was something to savor.

*Two of them made it back, which was unusual in itself.

As Seen on TV!!

PvPers!

Tired of being stuck in a Warsong Gulch run with a 0-4 healer imbalance?

Does your Eye of the Storm have six Rogues in it?

Did you just discover that half of your Twin Peaks team has below 400k health?


Well.... Has Blizzard got a deal for you!!!

No longer are you saddled with either sticking out a painful loss or having a 15 minute deserter debuff! That's right, Blizzard has slashed the timer on the deserter debuff!

If you port into a BG that hasn't started yet and decide to drop, you get a 5 minute debuff. If you do it again within 20 minutes you get an additional 5 minutes tacked onto that debuff (until you reach a maximum of 20 minutes.)

***

Given that I'm often forced into taking a random I know we have no chance in or being saddled with a debuff that will last longer than the game, this is a sanity saver.

Of course, the SMART thing is to level out the teams more so that gear levels and healing components are more equal, but I doubt Blizz is going to do that any time soon.

About those TPS reports...

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, out there on the prairie...
--Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion (pick an episode, any episode)


Yeah, it was a quiet week last week.

I ran some battlegrounds and perused another MMO (watch this space for more info), but other than that, not much happened.  Well, in MMO gaming space, anyway.

Last week was a week more for getting things done around the house: painting the kitchen, painting an adirondack chair (with another one to be built on the docket), replacing the 20 year old entertainment center with a more modern design* that had "some assembly required", and some annual cleaning of the heat pump and the porch/deck.

Yeah, Summer is here in the Midwest.

I did break my "only AV and IoC" battleground credo after finally getting what I consider to be enough Prideful gear (meaning I finally had enough Conquest points to get the Prideful weapon), and I promptly regretted it. There were so many bot filled games that it makes you want to pull your hair out, and to add insult to injury the Alliance was back to bad habits, where I as a (at best) partially Conquest geared Rogue was in the top 3 in health on most of the games I played.

If you're a fresh 90 and you're just chain running regular BGs, you're doing yourself and your team a disfavor. If you're Alliance, queueing for AV and IoC will get you a full Honor set much more quickly than the "queueing for random" strategy.  If you're Horde, just go ahead and pick anything OTHER than AV and IoC; hell, I think I've won Silvershard Mines as Alliance only once the entire expac, and why any Horde would queue for anything else for free honor is beyond me.

***

Overheard in MMOs:

In Eye of the Storm (WoW):

Me: Just how many bots do we have?
Other Rogue: Well, there's you and me at least.
::silence::
Other Rogue: Oh, that's not good.
Me: I don't know about you, but I'm going to hang out around FR for a while.


In Warsong Gulch (WoW):

Hunter: Blizz loves bots, you know.
Me: Okay, I'll bite. How do you figure?
Hunter: They keep their sub numbers up. They used to ban more of these bots but they stopped when their numbers started dropping this expac.
DK: Plummeting, you mean.


In Republic side Taris (SWTOR):

Player 1: Aaaaahh! When will this planet end?
Player 2: I don't like it either.
Me: What's not to love? Jedis and zombies. Er, ghouls.
Player 3: Zombies!
Me: Yeah, but movie zombies act like ghouls.
Player 4: OMG, you play D&D. I can tell.
Me: Guilty!


On Republic side Alderaan (SWTOR):

Mini-Red #1: I don't like politics.
Me: You're still on the opening zone, aren't you.
MR1: Yes, and I don't like the politics!
Me: It gets more interesting starting in the second zone.
MR1: AAA! I can't stand House Thul or Organa or the other guys!
Me: Just relax, kid. It's not a big deal. It's not like Belsavis, anyway.
MR1: Is there politics there too?
Me: No, the planet never seems to end. Just when you think that you've reached the final zone, there's ANOTHER freaking zone to travel to. And that's not even the Bonus Series.
MR1: ...


In Republic side Taris (SWTOR, whispered conversation):

Player: You get to have Risha as a companion?
Me (realizing I had Risha out): Um, yeah.
Player: When does that happen?
Me: Not for a while yet. I don't want to give out spoilers.
Player: Oh, come on!
Me: I'll tell you this much, it'll be in Chapter One sometime.
Player: Like that helps a lot.
Me: It's worth the wait. The Smuggler story is the best one Republic side, IMHO.




*Which is step one in eventually replacing our old --and I'd like to emphasize the 'old' part-- 25" RCA television with a new digital model.

Alterac Valley: The Spirit of Christmas, Scrooge Style

The Lock was not pleased.  "No, dammit, that's the old strat," he snapped.  "The new strat is to rush everyone to Drek, cap the two towers nearby, and then kill Drek."

"Somebody had told the Horde, then, because they're ahead of us in getting our first two towers down," I quipped.  "If we want to win, we have to take them back."

"Didn't you hear me?"  The Lock demanded as we finished recapping Stonehearth and Icewing Bunkers.  "Everybody get down to Drek now!"

"F--- him," a Druid in the backcap team said aloud.  "We've got to get DB North and South back."

We recapped the two Dun Baldur bunkers --as well as the Aid Station-- and then everybody began the trek south.  Meanwhile, the 25+ people surrounding Drek began their attack, but kept wiping.

"What gives?" someone asked in BG chat.  "You have 8 healers there."

"We ALSO have 7 Horde in the base, asshole," the Lock replied.  "We need EVERYONE down here!"

Another half dozen or so of people abandoned their watch on Stonehearth and Icewing and ran south, just in time for the Horde to begin to cap those two bunkers.

I watched from my position at DB North as a dozen Horde pushed their way up north and began crossing the bridge.  There were only a few of us left to counter them, and not enough time to get to Stonehearth or Icewing before they were captured, ending the game on attrition.

The Lock kept up a running diatribe on how badly we sucked, and if we'd have just done what he wanted we'd have won anyway.  Regardless of whether he was right or not, changing the strategy by abandoning our position in the southern two bunkers meant that we absolutely HAD to burn down Drek within a few minutes or lose.

And given the title of this warm and fuzzy piece, you can probably guess the outcome.


EtA:  Somehow the first sentence got chopped off.

"Look, I'm a Rogue. I'm not supposed to have more health than a Prot Pally."

The past week or two's worth of random battlegrounds has seen a dramatic rise in a rather disconcerting trend:  I've got the high health.

That's not how random battlegrounds are supposed to work.

You're supposed to have a mix of players, or at possibly a premade of a guild/arena group in the mix.  And really, I see a lot of the latter on the Horde side:  4 out of every 5 random BGs I'm in involve a Horde premade of some sort.*  But even without the premades, I can see the health of each enemy player, and they follow the standard pattern of high to low health:  tanks > plate DPS/locks > leather DPS > other cloth DPS.

However, the Alliance health numbers are all over the map, with the lone exception that my Rogue is always in the top two in health.

I knew what my max health with Malevolent PvP gear was (360k-ish), and what my max health with Tyrannical gear was (420 ish).  I'm now part of the way through getting Grievous gear, which puts me in around 450k health.  But most of my random BG teams have health in the 350k range, with some players around 410k and the fresh L90s at less than 300k.**

That means that Alliance teams are typically undergeared and severely outgunned by Horde teams.

How undergeared?  Well, I know that by only running random BGs, I've fallen behind the arena players by an additional Grievous piece***, or two if you count the 1250 point gear and take this week into account. That's enough of a difference for a maximum geared Hunter (plus current raid tier gear) to 4-5 shot me, as happened multiple times last night.****  And if I'm at max PvP gear without running arenas, imagine what it's like for someone with a half Malevolent/ half Tyrannical set.

I was in a Twin Peaks BG this morning and I watched it happen.  We even had more than the usual number of healers at four (!) whereas the Horde only had one, and our health was actually decent for a change (averaged in the low 420s.)  But the Horde side, where I counted 6-7 players at 480k health and higher, simply cut through our side like a hot knife through butter.  Putting it in a different way, the Horde was able to out-DPS four healers in a 10v10 match.  That we were lacking in strategy --only about 1/3 of the team was trying to get the flag at any one time-- was almost immaterial when 2 healers in a convoy couldn't keep a Shaman or myself upright.

Such a DPS imbalance in random BGs is worrisome, particularly when in arenas/rateds at least you're paired against teams with similar ratings.  That doesn't guarantee similar teams, but it sure helps in evening out the skill levels.  Shouldn't there be at least a reasonable attempt at matching up the iLevels of players in a 10s or 15s random BG so you don't have slaughters like this one?

But then again, I've seen weird groupings in randoms.  Like six rogues on one side in WSG.  Or seven hunters vs. five locks in AB.  When I get to a random that's not raid size, I quickly check our listings.  If I see more than three rogues in a 10s or four in a 15s, I'll voluntarily drop, telling the group there's no way you can win with this many rogues.  I can go blow off 15 minutes soloing Pit of Saron or Halls of Lightning instead of getting frustrated when I'm being farmed by a Mal'Ganis or Tichondrius premade.

***

BlizzCon is this week, so I presume that on Friday we'll hear about the new WoW expac.

Unless we won't.

I'll concede that it's entirely possible that The Dark Below is going to be the name of the next WoW expac, but in terms of Blizzard history they are very late in announcing an expac after the last major patch for the current expac drops.  Perhaps Blizz saw that extended beta as a big part of the reason why their subs dropped and are swinging heavily toward the "don't tell them anything until we're just about to release it" Apple-style presentation.  The risk for this is to have an unstable release where people have major problems at launch (see:  Diablo III).

But here's an idea:  maybe Blizz is going to go for a lot of smaller expacs rather than one big one every two years.  What about the possibility of new content every year --ala SWTOR and GW2-- with 2-3 patches accompanying it?  More content, quicker, so people will fork over $20 for an expac every year rather than $35 every two years.

Or make Wow F2P, but gateway raids and arenas to subs only?  That would enable Blizz to keep most of their subs who live for raiding or arenas/rateds, but allow the casuals to drop in and out as necessary.  Of course, a cash shop would be needed to pump the casuals for money, as Blizz would be giving up a lot of money in subs to do this.  But it is more of a likelihood than I considered before.

Either way, in two days we'll see what happens.  One thing I will bet money on is that while their subs are down, don't count Blizz out just yet.  They're not the same crew running things during vanilla and BC, but they're not going to screw up their IP.

At least I don't think so.




*For the sake of simplicity, I'm focusing on 10 and 15 man BGs.  the 40 man raid BGs will almost always have a guild group in the mix due to the size of the teams.

**I've said it before and I'll say it again:  chain running AV and IoC for an Alliance player is the quickest way to get geared up with Honor level gear.  And for a plate wearer, that'll put you on par with my health.

***Merely running random BGs will get you a max of 1800 Conquest points a week, while arenas will get a max of 2200 Conquest points.  If you want to keep up with the Joneses, you have to run arenas, which is suicide to most Mists-era Rogues when paired against other classes of equal skill.

****You get used to the routine:  either they spot you lurking about or they ride in when you're trying to help finish off an enemy by a flag.  They send their pet after you, use their Deterrence to deflect your blows, and then drop some traps to slow you while jumping backward to rain down hell while you try to run after them. You can't run quickly because you likely blew your escape CDs on getting away from the Concussive Shot and/or captured by a net.  And since some of the Hunter's DoTs aren't removable by Cloak of Shadows, you can't Vanish.  You're a sitting duck.

One Person's Trash is Another Person's... Trash Mob

One drawback of random queues for content is that you run into people with differing viewpoints.  No, I'm not talking political or sports views --although I was once in a SWTOR Flashpoint where an argument broke out over American football-- but rather different approaches to the content should be run.

I say "drawback" because one of the big sources of instance/BG drama is that clash of viewpoints.  Failpugs are full of tanks who bypass bosses, healers who refuse to heal people who make mistakes, and DPS who decide they know how to pull properly.  But in a basic sense, what you might be looking for in group content might be completely different than everyone else, and when you feel like you're being dismissed/ignored that can cause significant drama.

This isn't a new revelation.  I've been in instances where the tank decided his version of "fun" was to chain pull the entire first area in Halls of Lightning, expecting the healer to keep him upright.*  The completionist vs. the minimalist clash is often found in instances such as SWTOR's Taral V or WoW's revamped 5-man Zul'Aman/Zul'Gurub.

But this clash of views took on a whole new meaning in an Alterac Valley run the other day.

I'm used to the arguments about Blue vs. Green in Strand of the Ancients and Gold Mine vs. Blacksmith vs. Lumber Mill in Arathi Basin, but the fight that broke out in BG chat in AV was a new one on me.

Prior to the other night, I'd only been in one so-called "bridge stomp" in AV.  For the uninitiated, a bridge stomp is a strategy where almost the entire Alliance gathers behind the bridge to Dun Baldur, allowing the Horde to kill off Belinda and sack Stonehearth Bunker and Icewing Bunker.  The Alliance then rains down hell on the bridge, which in theory will kill off Horde at a far greater rate than the Alliance defenders.  If everything goes according to plan, the Alliance wins a war of attrition and earns a ton of HKs.

As a Rogue, I'm kind of superfluous to the bridge stomp itself --I'd get killed too quickly to help the plate wearers defend the bridge-- so I and a few other stealthies basically peel away some of the Horde attackers by forcing them to constantly retake their own towers and the Coldtooth Mine.

The first bridge stomp I'd been in, the guild behind it had opened up their Vent channel and had set up a raid group specifically for the attack, which made perfect sense.  They also had complete buy-in from the rest of the AV team, because the sheer number of HKs also meant that we were able to summon Ivus, which is something that most people had never seen.**  Therefore, when I'd ported into an AV run and the people there started chanting "War!!!", I kind of had an idea what was up.

But not everyone appreciated having their AV run turn into a bridge stomp, and said so loudly on BG chat.

"I don't want my BG hijacked by some lame-ass premade," groused one DK.

Another player added that these players "...didn't know how to play AV," among other (more colorful) things.

"You're all a bunch of little kids!" said a third.

The bridge stomp team kept mocking the detractors and egging them on, causing a dramatic escalation in hostilities.

"Yep, we don't let anyone older than 14 in the guild!"

"Whoops, I just grew a pube!"

And things kind of went downhill from there.

I tried to ignore the fight as best as possible and kept to just annoying the Horde side, even when the anti-stomp crowd started taking other graveyards, loudly announcing their intention to disrupt the bridge stomp plan.

Just how many adults are actually in this BG anyway? I thought.

After about close to 1/2 hour, the anti-stomp crowd began to drop, firing off a few obscene parting shots along the way.

A lot of this fight could have been avoided by the bridge stomp team behaving maturely.  Announcing intentions prior to the start of AV, and even organizing things via Vent would have gone a long way toward keeping things civil.  That said, once the bridge stomp team began, the people who expected the "15 minute zerg" AV threw a tantrum and behaved no better.  Each side wanted their way, victory be damned. The fact that we won was superfluous by the end, because I was sick of everybody's behavior.  The parent in me wanted to send everybody into time out for a good long time, because you can bet that if I found out my kids were behaving like that, a time out would be the least of their worries.

I felt bad for the Horde, because they probably had no idea what the hell the Alliance was doing with half doing one thing and half doing another.  But if nothing else, the Horde were the ones who actually behaved like adults; they tried to win as best they could.

*And chewing him out when he wasn't able to.

**Watching Ivus whallop a Horde tank certainly made my night.

"Who Gives a @#$% About the Refinery, Anyway?"

It's been kind of a strange week in my neck of the woods.

I gained a few more streaks of gray in my beard, mainly due to taking my oldest out shopping for Homecoming dresses.  (I'm not sure I'm ready for her to go to formal dances just yet, but she is in high school* now...)

And I also gained a few more patches of gray dealing with random BGs, as well.  This post is dedicated to those numerous runs, trying to eek out enough Conquest points to get another piece of Grievous gear.

***

Signs Your Random Battleground Isn't Going to Go Well

• The toon with the highest health is a Rogue.
• You check out the list of toons in the BG and discover you have no healers.
• The other side has a premade and your side is already arguing over strategy.
• Nobody stays back on defense in Alterac Valley.
• Your entire team runs to the mid in Eye of the Storm.
• You're Alliance and you port into Strand of the Ancients.  (Nuff said.)
• The BG starts and half of your team is AFK.
• Nobody targets the enemy healers.
• Nobody stays back to defend the Farm/Stables during the initial rush.
• In a 10 or 15 player game, 5 or more of your players are Rogues.
• A player ports in and declares "You all suck but I'm here, so we'll win."  (Never tempt people to throw a game just to spite you.)

Oh, and the title quote?  That came from an Isle of Conquest game wherein a few of us were talking back and forth about capturing and recapturing the Quarry and Refinery.  The Warrior who said that also was bitching about the fact that the Horde was ahead of us in breaking down the gates, and he didn't make the correlation between the Horde having both the Quarry and Refinery and being 30% closer to breaking down the gate...



*For those not familiar with the U.S. educational system, high school or secondary education is Grades 9 through 12, roughly age 14/15 through 18.  Attending a college/university is technically optional, but highly encouraged.

The Stuff of Nightmares

Have you ever had the dream where you're trying to outrun something --a train, a car, or Usain Bolt-- but you feel like your feet are made of lead?  You're trying desperately to get around a corner before you get run over, and you can feel the rumble of the steam engine in your bones as that train gets closer....

Closer....

Closer....

And then you wake up, your heart pounding in your chest.

Yeah, I've had that dream a lot recently, and it involves Deepwind Gorge.

On the face of it, Deepwind Gorge is a lot like Arathi Basin and Battle of Gilneas, with the additional part of having to capture the other faction's gold.  The BG is more compact than either AB (by a lot) or BoG (marginally so), but the line of sight issues make it seem larger than it is.  But the biggest differences between the prior two and DG are the locations of the respawning points:  each faction's home base.

That alone changes the dynamics of the BG, because if you're assaulting a mine and you can kill off another faction's toon, that pretty much guarantees that toon will be gone for more than twice the normal amount of time it would take to run back from a localized spawning point.  We've all been in the situation where you're in AB assaulting the Gold Mine, and you kill off a toon just to see it make a reappearance from the GM spawning point 10 seconds later.  That won't happen in DG.

But what the respawn points also do is make Rogues' biggest advantage --stealth-- their biggest weakness.

No matter how fast a Rogue can run while stealthed, except for a few short bursts they can't move fast enough to get back to a base in peril.  You are trying to get back as quickly as you can, or to get anywhere as quickly as you can, and you feel like your feet are in mud.

There is an option, of course, which is to summon your mount and ride back, but for a class that's bringing up the bottom in terms of survivability in BGs, that's akin to jumping up and down and yelling "Free HKs!!" To ensure survivability you have to ride in a pack, and that isn't playing to a Rogue's strength either.

Rogues are at their best when they can strike when you least expect it.  They don't have the plate (or even the mail) of other melee classes, and they don't have either tanking or healing capabilities.  They also don't have a (seemingly) neverending font of mana, either.*

What all this means is that a Rogue's best bet while playing Deepwind Gorge is to either play close to your home base --defending the gold-- or spending time as part of a bigger effort.  Solo work is a risky business for a Rogue in general, and solo work in DG is potentially very nasty indeed.

Oh, and try not to have too many nightmares.



*I once hid in Icewing Bunker with another Rogue, watching a Mage spam Arcane Explosion and seeing the Mage's supply of mana creep downward like a snail.  "They need to nerf that," I whispered.  "There's absolutely no downside to spamming that for minutes at a time."

"Yeah," the other Rogue replied.  "That and a Lock's Hellfire and Rain of Fire.  When a Lock can dump Rain of Fire on the run...."

Did Somebody Get the License of that Truck?

I'd thought the L75-L79 BG range was the worst for leveling via BGs.  The Cata gear entering in at L77-L78 skewed the BG fairly heavily toward the top end of the BG, even more so than the average leveling BG due to the compressed nature of an entire expac to five levels.  Having gone through that range twice now, once with a Lock in Cata and now on my Rogue in Mists, I figured I knew what I was talking about.

Seems that I was wrong.

When my Rogue hit L80 and entered into this BG field, with Blizz's internal adjustments my health was about 52-53k.  I saw L84s with 84-90k health, and figured it wasn't too bad all things considering.  I knew I'd have to run through either Vashj'ir or Hyjal to get enough Cata gear to compensate for losing most of my old Wrath and BoA gear*, although I had enough Honor farmed to get some good L270 PvP gear.

Things just looked better than the L75-L79 range, and I breathed a sigh of relief.  Mists was in sight.

The first few battlegrounds I got into --Isle of Conquest, Eye of the Storm, and Warsong Gulch-- I was able to contribute to.  I wasn't a terror out there, as I wasn't high enough level or had enough gear, but I held my own and wasn't a drag on the teams.  Well, let's be realistic here:  Children's Week bringing in a lot of unskilled PvPers helped me considerably.

Then came last night.

I was in an IoC battleground, and we'd quickly stormed the Horde Keep.  I and two other people held back to defend the Keep while the rest went after Overlord Agmar.  A lone Warlock showed up and gave battle, which even though Locks are much improved over the Cata version**, a Hunter, Druid and Rogue (me) should have no trouble dispatching him.

He blew through us in 20 seconds.

"What the hell was that?" I asked as we were waiting by the Spirit Guide.

"Did you see him?" the Druid added as we ran back to the Keep.  "He had 180k health!"

"All I knew is that he one-shotted me and I had 66k!"

We made it back to the Keep and were joined by two more toons.  It didn't help, as it took the Lock a mere 25 seconds to dispatch us all.

"Skip D-ing the Horde Keep," a DK said.  "Just run in and kill the boss!"

"No kidding," I grumbled.  "The Lock is more powerful than the boss!"

Needless to say, the Lock all by himself managed to win IoC for the Horde.

I was still shaking my head over this when I got into an Arathi Basin run.  While the Horde didn't have a 180k health Lock roaming around, they had about half of their team over 100k.

"This is ridiculous," a DK said.  "I might be able to take on one of them, but not a whole side.  Just go ahead and let them 5 cap so we can get this over with."

"So Blizz didn't close that loophole in the gear that they started with Cata?"

"No, they didn't.  What makes it worse is that while they can't queue up for it, a toon can be invited into a group running a Mists dungeon so they can get Mists blue gear.  You've got guilds running their twinks through multiple runs just to get tricked out."

"And I thought L75-79 was bad.  At least I didn't get one-shotted there."

"Yeah, the gear inflation isn't linear between Wrath Cata and MoP."

Well, it looks like my prediction about the BG issues back in Cata has come to pass in Mists.  If Blizz isn't going to allow toons to migrate straight to Cata and Mists from L78 and L83 respectively, they ought to move the low end Cata and Mists gear to a requirement of L80 and L85.  While the gear discrepancy is bad enough between Wrath and Cata, the non-linear nature of gear inflation has made it progressively worse between Cata and Mists.  And while Blizz attempted to level things out a bit by raising the health level of the new L80s in battlegrounds, the L84s with access to blue Mists gear far outstrip any manual intervention Blizz accomplished.

I'm not going to hold my breath on any corrections any time soon, because this is the second expac that Blizz has let this go; obviously, they gain more by leaving things as they were than actually fixing this discrepancy.  But from where I sit, this is just as bad as how weak Warlocks were in Cata.  And we know how Blizz addressed that, don't we?





*I ended up with two Toxidunk Daggers due to the generosity of a fellow Rogue on the Ysera server, who saw I was at L78 and in AV at the time.  The Rogue didn't want any gold, he just wanted to give the daggers to someone who was going to use them in BGs.  Who said that Rogues were disreputable people, anyway? ;-)

**Apologies to Cynwise, but I felt like an old man griping that "I leveled a Lock via BGs when it was HARD, back in Cata, and all these young whippersnappers don't know what it's like to be Rogue chow!"

A Few Miscellaneous Thoughts for a Rainy Wednesday

It might not be pouring where you are, but is sure is outside of my window.

Although it looks gloomy, I don't mind.  Not today, anyway, when the plants have woken from their (excessive) Winter slumber.

Which reminds me; I was perusing old patch notes --really really old patch notes-- for WoW when I came across the note announcing the grand improvement of Weather in Azeroth.  That surprised me a bit, since I'd assumed that having rain fall randomly in a zone would be a minor thing.  Still, it wasn't there at release, but showed up sometime prior to BC.

While some other MMOs seem to not bother with things such as graphical changes based on the time of day or having "weather" impact the scenery (::cough:: TOR ::cough::), they get around other issues such as seasons by focusing on a small part of a planet for the questlines.  MMOs based on a single world don't have such a luxury, and yet they never seem to change the scenery in a zone based on the season.

I can understand the reasoning behind a reluctance to concentrate on these things --it not only takes up valuable developer time but adds to the horsepower needed to run a game-- but the next time an MMO touts "Weather" as a feature I'm going to be a bit skeptical.

***

It was bound to happen, but somebody finally started using raid announcements in WoW BGs.

Ever since WoW changed BG chat to Raid chat, I was waiting for some BG leader to decide to take advantage of Raid announcements to start ordering people around.

If you know nothing else about pickup BGs, you should know that there's always someone who thinks they can lead, and there's always about 5 people ready to tell that person that they're doing it wrong.

Now, inject raid announcements into the mix.  Wait for everything to combust, and.....

Oh yeah.  You can see what's coming, right?

This all went down in Arathi Basin.  That BG confounds the Alliance more than it has any right to, and I've no idea why.

As I waited for the BG to start, I perused the lists to see how the classes broke out.  Then the announcements began.

Need 5 people to cross water to assault BS
5 people pls
We'll kick ass
Need 5 people to cross water to BS

Okay, I thought, this is different.  So when Arathi Basin began, I parked myself down at the Stables to watch the show.*

Of the 15 people on our team, 14 crossed the water to the Blacksmith.

"...and nobody went to GM or LM," I said in chat.

"Keep pressing to Farm!" the Raid announcement replied.

You can pretty much guess what happened from there.  The assault on the Farm collapsed, and the Horde rallied to push against the Blacksmith and the Stables, capturing the Blacksmith.  The BG began to fall apart at that point, for whenever a Raid announcement came "5 to GM go!", about 10 toons wheeled and went to the Gold Mine.

"What a bunch of idiots!" one person grumbled.

A DK pulled up to a stop next to me.  "Stop sending those messages!" he said in chat.

"I know what I'm doing!" the BG Leader replied.

"No you don't!  This isn't a raid!"

"Shut up!"

I just kind of rolled my eyes at the spectacle.  While the raid announcement does have its use, in a pick-up game it's a bit of overkill.




*I've kind of given up on being on offense in AB when so few people actually play defense on bases they capture.  Given that --as a Rogue-- I'm usually in the shadows, an apparently empty base is a far too inviting target for the opposite faction.

Me and My Big Mouth, Part Whatever

You know how I said that it'd be terrifying to see 20 DKs on a side in Alterac Valley?

Be careful what you wish for.

I was blowing off some steam tonight when I got into an Alterac Valley run.  During the countdown I got up, grabbed a drink, and settled in to check the player lists.

"Holy crap," I said in BG chat.  "I think half of their team are DKs!"

I counted the list a few times and found they had 19 DKs with one slot left empty.  Sure enough the last slot was filled by another DK.

"We're gonna get whiplash by all the Death Grips," a Priest quipped.

"At least a lot of them play like crap at this level," a Warrior added.

"Yeah," I said.  "We're gonna need it."

The DKs belief in their own invincibility proved their undoing in the game.  We had about 15 players stay back and defend Belinda, while the rest pushed down toward Drek.  Another Rogue and I hung out in Icewing Bunker, catching those who broke through to try to capture it.  The DKs were like a wave of blue frost crashing against our defense, but they were unable to break it.

In the end we won on sheer attrition, which was perfectly fine with me.

Still, I ought to have learned by now to keep my mouth shut.

...And lo, there were Death Knights as far as the eye could see...

The L55-L59 battleground range is (in)famous for two reasons:  this is the first range where an expac's gear becomes available, and this is the first range where DKs appear.

I will not speak of BC clown gear, other than to say that Orcs certainly do look pretty in them.

While it may have taken several months, the flood of Monks and Pandaren leveling through Azeroth has died down.  The general makeup of your average leveling BG has evened out to an even composition of various classes.  (For the record, the Mistweaver and Windwalker Monks are far more popular than Brewmaster, with a slight nod to Windwalker at the moment in the 40s/50s BGs.)

That is, until the Great DK Invasion.

I can only imagine what it was like those first few months of Wrath when everybody and anybody created a DK.  I remember the one time this past Winter when I was the only non-Monk on my side in a Warsong Gulch battleground, but the idea of having almost half of an Alterac Valley run composed of Death Knights terrifies me.  It's bad enough when there are ten of them per side in AV, but more?

The consolation I can take in witnessing DKs swarming over everything is that not a lot of them know how to play their class.  As a player who leveled a Warlock via BGs in Cata, I know firsthand how little fun it is when a group of DKs decide to play Death Grip Ping Pong with you.  The fact that I've not been Death Gripped all over the place when even clothies know to target me mercilessly speaks volumes.

That influx of powerful but unskilled DKs has reinvigorated BGs a bit for me.  The slog of trying to get to at least the first expac, coupled with a long losing streak, can wear a player down.  It got so bad at one point in a WSG game that I ended up parking in the middle platform above their base and waited for the thing to end.  The Horde team had us on farm, but instead of people simply running away and not respawning in the graveyard, we kept feeding the beast.  I couldn't bring myself to drop group, because WSG had only 4 minutes left in the timer, but there was no way we could win.  So I got up and got some coffee instead of stressing over this.

"Get their flag!  Get their flag!" someone said over BG chat.

"I can't," I replied.  "They've got a Monk, a Lock, and a Feral protecting it."

"Get it anyway!"

"I'm not going to add to their HKs."

But on the flip side, with the instability induced by BC gear and new Death Knights, the Alliance has finally started making inroads on Eye of the Storm and has been dominating Alterac Valley.*  I've stealthed in Stonehearth Bunker several times now, watched the wave of Hordies go by, and leave SHB empty for me to recap.  You'd think that after the first three or four times I wouldn't be able to get away with this, but it keeps happening in either SHB or Icewing Bunker.

I realize that this state of flux will subside by the time I reach the Wrath level.  DKs will gain more skill or will drop out, leaving a leaner, meaner group to contend with.  Still, I intend to enjoy this chaos while it lasts.  Rogues thrive on chaos, you know.



*YBMV -- Your battlegroup may vary.

The View from the Halfway Point

While it seems that everybody else on WoW already has multiple toons at L90 --their main, their primary alt, their secondary alt, their cross-faction alt, and their bank alt-- my main for this expac just dinged L45 somewhere in the middle of an Arathi Basin fight.

I've been steadily moving along, splitting time between battlegrounds and skinning, and playing about 3 days a week or so.  There have been many waves of players passing through BGs on new Pandaren toons, and we're now down to seeing more traditional BG compositions --with a few sprinkling of Monks, that is.

Once I reached the mid-30s on my Rogue, BG leveling slowed to a crawl and is only now starting to pick up with the unlocking of Alterac Valley.  I don't think this is by design, because leveling via BGs is heavily dependent upon your side's ability to grind out wins.  And since the Alliance has had very few healers in the mid-30s to early 40s BGs, the wins have been hard to come by.

The bots are in vogue too, I see.

Eye of the Storm seems to be the biggest place where you'll find bots, because their behavior is so obvious.  When a toon repeatedly:

• pops from a graveyard
• runs up to the nearest base
• pivots where the buff would ordinarily be (but isn't because it was freaking used already)
• races to the mid

you know you've got a bot on your hands.

I'd like to see Blizz be a bit more proactive in zapping bots, since they can't really be gotten rid of from a BG except by being marked as away, but I guess that's something they're going to have to come up with.  Making it easier to kick people from BGs could turn out to be a double edged sword, because people could simply vote-kick players who are on the low end of the level range just because they're on the low end of the level range.  I'm not sure Blizz wants to pay enough devs support staff to watch enough BGs to make sure everybody is playing nicely, either.  It's a conundrum that I don't have a good answer to.

***

Since I've got 40 levels to go before I really purchase Mists, I've found it interesting watching the lures the Blizzard has been dangling out in the internet.  The free week in Pandaria, the Christmas sales, the recruit a friend, they're all out in force.  I have no idea how well the bait has been working, but the fact that Blizz hasn't stopped them yet is an indicator that they're fighting hard to get all of their lost subs back.  Or, perhaps, just to stay even with what they've got.

My own guild, however, hasn't recovered from Cataclysm.  In fact, while some people returned for Mists, others came back and have since disappeared.  Still others left the guild for other, more active raiding guilds before Mists dropped.  And there have been those who came back but not because of Mists, but because their work/life/whatever has finally allowed them the free time to resub.  But from the high point in Wrath where the guild was pulling in enough people to run 25s on a once-in-a-while basis, I've yet to see 10 people logged in at one time on any consistent basis, let alone raid.  There have been a lot of evenings when I've been the only one logged in.

"This server's dead," I saw someone type recently in Gen Chat.  Given that the crowds in Stormwind aren't very impressive --still averaging in the 50s on a given night-- I suspect that there's more truth to that than meets the eye.

***

Still, the game seems to be doing fairly well for itself.

Judging by the blogs I read (a subset of which is listed on our site), the most popular parts of WoW in its current state are a) Transmogs, b) Pet Battles, and c) Pandas.  Raiding, instances, PvP in its various forms, and the ongoing expac story haven't been very active topics in Mists.  Now, while people write a lot about Dailies, I can say that while the topic is popular, the activity is not.

I think it is safe to say that if Transmogs and Pet Battles didn't exist, then there wouldn't be nearly as many people excited about Mists as they seem to be.  I'm not sure about the staying power of either through the entire expac, but Transmogs at least seems to scratch the itch of a subset of WoW players well enough to last long term.  Of course, it also takes some pressure off of the Blizz art team to not repeat the BC clown gear, since people will merely transmog any "ugly" gear into something they like.

I'm not quite sure what to make about Pet Battles.  Judging by bloggers alone it seems wildly popular, yet ragging on Pet Battles is a popular topic in low level BGs.  I suspect that Pet Battles falls squarely into the love-it-or-hate-it category, with the people who don't really give a damn (like me) few and far between.  I suspect the Pet Battle mojo will last a lot longer --more than I anticipated, anyway-- by simply creating new pets as part of upcoming patches.  Pets are easier to design than raid or instance bosses, and don't need backstory like questlines, so they're incredibly easy to drop into a story as a carrot-on-a-stick for the aficionados.  "Run enough dailies, get a pet!"  "Go through this side questline, get a pet!"  This isn't exactly new*, but Pet Battles ratchets the desire up to another level entirely.

Whether that desire will flame out is the million dollar question, and I don't have an answer for that.  After all, I still can't explain the continuing fascination with Justin Bieber, and I have middle school kids in the house.




*The Miniwing quest reward in Terokkar Forest, for example.


EtA:  I thought "support staff" and typed "devs".  Sigh.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love those OP Classes

You don't know how much you'll miss something until it's gone.

Yes, it's cliche --and also the subject of an 80's power ballad by Cinderella-- but it's also quite true.

In this case, the something I missed was internet access.  On this past Saturday, we lost our internet connection, which didn't get restored until a few hours ago.  No, this wasn't due to any natural disaster, but to MAC address problems between our DSL modem and our ISP.

Not counting the occasional vacation, that was probably the longest time I've been without internet access in about 20 years.*

In the Internet era, we've become used to permanent online access, and we reduce ourselves to complaining about First World problems when we don't have it.  But really, is it all that bad?

No, not at all.**

This kind of dovetails right into a favorite complaint of MMO players, right after "I'm bored!" and "[Pick a faction] sucks!":  "[Pick a class] is over/underpowered!"

You can't enter into a battleground or read Gen Chat without someone making an observation that "Monks are SOOOO OP right now" or "Damn, Warriors are BEASTS!"***  I've been as guilty as the rest, since I saw how Locks got revamped compared to their Cataclysm incarnation, but I don't spend my BG time complaining about which class is the "favored class" right now.  Others, however, live for that sort of thing.

There's an entire cottage industry built around maximizing classes and specs for raiding and PvP, so it's not surprising that people complain when they feel that a spec has gotten some unfair love or hate from the Devs.  But really, is it that big of a deal?  Unless your toon is being picked on by the OP ones, is this really that much of a problem that it requires a Dev to get out the nerfbat?  Is absolute class equality the goal?

While a nice idea, I don't think class equality should be an overarching design goal.  You can lose sight of the overall game while trying to make everything equal for everybody.  I realize that a basic tenet of Blizzard's raid design philosophy is "bring the player, not the class", but the reality is that people will bring a specific class for a specific raid boss mechanic.  That can't be avoided.  Likewise, a BG/arena team will look for specific specs/classes, because they bring the best chance at survival.  Tweaking things to promote class balance is tricky, and doesn't necessarily work to encourage more classes to take over specific roles.

I'm reminded of pencil-and-paper RPGs, with the common complaint in D&D 3.x (and it's successor Pathfinder) is that the spell casters are overpowered in high level campaigns.  Well, Wizards of the Coast decided to "fix" that in D&D 4e, to the point of having constant tweaks to different classes via the D&D Insider subscriptions.  I was unaware as to just how much tweaking Wizards had done until I signed up for DDI.  Much to my surprise, Wizards had tweaked classes to the point where they'd even gone and changed the names of some of the basic classes just to make them sound more in tune with newer class names.  Gone was the Cleric, in its place was the Templar.  That, to me, seems to be taking things a wee bit too far.

While MMOs haven't gone down that route just yet, it seems that temptation is there.  After all, look at the wholesale changes to talents that each new WoW expac brings to the table.  To say that the Mists version of WoW's toons bears only superficial resemblance to the Vanilla WoW version is probably an understatement.  The classes act in a similar manner, but almost everything under the hood is different.

But why worry about it too much?  Is that particular Feral Druid that's dancing around you, firing off heals, the source of your annoyance?  Or is it the class?  Odds are good that we'll hear people say it's the class, when it really is the player.

So maybe it's time to be more specific, that it is a player you're complaining about, not the class.





*That includes several days without power due to Hurricane Ike back in 2008.

**I was perfectly fine, thank-you-very-much, but the lack of internet meant that we had to periodically go to a free WiFi location to check to make sure there weren't any school/work e-mails that required addressing.

***That warriors crack covers both WoW and TOR:  the WoW Warrior and the TOR Sith Warrior.