I'm Sorry, You Confused me with Somebody Else

It's been one of those weeks.

No, not in a bad way, but in a "who did you think I was, anyway?" sort of way.

Like the Warrior who berated me in Arathi Basin for not pursuing a retreating Horde player and instead returning to the flag.  "Shoulda killed him," he said.  "Don't be such a pussy."

"My job is to protect the flag, not get HKs," I replied.

"She's right, you shithead," a Druid added.*  "You win by getting and protecting the flags."

The Warrior just wouldn't give up.  "But what Rogue turns away from an easy kill?  She's a wuss."

"I want to win," I replied.  "If it means fewer HKs, I'll do it."

"Chicken shit."

***

Or, like the group finder in The Old Republic, which had my Jedi Shadow automatically checked as Tank and Damage, and I only found out about it after I'd ported into Cademimu.  "Gang, I'm going to drop," I said.  "I thought I was queued as Damage, not as Tank."

"You sure?" the Commando marked as healer asked.  "I can keep you going."

"Not here.  I'm at the low end for this Flashpoint, and I'm not specced for tanking."

I'm sure the Commando could have given it a good try, but come on.  I've been in Cademimu as a low end DPS before, and even then I had trouble staying upright against bosses.

***

Or the people in Eye of the Storm who, when they asked what to do in this battleground, I replied "You get and hold towers, then worry about the mid.  Three towers will beat holding and getting the flag most of the time."

So what happened?  9-10 of our team went to the mid, 3 went to a far side tower, and there was one person on each of our regular towers.  While our side fought over the mid, the Horde swept in and took three towers.  As players died and respawned, we were slowly pushed back and away from the remaining tower.

So much for asking my opinion.

***

Or yesterday, when I was back on Taris with my Jedi Shadow, I got mistaken for a tank.  I was taking a break from the Alderaan push toward the end of Chapter 1, and I figured it'd be nice to smash a few rakghouls and clean out some old quests in my queue since those raks couldn't really hurt me.

So, when the call went out for a group to take on the World Boss, I waited until I was sure there was going to be a group pulled together and I whispered if they needed DPS.  I got an immediate invite, and I drove on over to the spot where Subject Alpha awaited us.  As I arrived, discussion centered on who would tank the giant rakghoul.

"I can do it," a Shadow replied.

"Tal," the Ops Leader asked of me, "can you be off tank?"

I was about to say no, but then I remembered I was an L30 in the land of L18-20.  "I'm DPS spec, but I can tank in a pinch since I've got more health than everyone else."

"O_o"

To be fair, there was an L47 Sage in the group, but I only discovered that afterward.**  Everybody else was L20-L23 and had half of my health.  I felt reasonably confident that if it came to me tanking, my lack of tank expertise would be offset by the Shadow's taunting ability and my extra health.  Sure, I didn't have any of the Shadow's tank spec goodies, but I figured I could hold my own.

Probably.

Maybe.

Once everyone arrived at the site, about five minutes later, the tank pulled and we began.  The main tank held aggro well enough that I hardly took any damage, and whenever the Ops Leader asked the World Boss to be turned around I taunted Subject Alpha to my side.  My lack of aggro holding extras meant that the main tank got the World Boss back, but given the amount of healing heading our way we were in good shape.  There was some nut who kept taking huge amounts of damage, but the healers in the group kept him upright.

After about 5-10 minutes, Subject Alpha bit the dust, and I didn't even have to worry too much about tanking dynamics.

Now why couldn't the Eye of the Storm run have ended so well?




*My Rogue is a female Night Elf.  I've decided that it's easier to simply let people believe what they want to believe rather than correct them all the time.

**That probably explained why she was assigned to heal the main tank exclusively.


EtA: Cleaned up a few grammatical errors.

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.

Tanks, but no Tanks

I was clearing out the Tatooine bonus series quests on my Jedi Sentinel when the call came through on Gen Chat.

"LFM for World Boss."

It's not like I haven't seen that before.  Even WoW got back into the World Boss business with Mists, so you'll occasionally see recruitment messages in Trade Chat in much the same way you'd see pug raids in the old days.*  Still, I used to eschew World Boss runs in much the same way that I passed on raids:  I simply didn't have the time to invest in the gear grind and then the raids themselves.  Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair about raids these days, with LFR and all, but watching guildies smash themselves against ICC day in and day out for 3+ hours at a time kind of turned me off of raiding as anything more than an occasional diversion into AQ40 or Sunwell.

Still, one nice thing that the World Bosses in TOR have going for them are that they're level appropriate for the world you're in.  If you're at the right level for being on a specific world, you can assist in taking on that planet's World Boss.  No gear grind needed.**

Before I could talk myself out of it, I whispered the player rounding up the WB attempt and promptly received an invite.  I took a speeder out to the Dune Sea and scanned the list of people who joined up; I recognized a few people from Heroics I'd run, and one other person I'd run a Flashpoint with.  The slots were quickly filling up to the max of 16, and by the time I arrived people were splitting themselves off into the three parts of the trinity.  There was only one thing...

"Do we have a tank?" someone asked.

"Um," I replied, scanning the lists, "I don't think we have a tank spec at all.  But we've got a LOT of healers."

Indeed we did.  I counted seven Commandos alone, and three Jedi Sages.  There were a couple of Gunslingers, and one other Sentinel besides myself.  One person piped up, "I'm the only Scoundrel here? :-("

"Yeah," I replied, "but you're OUR Scoundrel."

The player organizing the run quickly spammed Gen Chat with "LF tank for World Boss" until our fifteenth slot was taken.  "Hi!" the tank said.  "Who's the main tank?"

"You are," someone said.  "You're our only tank."

One of the Commandos added, "Yeah, but you've got about 10 healers backing you up."

"Okay, cool.  I'll get there and we'll do this."

Playing toons whose damage can really spike --a Mage (WoW), a Barbarian (AoC), or a Gunslinger (TOR)-- taught me the value of waiting before joining in an attack.***  So I had a ringside seat of watching about a half dozen glowing green lines on that tank when he started in on the WB.  I'd have laughed if I wasn't so intent on getting into position, because it looked like the old Chain Heal spell run amok.

But what I really had in mind was this Order of the Stick comic.

We DPSed down the World Boss without losing a single toon.  In fact, I don't think that either myself or the tank dropped below 75% health for the entire fight.  Hell, it's entirely possible that I could have tanked the WB with that much healing available; not that I'd want to have tried, mind you, but it does illustrate the value of having excess healing to go around.

***

To piggyback on that WB adventure, I can make the conjecture that in a battleground a healer is far more important than a tank.

While having tanks and/or melee DPS is nice to have, BGs are won or lost by the number of healers a side has.  My completely unscientific observation has been borne out by months upon months of grinding through Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin, where you can make a reasonable assertion which side will win purely based on which side has more healers.  

A good healer can turn a squishy Mage into a tank.  No healer can turn a Warrior into a sitting duck.

And while a Ret/Prot Pally has a very limited number of heals before they run out of mana, the Feral Druid and Shadow Priest can hang around, dropping far more heals, even though they are technically a DPS spec. I've recently been in an Arathi Basin battleground where a Shadow Priest, a Mage, and a Feral Druid kept six players busy at the Stables.  Sure, they eventually lost, but the corresponding loss in time to taking them out meant 1/5 of one side kept 1/3 of another side from impacting the game. Spreading 9 people across four nodes meant that nodes were shorthanded, and the other side could (and did) take over at least one other node.

A good healer, just like the Demonology Warlock with their Wild Imps, can swing the battle by being a force multiplier.  Sure, you've got others with pets, such as the Hunter and Frost Mage, but a healer is a force multiplier without needing a pet at all.  By keeping teammates upright, the healer has an oversized impact on the game.  And if that healer can drop AoEs like the Druid can....

Well, you get the point.  A healer is a prized commodity in the BG world.

*Old days = pre patch 4.3.  Not to make you feel ancient or anything.

**Imagine a Knucklerot on steroids in every region of WoW, and you get the idea.

***Well, that and being a smudge on the floor when the boss smacks you good.



EtA:  Corrected a logic issue in the last paragraph.

The Curse of Redbeard Strikes Again!

You'd think that I'd have learned by now.

I start a toon, and that toon's class and/or spec gets nerfed.

It happened with Ret (although it took Cata dropping for it to finally get there).  It happened with Frost (again, Cata's release was the kicker).  It happened with Locks, too.

And now it's happened with Rogues.

You don't notice that Rogues got nerfed a bit in Mists until you get higher up in level, around the 30s.  That's when a lot of other toons start to get new abilities.  Or their existing abilities take a big leap in utility.

Like, say, those damn Wild Imps.

Back in my day, when I leveled Adelwulf, we didn't have no stinking Wild Imps.  We Warlocks took our lumps from every other class, and we LIKED it!  And we walked to school barefoot, too!  Uphill!  Both ways!!

It's more than a bit disconcerting that in the L30s BGs you can suddenly find yourself fighting 4-5 on 1 due to those Wild Imps.  Couple that with some improved AI on the succubus and the Lock is no longer the butt end of the BG spectrum like it was in Cata.  In fact, if you put two Demonology Locks together and add one healer, you can pin an entire bunch of people down at the entrance in Arathi Basin.

A Rogue's ability is designed for maximum damage close in, sacrificing armor for speed.  If the Rogue fails to kill the enemy quickly, then they're a sitting duck.  In the L30s in Mists, what ends up happening is that those other classes take a big leap forward in survivability, whereas the Rogue's corresponding damage output levels off.  This results in the Rogue being unable to pick on even the stragglers in a BG if they're of comparable level to the Rogue.

And you can forget about a healer.  A Rogue simply doesn't have enough stuns to take out a healer of comparable level in the L30s.

***

From where I stand watching BGs in the mid-30s, the Feral Druid still rules the roost.  The Disco Priest has fallen back a bit, and has been replaced by the Mistweaver Monk and Demonology Warlock.  Warriors have gotten their mojo back a bit, and two warriors together can handle a group of 4-5 DPS.  What I've found surprising is that Frost Mages have made a comeback of sorts.  Back in Cata you had Fire and Arcane making inroads into BGs based upon their higher damage output, but it seems that in Mists that Frost has reasserted itself as the Mage PvP spec once more.  As a (retired) Frost Mage player, it's nice to see the spec doing well.  As a (current) Rogue player, however, they're harder to take down than before.

Paladins seem to have made a bit of a recovery from their easy pickings of the L20s, but they still trail Warriors in survivability.  Ret still has the aftereffect from Cata's overhaul; the lack of decent emergency healing seems to hamper Ret more than anything else.  Being a (retired) Ret player, I've noticed that the major Paladin failing in L30s Mists has nothing to do with the class, but with the player type.  Pallies are more prone to charging in alone than any other class, save perhaps the Warrior, but without the Warrior's survivability.  I call it the Sir Lancelot Syndrome*, which is an offshoot of how Pallies can simply plow through mobs in most other circumstances.  It feeds a belief in invincibility, and encourages the "Follow me!  Chaaaarge!" sort of behavior.

I was guilty of SLS as much as anyone else.  I'm sure the gleaming armor and "Servant of the Light" didn't help, but I knew that even the Holy Spec wasn't as squishy as most classes, so it only made sense to wade into the thick of the fight.  Additionally, in a game like AB where one player can gum up the works and divert 4-5 people away from trying to take another base, it's only natural that a class that can take a beating would be the one to storm the beachhead.  In my hubris, I also figured that if I led by example, others would follow.  Naturally, a few years of playing BGs has beaten that idea out of me, but I still backslide from time to time.

***

Warsong Gulch is one of those BGs where your opinion of it is entirely shaped upon how well your side does in it.  You can top the meters day after day, but if your side doesn't win, you start to get bitter.**  I recognized that in myself in the most recent losing streak I've been in, as it was an echo of my time leveling Adelwulf.  There was this long period from L20 through L40 where my Lock could count on one paw the number of victories in WSG.  My Rogue found the BG much better --winning about half of the time will do that to a person-- but this current losing streak can wear on a psyche.

When you port in and you see half of the other side is a healer of some sort, you know you're in trouble.  The backbiting starts before even the first flag is captured, and the cries of "we ALWAYS suck!" fill the air.  Players drop like flies, and people who replace them look around, declare "What a fail group!" and drop themselves.

It's enough to make a body back up, go out into a zone, and work on a gathering skill for a while.

Or maybe visit the Darkmoon Faire.

But WSG is still lurking there, like Lucy and her football, hoping to get the Charlie Brown of BG players back in for another go.  "Surely it can't be that bad," you say to yourself.

"Yes it can," the pessimistic side of you retorts, "and don't call me Shirley."

"But maybe it's different this time."

"You said that the last time.  And the time before that.  And...."

"You know, when you talk to yourself, that's when you realize you're a bit off your rocker."

"So you're coming around to my way of thinking.  Good job!"

Maybe I ought to give WSG another try.  This streak has got to end sometime.  After all, even Manchester City won the Premier League last year.



*SLS makes a catchy acronym, you know.

**And your XP moves forward at a snail's pace.

You Don't Think He's Overcompensating for Something, Do You?

You know Illidan's favorite line?

Yeah, that was me when I hooked up the new desktop late last week.  I was so not prepared.

I work on a 14 inch laptop (81 in²).  Our old desktop had a 19 inch (160 in²) monitor.  The school laptop is 15.6 inches (120 in²).

The new desktop, by comparison, has a 23 inch HD monitor (230 in²).  I felt like it was the first day at a previous job back in the 90s, going from working on a 14 inch terminal to a 21 inch SGI workstation.  The only difference was that this new machine required a bunch of patches right off the bat (new OS, you know), but once that and the security software were in place I was off to downloading some MMOs.*

The first one was WoW, because I could play in a limited basis while the client itself was downloading.

I'd played so long on extremely low graphics settings that I was unprepared for how the game would look with current equipment (with a bit better than average graphics card).  For one thing, the 1080 resolution on a properly sized monitor is positively HUGE.  There was all this freaking space around where I was used to having to shoehorn in my mods; I'd grown so accustomed to having to mentally keep track of where enemies were located just off my viewing area that actually seeing them on-screen was unnerving.  And I'll be honest:  I thought I was playing an upgraded version of WoW because I could actually see the detail in both the background and the toons.**

If I thought that WoW was good, LOTRO and Age of Conan were better.  AoC seemed to have a bit of an issue with getting the toons at distance filled in, but it was still light years better than what I'd seen before.  Aion, on the other hand, seemed to be similar enough in graphics quality, but just moved better.***

Then I tried out TOR.

The details that I'd missed playing the game at extremely low graphics settings were stunning.  There I was --in Tatooine of all places-- staring at the sand on the screen.  The cutscenes didn't look all that different, but the actual worlds...

"Amazing," I said in Guild Chat when I was exploring The Wetlands on my Rogue.  "Everything is so huge."

"Yeah," said a guildie.  "Running on a smaller screen really takes out a lot of the details."

"And this is with a machine that you'd kind of classify as only a borderline gaming machine too.  Not one of the high powered $2k+ machines."

"Borderline gaming?"

"Yeah.  No $400 graphics card or solid state drive.  About the only splurge I did was to get the i7 CPU and 12 GB RAM."

Now, I'd be lying if I said that the fancy new machine suddenly improved my gaming, because it didn't.  Actually, my gaming got worse, because I was so used to being able to move around the smaller screen so quickly with a short flick of the wrist that having everything spread out so much made it more of a chore to use.  I also spent a lot more time looking down at where things were rather than where the enemy was when I was out and about.

And I have to confess that I spent way too much time just looking around rather than paying attention to the mobs around me.  You know, the ones that might actually kill me.

I can easily see why some game houses spend so much money on artwork in their attempt to take advantage of modern computer graphics, but I can now also see how that can be a money pit.  While I can stare at the visuals now, after a while it'll become old hat.  Once that happens, all the visuals in the world won't save a game without a deep and engrossing story, good gameplay, and replayability.

But in the meantime I'm going to grok some sand and swampland for a while.****





*Okay, perusing some clips on YouTube came first.  And setting up my family's accounts.  And setting up my wife's e-mail.  And setting up the network drive so I could listen to music/edit family videos.  And....

**And the pets.  With the higher resolution graphics, the Shivarra was a bit more PG-13 than I was comfortable with having my kids around.  But then again, I'd already covered that a while back.

***Aion still feels too.... Nintendo for my taste.  When I read the quest text, the language style isn't what I would use, and it just feels more like a translation from another culture.  It seems strange saying that, especially since AoC was developed by Funcom, but whereas the AoC NPCs talk like they came out of a Robert E. Howard short story, Aion's is decidedly different.

****My sister-in-law once said that professional golf broadcasts on television were tailor made for HDTV.  Now having seen the details in games with HD graphics, I can understand her argument a bit better.  And yes, for the record, we don't have a HD television in our house.  Our old 25 inch RCA is still chugging along, and there's been no need to replace it.  (Yet.)

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Having Withdrawal Symptoms

Yes, I really do exist.

I dropped off the map last week due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, and in no small part to my (lack of) MMO experiences on a laptop.  

What I've done is cherry pick what I've put on the laptop so that there's a minimum of times where the thing is on and downloading a game throughout the night, so I've focused on installing the three big heavy hitters in our household:  WoW, TOR, and LOTRO.*

Ironically enough, I've had an easier time slipping back into TOR than WoW, but that's because I've also been running without my mods.  It's been since 2009 when I last ran WoW without any mods at all, and boy does it show.  

I know some purists prefer the default WoW interface, and I used to think that I didn't need it much at all either, but boy do I miss Deadly Boss Mods (among others).  I couldn't tell you the number of times I've been looking around for a timer in a BG only to remember that I don't have it installed.  I've also made the declaration several times that "I'm going to install DBM no matter what the time of night is", only to forget it once the WoW session is over.

You'd think that means that I really don't miss mods all that much if I don't bother to put them in, right?

Well, sort of.

I think that dealing with the TOR interface has helped me immeasurably for this sort of situation.  It's a flashback to the days when I was leveling Quintalan in Wrath:  I'd level without mods, would get into an instance, and then learned the boss fights by watching for the in-game cues.  DBM and the other mods were a godsend for the clueless** or people who were too busy watching their rotation.  You didn't have to rely upon memory at all, but watch for the "Phase 2" or the "*Soul Storm*" to get your butt into the correct position.  Knowing the position was up to you, of course, but it was easier to handle knowing the "when" to do it.

WoW sans mods is more than a mere throwback, it's also a rejection of the current state of the game.  No serious raiding team will take you on if you don't have a requisite list of mods, those mods are absolutely essential to improving your efficiency to a proper raiding/PvP level.  You can demonstrate your skill all you want, but nobody will believe that you have the commitment to be a "serious" raider without them.

I could survive without any mods, but I realize that I can't perform at peak efficiency without them.  Even WoW's game design has taken into account the variety of mods out there; do you honestly think that the Arthas and Deathwing fights were designed for a player without any mods at all?  Of course they weren't; they were designed as a challenge, and when all of the best raiders are running heavily modded interfaces, that has an impact on the boss fight.

It's perhaps a chicken and egg scenario, but in its present state WoW is a mod driven game.  Even the controversial mods, such as Healers Have to Die or GearPlayerScore, have pushed the game in different directions.  For example, Blizz has taken PlayerScore, simplified it into the current gear rating, and incorporated it heavily into the game.  The old "go to Dal Fountain for GS check" has been replaced with "minimum ### gear rating required".

If you could scan a prospective raiding partner for currently used mods, would you?  Perhaps you might say that's too much intrusion into a player's personal preferences.  Maybe you might say that it's not needed; "skill trumps gear" as the saying goes, and the same ought to go for mods.  But if you were a raid leader and you could, just how great would that temptation be?

And would you like what you saw, without having seen the player in action?

*And Civ IV and LEGO Star Wars III.  I pretty much had to install Civ IV Complete, and the kids like LEGO Star Wars III for the battleground games.

**You'd be a "noob no more" as Soul once put it.

Lurching Toward Civilization

I managed to get WoW running on the new laptop.

After having played for a couple of hours that way, I wonder how people can handle playing MMOs on a laptop long term.

I can't possibly be that old, but my hands were cramping after a pair of battlegrounds.  And if I didn't have a wireless mouse, I don't think I could have handled using the trackpad at all.

The minor annoyances of dealing with a new OS (Win 8 in this case) I can handle in stride.  After all, I work in IT, and I know a new OS means some bugs in the system as all of the other apps get stressed in ways that beta testers never seem to get around to.  You just check frequently for patches and move on.  Considering my wife isn't cursing up a blue streak like she does when she tries to use my work laptop, I'll take that as a sign of approval.

However, one minor annoyance that I did find was that when I installed WoW and logged in, it wouldn't let me jump to the server listings directly.  I had to first allow the game to select a server, and then I could back out and find my usual haunts.  It would seem to be a minor thing that on a new install the game would check to see if you already have toons available, and if so it would allow you to select the server.  I know it used to do that back when the old machine lost a drive and I had to replace all of my apps (that'd be late Wrath - early Cata), so Blizz must have made a conscious decision to change the opening sequence into this server-selection-on-rails system.


Still, it was good to be back.  I've got several days worth of downloads ahead of me, but at least I can lurk around Warsong Gulch once more.