Under the Sea Plaguelands

If you want to know my opinion of sending the two guinea pigs straight into their first Cata zone --Vashj'ir-- I think the title pretty much sums it up.

For those of you who were around on WoW prior to Cata*, can you remember what it was like taking your first toon at ~L55 and making a mad dash for Light's Hope Chapel?  The Eastern Plaguelands was the scary zone in the Old World (sorry, Silithus and Blasted Lands), where it seemed the waves of Scourge were unending and you had to go at a crawl to reach the one safe place in the entire zone.  Oh, and it sucked if you happened to be on the road at the same time as the Scarlet Courier; you'd have been better off just running into Plaguewood naked instead.

Of course, all things being equal, some toons were more equal than others at dealing with the challenges of the old Eastern Plaguelands.  Paladins were custom made for the zone, while Cloth wearing toons suffered the most.

In a very real sense, that's what I felt when Neve and Tom swam out into Vashj'ir for the first time.

Neve, as a Frost Mage, has the built in advantage of a minion. 

Boy, did she need it.

My experience leveling with her in the Old World (pre-v4.0.1) came in handy.  The mantra "nice and slow" was vital to her survival.  She could handle one 30-40k HP enemy at a time, but two made her sweat.  She had very little recourse for healing during a battle, so she had to rely heavily on damage mitigation using her shields.  Because the Naga were a) all over the place and b) prone to aggroing on her, she was forced to stand and fight a lot.  The shields she had were often exhausted before their cooldown was over, so these fights became a DPS race.  Afterward, the Conjured Mana Strudel was steady part of her diet.

Still, she didn't die at all until the "defend the ship" event.

A Cloth wearer like a mage is often a sitting duck in a melee style event, and Neve was no exception.  She survived multiple attacks by one Naga, but two at once were almost too much.  And three...

After that experience, things became a little easier.  She finally started to get a few Cata greens, and her health (and firepower) jumped 3k.  In fact, the only time she died after that was when the rare Lady Ya-Ya (yeah, I know, a nod to Lady Gaga) spawned right behind her.

Tomakan, by comparison, has built in healing, and is surrounded by nice, hefty (if puny by Cata standards) Plate.  And when Art of War procs, Exorcism will deal 10k damage at a pop.  He found the going quite a bit easier than Neve did, and he didn't die once.  Okay, I don't think the elite giant catching you from behind should count, but that's just me.  I did follow the same rules that I laid down with Neve:  one enemy at a time, switch out damage (Ret Aura) for protection (Protection Aura), and go slow.  I'll admit I was a bit concerned that Tom would have it harder than Neve because she could get more damage in from distance than he could, but he made up for it in better armor protection and higher spiky damage.

Now, I think both toons are getting their Cata legs under them, and while they aren't going to be knocking on the door of any instances soon, I'm more confident in their ability to survive in the Cata zones.

So the question I posed, "can you survive in the Cata zones going straight from Northrend after dinging L80?", is so far a yes.  Now, the "will you die a lot?" question is still out there, but we'll see.  A corollary to all this, "how long will it take you to be instance ready?", now that's a head scratcher.  I suspect it'll be after all of Vashj'ir is complete, but I don't know for certain.  Even with the Cata greens I have, I don't have a high enough iLevel to get into normal Trial of the Champion on either toon, so that gives you a feel on how far I have to go.



*Okay, that's just about everyone, but you never know.

And so it Begins

Tom and Neve both dinged L80 this morning.

(My run of bad luck in BGs continues, as I couldn't win in AV on either toon.  All I needed was one win and I would have dinged L80 early in the morning on each, but nooo....  /grumble)

Anyway, time to take stock of what's on each toon:

Pretty, um... homely, right?

Although both of them finally left their Outland gear behind (Tom replaced his last piece the other day), both toons only have two items at iL187.  (EtA:  Tom now has three, since I replaced the heirloom Chestpiece with one from The Oculus he won this morning.)  The Wrath heirlooms are still much in abundance, and the vast majority of gear is in the 150s-160s range.  Admittedly, this is far lower than I expected when I decided to go with this experiment, but it's realistic.  If you're a new player to WoW and you've leveled up to L80, this is what you've got.  Unless you figured out how to work the AH, you don't have a lot of gold in the bank to buy the new Cata L78 gear, either.

As you can see, I'm not bothering with an Eternal Belt Buckle (on a low-end Wrath green?).  Nor do I have a host of enchants on the items, either.  Some of the items don't have the iLevel for it, and others --being heirlooms-- I'd rather not enchant at all.  On Neve, I enchant when I can and when it makes sense; I'm not going to dump strength enchants on items just because I can; I'd rather match it up with something she can use.  I also need to level her Enchanting and Tailoring more (and I don't want to talk about Tom's Engineering).

I did the initial Vash'jir quest or two on Neve, and while I was waiting on the dock outside of Org, a couple of guildies tried to talk me into buying some of the Cata greens.  "You're going to die a lot, Q," I was told.

"But that's the point.  I keep reading about how you can do it, and I want to see how well you can do it."

And yes, I won't lie:  that first Naga fight was nasty.  However, my problem in that fight was that I couldn't damn well see, because my character was zoomed in all the way to FPS mode, and I couldn't seem to zoom back out.  (FPS mode makes my head hurt, and I'd rather not play in a zone where I have to play that way.)  I'm going to try again later, to see if something simply got out of whack that only a full restart would cure.


EtA:  In the interest of full disclosure, this is what Q has on at the moment while he's waiting his turn:

He's a wee bit better equipped to start questing in the Cata zones.  His gear is close to as good as you can get without actually having raided in ICC, so he'd have advantages that a true newbie wouldn't.

Me and my Big Mouth

I kept telling myself I wasn't going to post until both of my alts made L80, but the WoW gods conspired against me.  I'd had such a great run of good luck pugging the normal Wrath instances that I'd sort of forgotten what it was like to have a bit of drama in a pug.  Oh, I don't mean I'd had a series of Wrath Heroic "shh-don't-make-a-sound-we're-grinding-badges" pugs, because most of the pugs have become chatty affairs.  (When a UK run takes 45 minutes, you might as well talk about something along the way.)

No, I mean what I experienced today, where you become reacquainted with the Vote Kick button.

The first entertaining instance of the day, I got Halls of Lightning on Tomakan, and I was going into the middle of a run.  No big deal, really; when you LFD solo, you get that a lot.  The only issue I had was that I was inside Drakuru's Scourge tower, Voltarus, and I had to get out of there ASAP.  I ran down, ported out, ran down the ramp, and tried to mount the gryphon. 

Then I was reminded that while in disguise I couldn't mount anything.  (Yeah, insert adolescent joke here.)  So I bit the bullet and ported into Halls of Lightning, making a mental note that I'd probably port out into an aggro situation.

When I arrived, I found the priest and hunter standing around.  Recognizing the location, I said, "Afternoon.  Almost to Loken?"

"Um..." the Hunter said.

"Where is everyone?  Running back?"

"Um..."

"Hey everyone!" the tank shouted, running up.  "I'm an L82!"

"Okay," the Priest replied, "how did you get in?"

"The limit on normal Wrath instances is L82," I said.  In one of the most overused lines in Star Wars, I had a bad feeling about this.

"I'm a Worgen!"

"Yeah," I replied, "and I'm a Scourge.  Or I was a minute ago."

"And I'm a jelly doughnut," the Priest replied.

We buffed, and the tank took off.  I swear, he must have thought we were blitzing a Wrath Heroic.  "I can take on one of them all by myself!  Wanna see?"

"Um, no," the Priest said.

"Oh.  K."

We made it through to the end, killed Loken, and the tank queued us up again.  Since in spite of his overenthusiasm he was an okay tank, I queued up too.  The Priest and the Hunter had to go and dropped, and we stood around waiting for LFD to spit out a healer and DPS.

Then the tank and the other DPS started playing a game of comparisons.

"How old are you?"

"27.  You?"

"28.  Got you beat.  Married?"

"Yep."

"Nope."

"Kids?"

"Yep."

The comparisons began to veer a bit more toward the explicit, and before they could get to discussing things like penis size, I dropped.

I shook it off, ported out, and naturally got jumped by a pair of Scourge in the Reliquary of Pain.  Oh well.

Later that afternoon after I got done with work for the day, I got into what was almost an instant queue for Utgarde Pinnacle.  We got buffed, ran up, and started the first trash pull before I could even type the words "hello."

Then the tank lost aggro.

"Hey!" one of the DPS said as he and I died.  "Watch your threat!"

"WTH happened?" the healer asked.

"I was wondering the same thing," I replied.  "At least UP has a short run back."

Our questions were answered a few moments later when the tank DC-ed.

Oh well.  "I'm going to go questing," one of the DPS said.

"You're a lame-ass," the one replied.  "Questing during an instance."

"Why not?  It'll be 15 minutes before we can vote-kick him."

Lo and behold, three minutes later, the magic vote-kick window appeared.  "That was the fastest 15 minutes I've ever seen," I replied.

We queued up and got a new tank, and this one was so brand new he had that "new tank" smell.  "I've never been here before," he said, "and I'll need some pointers."

Things went okay --if slow-- until toward the end of the second boss.  "I've gtg," the tank announced, and suddenly I had aggro.

Oh.  Crap.

Luckily, Lay on Hands was off CD, so I was able to stay upright without us wiping, but the tank left the game without leaving the group.  We were stuck once more.

This time, the tank we got hung around until the end, but he ignored the healer when she called out for mana.  That almost cost us dearly in the Berserker area toward the end, because I got Feared into the latter two packs in the middle of the room.  Rather than do something stupid like run to the tank with two trash mobs trailing me and a healer low on mana, I stayed put and took one for the team.

"How'd you get over there?" the healer asked when he maneuvered over to rez me.

"Feared," the tank and I said in unison.

/sigh

This does not bode well for Cataclysm.



(Side note:  Draenei do not need the Viking-esque helmet that's a quest reward for UP; they're already horny enough, thankyouverymuch.)

From QQ to Pew Pew!

Okay, I'll admit it. I've been one of the pouters QQing about heroics and what-not. But the heavens have parted at the Blizzard ivory towers and delivered news that is sure to make the DPS throng rejoice.

Among the many buffs, nerfs, and balances coming in Patch 4.0.6, mages are getting some much needed love.

With mana costs being reduced to such spells as Arcane Barrage, Fireball, and, my favorite, Living Bomb, it will make it easier to bring down mobs within a decent amount of time. It won't be the face roll we had in Wrath, but it will be enough so that we can get through a heroic without going OOM half way through trash pulls. Yes, mana management will still be, and should be, part of the class mechanic. What makes this easier for healer and tank is that trash will be more managable for DPS to get them down and still be capable of an "oh $#!+" moment.

Cataclysm does offer mages a return to utility less often seen in Wrath. Sure, we're still the best vending machines in the game, but the use of CC has made playing a mage fun once again. Yeah, I love blowing things up, but I love strategy more. I'm slow to learn them, I'll admit. But once I get it, it's a blast (pun intended) working as a team.

I'm lucky. I have proficient players in my guild who make this game fun. Definitely, I prefer doing heroics with them. But I see this next patch making it easier to get through PUGs in the random dungeon finder, and sometimes that's all we DPS have available to us.

What's that old line about patience again?

I noticed that I haven't been posting as much the past month or so, but it's not like I haven't been doing anything.  I'm still plugging away at getting Tomakan and Neve to the Cata zones (they're L76 and L77, thanks for asking), and I'm continuing to pug my way through instances and BGs.

My posts about foibles in instances have been few and far between because, well, the number of worthy failpugs has dropped dramatically.  My speculation is that people are working on all of their toons in the Cata zones, and given the commentary about failpugs in Cata instances, I might not be too far off the mark.

One thing I have noticed is that LFD isn't really random.  My instance selections while leveling in the Wrath zones have been waves of a single instance at a time:  first Utgarde Keep, then Ahn'kahet, and now Violet Hold.  Scattered in between have been occasional forays into Azjol-Nerub, The Nexus, and Drak'Tharon.  I'm not sure how LFD determines the criteria for an instance, but I suspect that certain instances are ranked higher than others depending on your level, your gear's iLevel, and your role selection.  That role selection is subdivided if you're DPS into ranged vs. melee.  Finally, you're put into a pug based on need.

Anyway, I'm still plugging away in mostly abandoned areas of Azeroth.  Last week, when I had some off time, I spent a morning and part of the afternoon on Tom, and between leveling mining and questing in Zul'Drak, I think I saw a grand total of a half dozen other toons.  The power levelers have long passed through with their new alt combinations, and at least one guildie in Neve's guild has already lapped her and is closing in with a third toon.

I'm now starting to get antsy about making it to the Cata zones and see all of those spoilerific things that I've been avoiding on other people's blogs.

"Would it help if I got out and pushed?"

"It might!"


Convoy to L85 Progress
Tomakan - L76
Nevelanthana - L77  ("I'm almost L78!"  "How old are you, 10?")

Yet Another Arms Race

Another case of unintended side-effects seems to have hit with the Cataclysm green gear being accessible at L78.

I mean, we've seen this before, right?  You can make the jump at L58 and L68 to the next zones and start getting the new gear and...  Oh, wait.  The new zones start at L80.  You can get the gear off the AH, but the prices....  They make a Hummer look cheap.  (Especially if you're leveling Tailoring and/or Enchanting, and you have to sink gold into those professions.  Yikes.)

Hmm...  Okay, you don't really need the new Cata gear to quest in the Wrath zones, and you definitely don't need them for the regular Wrath instances, either.  It might make you feel more invincible running around in entry-level Cata gear in the Wrath areas, but it's not going to have that big of an impact, right?

Well, have you tried a 70+ BG lately?

I spent part of my Friday and a very late night run on Saturday getting pummeled in Eye of the Storm.  Whether I was on Tomakan or Neve, it didn't matter.  You could tell who the people with the Cata greens were, because their health and damage was way beyond what the rest of us were doing.  It was as if Tom was was dressed in cloth armor, and Neve, well...  I'm not going there.  But it was absolutely ridiculous.

In the BGs for the 50s and 60s, that gear jump to the next expansion was there too, but the overall quality gap is much worse this time (try gear with iL150-160 up against iL278 gear).  Tomakan at L57 could enter a one-on-one fight with an L60 tank in AV and have a reasonable chance of winning, but now?  Even an L78 Mage in Cata gear outstrips our L76 hero in health.  And with the only available remedy being the AH, that tips the balance of power to people with a big gold bank.

The obvious solution to this problem is to retrofit the entry level Cata gear to make it L80 and up, but with the expansion over a month old, that's not going to happen.  Perhaps the best solution here is to take a page from Wrath BGs, where L80 was separated from the rest of the L70s, and move the L78+ into the L80's BGs.  The result would be L70-77 and L78-84 BGs.  Sure, it goes against the 10 Level breakdown, but that is a simpler solution than trying to retrofit something that has already been out there for a while.

I Think I Misplaced My Ovaries

Under the heading of 'bad assumptions', I had one of those WoW moments last week where I can't decide to be amused, offended, or baffled.

Last Wednesday I had the day off but the kids were at school and my wife was at work.  Woot!  WoW time!  Well, Blizz decided to perform the downtime on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, so I got a late start on any goofing around.  I finally got logged into A-52 early in the afternoon, and Neve quickly got into first a Dark Portal and then a Magister's Terrace run.*

The group was chatty enough, which was good because we wiped repeatedly on MgT.  I'm pretty sure that it had something to do with the three Death Knights in the group, two of which didn't know what to do at all.  I described them in guild chat as Larry, Moe, and Curly, and you can just imagine the ineptitude at play.  Sometime after the third or fourth wipe, we took a short break to repair our gear.

"Do we have enough time to finish this?" one of the DKs asked.

"Sure!  I'm on leave!"  "I can.  School's on break."  "Same here."

"I'm fine," I replied after checking the clock.  "The kids don't get off of school for a couple more hours."

That announcement kind of brought the others up short.

"That's cool!  I wish my mom played WoW."  "Same here."

I'll be honest.  I didn't know what to say.

I know plenty of women who play WoW (it was Soul's wife who got me into playing in the first place), so I don't think it unusual.  I know moms who play during the day, too.  However, these kids made the very incorrect leap from "kids at school" to "mom", and I felt I ought to set the record straight.

At the same time, I wondered whether it would do any good to say anything.  Any striving for accuracy aside, was it such a bad thing to leave them thinking that I was a woman?  There wasn't anything resembling flirting going on, and there definitely wasn't any preferential treatment my way.  The first rule of WoW is that you don't know who is on the other end of the computer unless you get on Vent or Mumble; making assumptions in an MMO can get you in hot water. 

In the end, I decided to just not say anything and just keep running the instance.  You could argue that it was dishonest to let them believe otherwise --and I'd not disagree with you, either-- but what kept running through my mind was that I play with the people they imagined me to be, and that maybe it was an eye opening experience for them.  If there was more asshatery going on --as opposed to ineptitude-- I might have responded differently, but I figured there was no sense in busting their bubble over that.



*I finished up the BC Dungeon Achievement at-level, since I know that I probably won't be able to solo these later instances as a Mage until L85, and MGT probably not at all.