A Week With the Hour

Thrall, Aspect of Stealin' the Scene.

We’ve had a week since 4.3 dropped and it’s been a lot of fun so far, I made money hand over fist the first few days. Oh, Auction House, you are so good to me. Ahem, anyway! I don’t know if I am an exception or the rule on this, but this patch has thrust me fully back into PvE and for that I am thankful.

-Feeling like a Hero-

 

I’ve been through all the new heroics multiple times with various characters in a number of roles. These are heroics that feel right again, they have just enough going on to keep you engaged, but are still easy enough to blunder through on the first go without too much hassle, I’m in love. I do worry though that it might not last, I beat that loot piñata hard this first week and have 4 mostly complete sets of gear to show for it. We might be in love now, but I think we’re gonna see the same sort of content burnout we always do. I just hope the speed and ease of these will help, when you don’t have hour long slogs to deal with moods tend to be better.

-The Hive Mind-

The other big deal of course is the raid finder. I found it a pleasant surprise really, folks dealt with the content very well. I can’t say for sure if it’s as easy as it seems or if it’s just my latent raider kicking in after better than a year of dormancy. Naturally, of course, the human factor was, what’s the word for this…present? People are people, they whine, they insult, they stamp their feet and quit when they don’t get their way or fail to grasp a simple concept (Hagara, I’m lookin’ at you). None of this, however, stopped the 20 of us who gave a damn from putting our heads down and terminating the boss with brutal efficiency. As time goes by people will learn the fights and the wrinkles will smooth out. It'll eventually be an overgrown dungeon finder, swift, silent destruction... for fabulous prizes!

-Conquistadors-

Taking a different track, while the season is just getting going I am a huge fan of Conquest Points from Battleground wins. I’ve already seen the Allies trying a lot harder now that we got a real prize on the line. The gains feel just right too, the current cap of 1650 can be met with 3 or 4 wins a day, which can be meet, barring horrible luck, with a few hours of BG in the evening. Feels like a good balance. Throw in some arena and a casual team can knock out a few wins one night and make up the rest with a BG or two a day for the rest of the week. 

-Looking Ahead-

This patch as a whole is meant to be a sign of things to come according the Blizzard. The test run for the raid finder, dungeons that conform to the goals of MoP design (3-4 bosses, couple pulls of trash in between, 30 minute run times), and being able to play the way you want without the rewards being restricted to those with a large guild. I like it a lot, it’s a good feeling and it’s successfully gotten at least one casual back into current content. When the new expansion drops containing two or three raid finder queues of three or four bosses each and has nine different well-crafted, smooth running dungeons that flow along from boss to boss I’m gonna be a happy player. And despite what some may say I think most other players will be happy too.

Fitting In

Image from Blizzard Entertainment.

Roleplaying is something pretty near and dear to me. We have a new patch, transmog and a new expansion one the way with a radically different race, class and location from anything yet seen. It gets the old creative juices flowing, eh? So this time it’s gonna be a rundown of character design basics, some broad guidelines and some tips to help you fit your character into the world avoid a big rules lawyer argument with other RPers.

-Know Your Lore-

I can’t stress how important it is to have a basic handle on the in game history, big events of who, what and when. The in game timeline is vague, there are a couple versions around and they are always running behind the current state of things, but there are some basic reference points to think of. If you know your history and follow its guidelines many RP pitfalls can be avoided.

•          Going backwards we have the events of World of Warcraft, all these have taken place in, more or less, the last 5 years.

•          Before that is the Third War, which took place around 10 years ago and saw the Scourge destroy Lordaeron, the orcs coming to Kalimdor, the founding of Theramore and the uniting to the humans, orcs and night elves at the battle for Mount Hyjal. After this we had Illidan, the naga and the blood elves going to Outland, Arthas becoming the Lich King and somewhere in there the night elves grew Teldrassil and built Darnassus.

•           We then have a 15 or so year-long period after the Second War where the orcs were imprisoned, Thrall was raised as a gladiator, escaped, became a shaman, meet Doomhammer, eventually freed the other orcs and became Warchief with Doomhammer’s death.

•           Before this was the Second War, over 25 years ago, the original Alliance formed by the seven human kingdoms, plus high elves and dwarves, fighting the horde in Lordaeron, Lothar dying, Gul’dan dying and the Old Horde losing and being imprisoned. This is also when the Alliance Expedition chased the horde back to Outland and got stuck.  It was right after these events that Gilneas flipped the rest of the Alliance the bird and built that lovely wall.

•           About 35 years ago, and some 6 or so years before the Second War, we had the events of the First War, the opening of the Dark Portal, the original fall of Stormwind and a few years of 16-bit Orc vs Human action. Before all this, everything was pretty cool for the humans.

•           But over in Outland, then still a lovely spherical world called Draenor, we had a fairly lengthy 50-ish year period of increasing demonic corruption, Draenei genocide etc, from the orcs, starting around 80 years before the present day.

•           History deeper than this exists, but aside from three big events, the War of the Three Hammers at maybe 300 years ago for the dwarves, along with the War of the Shifting Sands around 1,000 years ago and the War of the Ancients about 10,000 years ago, which were both very big deal for the night elves, it’s moot when it comes to the basics.

-Basic Character Design-

Now that the mess is out of the way, some general pointers that can apply to any race.

  

•       Different races age differently. We don’t have exact numbers, but dwarves and gnomes live longer than humans, elves tend to have very long lives, the night elves were technically immortal for 10,000 years and draenei don’t seem to have a set lifespan at all. All other player races live on a similar timescale to humans.

•         Find your place in the world. What could this character have seen in their lifetime? How new are the things they are experiencing? Night elves just got over 10,000 years of isolation, most young orcs today were probably born or raised in a prison camp, many adult humans could have literally seen their kingdom burned to the ground.

•          Where are you from? This is a big concern for humans, what with 7 kingdoms and all, but also applies to other races. Someone from Lordaeron saw things in a different light than someone from Stormwind, a Bronzebeard dwarf is not a Wildhammer dwarf, and different clans of orcs have different traditions.

After the who and where are taken care of the last question is the what. There are lots of possible people to be, soldiers, scholars, treasure hunters, a grizzled vet, a green recruit, a fighter, a healer, an explorer, really just about anything works. It helps to keep it simple in the beginning and staying apart from major lore figures and not giving yourself a big role in events almost always helps to smooth the way. That’s not to say you can’t have served under the command Anduin Lothar himself back in the day, but you probably aren’t his long lost child or favorite squire. Be open, be aware, do a little digging on the race you choose and try to stay to the general outline of things. You’ll get along fine and get better with time.

Playing Favorites

Blue is such a Player 2 color.

Oh my my, oh hey hey. Things is happenin’ today. We’re getting hit with 4.3 folks and it’s brave new world time yet again.

But that’s all beside the point right now, cause I feel like talking about the recent Dev Watercooler on faction bias. Now, I’m gonna come clean on a thing or two myself first. 

I’m an Ally, have been since the beginning, and I mean the ol’ old days, vanilla vintage female dwarf rogue. I’ve played various alts through various leveling pathways of various races and factions and classes. I’ve been a two-hander shaman. I’ve arena’d in the halcyon days of Burning Crusade. I raided in Wrath from when 3K dps was godly up through the halls of ICC. I’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in BG and world PvP more times than I care to remember and I’ve seen city raids fall to a single party of well-organized defenders. I’m an RPer, a PvPer, an AH-Player and a… well no, since Cata I can honestly say I’ve done like eight random dungeons. 

Point is though I been here a long time and I’ve seen the game change in many different ways and over this span of time I have come to temper my thoughts on a lot of issues with the depth of experience. But something about that post bugs me…

This all seems familiar…

It’s the old song and dance we’ve seen since the beginning of the game, “Is that grass really greener over there or is it just me?” The Dev post is well reasoned, well written, but ultimately it has a fatal flaw, it talked about faction bias. There was no way to say it without making some people get angry at the result.

For some faction bias is a scorecard, who has what, if the Horde is 11-1 and the Allies 1-11 it’s a problem. For others it’s a pure mechanical issue, and people pick pet examples to prove their point, from racials to bridges to the numbers of mailboxes per capita in the various cities. And lastly there is the big one, creative energy, development effort and the court of public opinion.

The blog post addressed a lot of option #1, “We’re sorry you lost battles, but you’ll have to take a few more punches before things start looking up” fair enough, it’s war. It then dove into lots of flowery language about forging heroes through hardship and just how awesome Thrall really is. From a story design standpoint it’s great, but the core issue that most people, Horde and Ally alike, are upset about, at least judging from the comments is the last point, how much does Blizzard care?

Sadly the answer to “What is more of the current in game story advancement being used for?” is a pretty resounding “For the Horde!”. Now this isn’t saying that in the time span of Cata the Alliance did nothing. Darkshore for example has the Night Elves engaging Horde forces and players taking part, as well as getting to help out Malfurion directly, good times, in Wolfheart, Wrynn gets to whip Garrosh pretty soundly, and run him off for a time.

While Darkshore is fine the problem with Wolfheart and a number of other events is they don’t have any impact in the game, at all. Unless you read the book, or an article on the web some place you have no idea that the Alliance was winning in Ashenvale, or had won and was later turned back, all you see is orcs everywhere, bombing, burning, and taking over previously Night Elf territory. Southshore is just gone, Alliance doesn’t even see mention of its loss. I could go on, Worgen vs Goblin development, Ally storylines being resolved in Horde side questing, ambiguous endings vs definitive ones, amount of faction leader involvement, pop-culture quests, open Horde-pride from Blizz, etc. People have made all these points, no need to be a broken record here.

Give it time.

I’m honestly not mad at Blizzard, not upset, not envious, just disappointed. I want to see things turn around, I really do. The new dungeons and raids coming today might give the Alliance more reason to like Thrall, the events surrounding Theramore are unclear still, and they say things will be better in Mists. For now it’s benefit of the doubt time. We need to let things develop naturally; Blizzard works with a big time delay and folks have to remember that. Complaining now isn’t going to change things tomorrow, they do listen, and we have given a good solid response. Now we have to wait and see what their reaction is. I just hope they learned their lesson. For Khaz Modan!

Class Abilities: Take One

Image from Blizzard Entertainment

We finally got a look at the updated ability lists for Mists of Pandaria, hopefully this will help dispel some of the false info flying around the web right now. Of course as with anything Blizzard says its debatable whether it provided more questions or answers. However, a few things have come to light and I feel that, for the most part, they are positives.


-It should now be abundantly clear that they are not taking away your class specialization.

While this was known from the beginning lots of folks still seemed ignorant of the fact that talents were now a separate thing from spec. To anyone still confused, its ok, it really is, you can still be a Frost Mage, or Marks Hunter, or Protection Paladin. You get all the abilities you need for your chosen spec automatically as you level, and the new talent system provides additional utility on top of the basic skills you need to do your job.


-Pure DPS classes generally have very few spec specific abilities compared to others.

This is a good sign for anyone hoping to see more useful cross spec abilities. For example, a Mage’s class specific abilities are limited to the main rotational nukes, a flavored orb and the spec’s cooldown skill. There are no elemental damage boosts, which in the case of Mages and Warlocks is one of the main factors limiting the effectiveness of spells from other schools. Under the new system a Fire Mage can spread their Living Bomb to other targets using Inferno Blast (a spec specific Fire Blast upgrade), but a Frost or Arcane Mage’s version will tick for the same amount of damage. This will bring in a lot more variety and useful situational tricks for mages.


-Heal capable hybrids are losing access to a lot of their healing when not a healing spec.

Any non-healing spec of these classes is only going to be able to use a single direct heal, typically the “fast heal” of the current trinity, and a class themed specialized heal, Power Word: Shield, Word of Glory, Rejuv, and Healing Rain, along with a stray cool down here and there for some classes. Now, on the surface this seems to be a bad thing, however, in light of the previous point I feel this could turn out a plus. By limiting the number of healing spells these specs can use they can make these spells more effective, healing for amounts similar to their healer speced brethren, rather than weakened off spec heals. This fits in nicely with the idea that other casters won’t be at a disadvantage using spells from schools they aren’t speced into.


-What few new spells we are seeing are extremely interesting.

The ability lists are incomplete, but a some of the new tricks are listed and they are good. A lot of these skills are wildly different from anything currently in game and show that Blizzard isn’t shying away from some very finicky, tricky to use, sorts of skills. Alter Time for Mages is going to be immensely powerful in skills hands, but very, very hard to pull off. Druid’s Symbiosis is just way out there, the closest thing to it is Dark Simulacrum, but that’s more an offensive Spellsteal. The possibilities on this one, geez, I am already plotting how to best use my guild mates.  Demonic Portal for Warlock is fun, the description is so vague though, is this a group wide Demonic Circle, some kind of Lock answer to the Mage-Portal, who knows? Rounding out the list is Blinding Light for Pallys. This is the Plain Jane of the bunch, useful, long asked for, but at the end of the day just a Pally-themed AoE disorient. Still a nice trick though.


-This is all still a work in progress.

This talent set up is already showing differences from the original release and its all still pre-alpha. If you see an issue now, don’t panic, talk about it, calmly and rationally. Bring up your concerns, lay them out and give a solution. Blizzard does not want to kill their game, they want to make it better.


So far, so good.

Beginnings

Well, hello there.

With all the changes and news happening in the World of Warcraft lately I took it into my head to make a little place where I could starting writing my thoughts on the matter down.

New ideas, wild speculation, and random groping in the dark about the future of the game are all in style now and this is just the sort of environment I enjoy most, the exciting world of what may and may not be. I'm an info-hound by nature, a scientist by trade, and its just part of who I am to find out as much as I can. This is the place where I plan to make those bits of knowledge into a cohesive whole.

I honestly can't say how this will all turn out but, hey, no harm in giving it a go.