Welcome to the End

Patch Day, ladies and gents. Welcome to the end.

It’s been a long run. I got Wrath of the Lich King on launch day back in November 2008, and it’s that game that I’ve been playing for the better part of two years now. While I’ll technically still be playing it for a couple months longer, that’s an extremely minor technicality. All the tech and all the systems will have been updated to what we’ll have to get used to using for at the next two years or so, if not much longer. But alas, the days of the 3.x patches are behind us, and now I get to fiddle around with all the juicy new stuffs 4.0.1 at long last.

I imagine the first order of business is to get everything together for the impending Cataclysm, well and truly. I’ve gradually been chipping away at achievements and rep grinds in the previous weeks, though now with the deadline less than two months away before the expansion drops, it might be time to set up a proper bucket list and see what I can get done before then. Zandalari rep is right at the top of the list, since I have so little time to get that capped to Exalted before it disappears forever, and then… well, there’s nothing terribly urgent, I guess. I’m an Explorer already, I’m a Loremaster already, I’m a Kingslayer already. Perhaps I’ll just tear up the battlegrounds as Arms for a while and see if I can get a Halion group together just to say I’ve done him.

So forget that long term stuff, then. What will I do when I get to log in tomorrow? Well… I’ll probably end up kicking and screaming and cursing at the lag of one of the more popular servers which is, sadly, the one I inhabit. Once I manage to get some stability and hope that there are no character destroying bugs lying around somewhere, first things first will be to get my characters in order. Atreika the DK I’ll probably not touch immediately, but Arisza the Warrior and Amelyra Delfeir the Paladin will need their specs sorted out. From there, a visit to the class trainer to get any new abilities that I might have found along the way, and then some time spent getting my glyphs and gems in order. I might tinker around with the Reforging systems as well to try and get my stats in a position that I’m comfortable with.

In short, I fiddle with the mechanics for a while. Once I’m satisfied, though, it’ll be time to retrain myself. Warrior Tanking has seen me build up a considerable amount of muscle memory – spam Heroic Strike as long as your rage is up, hit Shield Slam whenever it’s off cooldown or a proc goes off, hit Revenge whenever it procs, keep Shield Block up off CD, spam Devastate if you cannot do that, keep your Thunder Clap and Demo Shout buffs up, use your stuns and interrupts as is needed. Sounds like a lot, and it is – the main reason why I like Warrior tanking, given how involved they are – but even something as complicated as that becomes something you can do in your sleep given enough time.

As an aside, I spent some time today in my first raid since I killed the Lich King however many weeks ago. What was I doing? The exact same thing… invited to tank LK10 by a guildie and a few randoms, and out of boredom I decided to go along with it. We didn’t get it down and it wasn’t the most satisfying raid I’ve ever done, but hey. I did notice, however, that after about three attempts of Phase 1 once I was refamiliar with everything that was required and everyone else in the raid knew exactly what they were doing, that I was pretty much doing the entire thing while half asleep. I just tuned out, listened to my music and the calls in Vent, and just hit the buttons by sheer force of muscle memory. Kinda sad when you think about it. Is that a sign that I’ve gotten really good, really practiced, or just play the game too much? All of the above? Who knows.

Getting back to the point, it’ll be really interesting once I’ve got the mechanics all set up to launch myself back into content with renewed vigor and learn everything again. Arisza shouldn’t be too tricky to get back into habits with just by launching myself into Heroics and seeing what happens, but I’ll probably do the same thing again with the new Arms setup and see how that works out. From there, I’ll probably run through the prequel quest lines that they’ve added to the game and beat up all the event bosses. With luck, the old Fist of Reckoning crew will be around to join me in this, since I’d rather much be doing all this with friends and people I trust rather than randoms. I’ll probably end up consuming as much of the new stuff as I can over the next two or three days, then I’ll likely go ahead and repeat it with Delfeir before maybe doing the same with Atreika. If my friends haven’t joined me in it yet, I’ll likely drag them into seeing it all.

What will I do from there? Well, I’ll probably get back to you on that aforementioned bucket list and see if I come up with anything more interesting and definitive. Stay tuned.

Oh yeah. Finally, I’m probably going to start cataloguing the adventures of Arisza as I go in short story format as I’ve already started. Why? Because I like to get writing experience out of my gaming time, and also because I am a ridiculous dork with far too much affection for my fictional entity. You keep your hobbies, I have mine.

So, it’s all getting closer and closer to the big day. What are you guys going to be doing from now until then?

The time has come

There have been very few posts here for the last couple of weeks simply because, once again, my WoW time has become limited. That’s not by circumstance though, it’s by choice. At the moment, all I really have left to do in the game is ground out old reputations, get achievements, that sort of thing. Until the pre-Cataclysm patches come out or Cataclysm itself shows up, there’s pretty much nothing to do. Instead I just work inexorably towards getting The Exalted.

Thankfully, my grinding may be at an end soon… since today was the big day many of us have been waiting for. Blizzard takes their sweet time in even announcing release dates, let alone actually releasing the products, but they finally broke their silence and gave a release date.

Cataclysm begins on December 7th. I’ll be there.

The strange versus the familiar

I’ve said before that one of the key factors that drove me to playing WoW was my love of Warcraft 3 and how I wanted to see through all the plot points that were left unresolved, namely the Lich King. Shortly into my WoW career when the rampant interest in the stories and lore on offer really set in, I ended up looking back over what I’d missed in the two or three years of vanilla that I’d not been present for.

It was an interesting experience because I remember looking at all the big threats, the big bad villains that we raided to kill… and realising that aside from Kel’thuzad in the final content patch, I didn’t know who any of the villains were. Ragnaros? He wasn’t in the RTS. Hakkar? Nope. C’Thun and the qiraji? Never heard of them. Onyxia and Nefarian? Well, I’ve heard of their dad… but nope, they’re drawing blanks with me. Again, Kel’thuzad was the first boss where I could actually go “Oh, okay, I know that guy.” It wasn’t even just the raid bosses. Pretty much every dungeon was filled with people I’d never even heard of and didn’t know anything about their story, but in the end just about all of them worked. They all filled their niche, they all fit their purpose, and they (mostly) all had their place in the flow of the story.

It was only when one crossed the Portal into Outland that suddenly familiar names are popping up everywhere. Once you cleared Karazhan and Gruul, you had Magtheridon, Vashj, Kael’thas, Illidan, Zul’jin, and eventually Kil’jaeden himself all wanting a piece of you. We suddenly went from killing entirely new and original threats to rehashing the old stuff from the RTS. I don’t mean to say that it’s a bad thing either, don’t get me wrong – some of us migrated from RTS to MMO simply because we wanted to see those guys and stick them with whatever pointy thing we had available at the time. But it did show a somewhat marked change from the vanilla content.

Sometimes I wonder which is better: treading the familiar ground and giving us familiar faces to encounter, fight against, and ultimately defeat… or creating new characters and enemies in the gaps of the lore to give us something without having to kill the supposed Holy Grail of RTS characters. Certainly, there are two schools of thought within the fanbase, but that’s always the case. You’ll always have the die hards who absolutely insist that because a character was in the RTS, they are simply beyond reproach and should not ever come into the story. Likewise, you’ll have those who say that they’d rather fight established figures rather than some no-name random that Metzen came up with while drunk.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with killing the characters. Then again, I’m a writer and so I understand that no matter how much of an ensemble darkhorse somebody might be, all characters have a part to play and a purpose to fill. Sometimes, that means being defeated to reward the new generation of heroes. We all have our favourites, but hey, no king rules forever. Again, it was the desire to continue the story of the Lich King and see him brought low that was one of the major motivating factors for me in starting up WoW.

Blizzard certainly received a lot of flak for turning an arguably Not Evil character (Illidan) into an insane and depraved enemy who only showed up a few times before we killed him. They received even more flak for doing the same thing with Kael’thas, who was Even More Not Evil in the RTS games and yet was so despicably bad and evil in Burning Crusade that we had to kill him twice. I think they learned from that in Wrath of the Lich King, though: The Lich King was well and truly evil, yes, but he at least had the chance to show up and make himself really hated and reviled several times before the inevitable conclusion. The previous post, though, suggests that maybe that wasn’t done to perfection either.

At the same time, however, an interesting thing occurred in Wrath of the Lich King. Remember when I said that my favourite raid is Ulduar? Well, the entirety of that raid – the story, the enemies, the characters both in and out of the raid itself – were entirely new, created just for this expansion. The watchers, Loken, Yogg-Saron, Algalon… it provided a great story, a really tough raid, and the ultimate ramifications of the raid had us take a long hard look at the thought-to-be benevolent Titans and realise that they might just be cold and uncaring, potentially even hostile. Ulduar really opened up a lot of doors… and again, the whole thing had absolutely no connection to the Lich King or, indeed, barely any existing lore from the RTS games at all.

Cataclysm finds us at a new impasse, then. Like with the previous expansions, we’ve been given a targeted villain that many RTS players are familiar with right from the outset to direct our hatred onto: Deathwing. Like WotLK, we’ve been told that he’ll show up and make his influence known all over the place as the expansion progresses. Yet… he doesn’t feel like the big threat. Yeah, he’s a threat, he’s a big bad evil dragon with enough power to make Azeroth almost collapse into the Elemental Plane of Earth. But he doesn’t seem like the big overlord that the Lich King was.

This is especially true when you look at the stuff that will be joining him in the game. The Lich King had centre stage because the whole expansion – sans the Ulduar deviation – focused on the campaign to bring him down. Deathwing… not so much. Yeah, he *caused* the Cataclysm, but he’s not the only destructive feature of said cataclysm. There’s all the invasions of the elemental lords, there’s the continued threat of the Old Gods (which Deathwing is but a pawn/champion of anyway), there’s the rampant animosity between Alliance and Horde… a hell of a lot is going to happen in this expansion, and Deathwing really doesn’t seem like he’ll be taking centre stage aside from being the penultimate trophy we kill.

But the reason I’m bringing all this up? Just about every single element of the Cataclysm beyond, say, the War of the Ancients and anything relating to Queen Azshara is entirely a product of the MMO rather than the RTS. Ragnaros and the other elemental lords are all products of the MMO if not completely new, the Old Gods were developed for the MMO, the figureheads of the Horde and Alliance are all brand new, most of Deathwing’s servants and aides like his resurrected son… pretty much everything is new, save for Deathwing and Cho’Gall.

And really, that might be a sign that we’re simply running out of material to draw from… there’s not that many loose ends left from the RTS that we haven’t already tied up. If Blizzard is serious about continuing WoW as they’ve said repeatedly that they are, much of what they’ll be doing is drawing a little bit from the remaining threads in the RTS series, and then filling it out with new creations. That means that sooner or later, the question of whether it’s better to have new lore figures and enemies to fight rather than drawing directly from the RTS is going to be completely irrelevant. There won’t be much left to draw from soon, and so we’re going to have to get used to the idea of fighting things that are completely new and made up just for the sake of continuing the juggernaught of the MMO industry that WoW has become.

That is… at least until they reveal that new MMO. My money’s on that being a Starcraft MMO, actually. More on that later.

So what do you guys think? Is it better to fight the stuff we know, or the stuff we don’t?

“I will give anything or pay any price…”

“…if only you will help me save my people.”

This is one of many quotes from Warcraft III by Arthas that quickly and utterly solidified him as one of my favourite video game villains of all time… and I’ve played a lot of video games. The first human campaign of that game follows as Arthas, still an aspiring Paladin, sees the rise of the Scourge and watches as Lordaeron is gradually torn asunder by the devastating plague. You watch him try his best to contain the situation, but always end up just a little too late… and then you watch him take one step too far with the culling of Stratholme. Mal’Ganis reveals himself to be one of the driving forces behind the Scourge, and so Arthas goes to Northrend to gain revenge on him, finds Muradin there, tracks down Frostmourne, loses his soul and goodbye humanity!

The whole story was handled very well. You’d see Arthas do his best, but still fail to contain the plague even after killing Kel’Thuzad, who was more or less responsible for corrupting and destroying Andorhal and triggering the entire thing. Finally, his methods become extreme to the point of massacring a city of innocents. Sure, they were going to become undead anyway, but you’d think there had to be a better way, and calling Uther the Lightbringer a treasonous bastard in the process didn’t really help things. Arthas alienates those he cares about in a slow, arduous crusade just to make sure that the Scourge is ended and his people are saved. Yet by the end, he falls into the hands of the Lich King himself when he takes up Frostmourne to stop Mal’Ganis and becomes consumed by what he was trying to stop, right up to the point where he kills his father. Seriously, listen to that voice acting. They did a really good job on that.

The story didn’t end there, though, which is why I continued to like Arthas so much. You saw his fall from grace, yes, but then you saw his actions once he’d accepted his fall… and you saw just how well he thrived there. The undead campaign is exceedingly fun as you go around corrupting the remnants of Lordaeron, killing Uther the Lightbringer himself (with another epic Arthas quote), invading and ransacking Quel’thalas, and ultimately summoning Archimonde into the world to have him obliterate Dalaran. It was a good time for all concerned and I really enjoyed the game and adored Arthas as a character. He was well-written, well voice-acted, and overall a very interesting figure to spend half the game focused on.

Arthas then showed up and kicked even more ass in The Frozen Throne, but I didn’t like that game nearly as much as I did vanilla Warcraft 3 so I won’t bring up too much of that. He was still very cool and well-handled, though, and I remember sitting there in awe of the cinematic where he beat up Illidan and then became the Lich King. Even though I didn’t like most of the game, there was no denying that it ended on an incredibly epic note and only further solidified Arthas as an awesome character.

Yet it occurs to me that despite the fact that I started playing World of Warcraft looking forward to the day when I could travel to Northrend and confront the Lich King and then spending two years playing in an expansion which had me impede, assault, and ultimately defeat him… I walked away with so little of that sentiment remaining.

Arthas was awesome. Well written, well acted, an interesting and powerful hero to follow for the better part of two games. He was arguably the biggest threat to the world of Azeroth this side of Sargeras and most lore nuts who played WoW like myself were counting down the days until his confrontation.

But… in hindsight, it was all so lacking.

Wrath of the Lich King was a pretty good expansion, I’ve had fun with it, I’m not saying that. But really… the most interesting raid, to me, was Ulduar. Icecrown Citadel was good but not handled as well as Ulduar, even though the Lich King encounter itself was suitably amazing… but I tuned out most of his dialogue. Only one line of the Lich King’s quotes truly stands out for me now that he’s been defeated, the final line he says before you tip him over to 0 HP.

“Now I stand, the lion before the lambs… and they do not fear. They cannot fear.”

Actually, most of what he says in the final outro of the fight with him is pretty cool, but that one final line is my favourite. That was done well and was a suitably poignant end to such a great villain. Yet… that’s one of the very few and very rare quotes that I retain from Wrath of the Lich King that the big cheese actually delivers himself. There are very few stand out moments or lines that he delivers in WoW that I’ll remember beyond it, yet by contrast there were a lot more… facepalm worthy moments, I suppose.

Blizzard recognised that Illidan was an interesting character but he was practically unseen for most of Burning Crusade, right up until you killed him in something of an anticlimactic event. They wanted to establish Arthas as more of a threat, more of a villain, and actually give him a presence up to that point. You’ll see him at least once in practically each zone of the game as you quest, giving you all sorts of threats or insults or whatever… and then he’ll usually back off and run, or spare you, or let you as a mere insect in his gaze run around a little longer. Yes, he gets more presence as a villain and does some pretty interesting/cool things, but the fact that he constantly spares you seems kind of stupid. You could justify that with his ultimate aim, though: he planned to have those who fought their way to fighting him at the Frozen Throne killed and raised as generals of the Scourge, so he wouldn’t want anyone with too much potential killed off too soon. But couldn’t he just have killed you earlier anyway and used you then?

Another thing that annoyed me about how they presented Arthas was the change in voice actor. Arthas has an incredible VA in the strategy games, and I don’t even mind the Lich King’s current voice… even though the guttural rumble does start to hurt after a while. What annoys me, however, is that they felt the need to change the voice actor for Arthas himself in the Caverns of Time flashback. The opening to that dungeon is one of my favourite scenes in Warcraft III, largely for the excellent acting. In that scene Arthas sounds like he’s committed to taking that first step into darkness. But the WoW version of that? The new voice actor just sounds like a whiny teenager. Why they felt the need to replace the VA is beyond me, but shortly they could have hired somebody better? I hate that instance just for the sheer annoyance I feel at the use of that voice.

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s simply the nature of an MMO as opposed to an RTS in which there’s less focus on the characters and the lore which means Arthas/The Lich King just isn’t as interesting or likeable compared to his RTS counterpart. Or perhaps he wasn’t even that bad a character in the MMO, but just didn’t compare to his RTS self and it was just too difficult for me to compare them objectively? Years have passed after all, and writers no doubt come and go in Blizzard. Just because something isn’t *as* good as something else, doesn’t make it bad. It’s hard to say, though… but one thing is for certain. Arthas was, to me, a much more satisfying character to deal with in Warcraft III and Frozen Throne than he was in Wrath of the Lich King, and it’s kinda sad that this is the case.

In a way, I’m kind of glad that Cataclysm doesn’t focus on a character with as deep and meaningful a backstory as Deathwing. Yeah, there’s plenty of lore around for Deathwing, but that falls into two categories: It’s either stuff that we haven’t seen in any game and was just written about to further the lore, or it’s contained in books written by Richard A. Knaak, who sucks utterly as a writer and whose work I simply cannot stand. Deathwing is a stupidly annoying character and all the books he’s contained in are complete jokes, so any new lore established in Cataclysm will not, in comparison, be trashing stuff that I actually treasured.

Next post will be more about the lore, methinks.

The reasons we raid

The way I see it, there are three main reasons why people raid in WoW.

1. Raiding for Glory

You raid because you want to win and because you want the prestige or satisfaction that raiding can provide. There’s differing levels of this, too. The top end of players who raid for this are the ones chasing world/server first kills, honing their gear and their skills to the absolute best that they can in order to stand tall and proud against all comers. But it doesn’t have to be so extreme – some may just want the glory of having the kills and titles under their name so that they can show off to others or simply feel proud of their accomplishments.

2. Raiding for Profit

You raid because you want the gear, plain and simple. Whether it’s because you need the gear to tear up PvP, you just want to look impressive and have people inspect you constantly in capital cities, or you just want to be the strongest you can be for whatever you want to do in the game, your aim in raiding is to walk away with as many purples as possible.

3. Raiding for Fun

You raid because you find it fun. Either it’s the social environment that spurs you onwards, or the thrill of the boss kill, or just because you have fun seeing everything the game has to offer, you’re here just because you get a kick out of it. Plain, simple, effective. Gear and kills are usually second nature to it.

Those are the three reasons I see that people tend to raid. An important thing to keep in mind, however, is that they’re not all necessarily exclusive. The people chasing server first kills probably still enjoy getting gear out of their madcap runs, and probably still have plenty of fun with their guild and in their raids. A person who raids for fun will still likely proudly show off their gear and titles like anyone else. I do feel sorry for the person who raids for glory and profit but not fun… but other than that, you could easily be any combination of these three. I consider myself a mix of all three, but primarily Fun and Glory: I raid for fun with my friends first and foremost and I thrive on having shiny titles, achievements, and the thrill of the hunt. It’s always pleasant to see my gear scale in power, too.

Once Cataclysm comes out, however, many people will have to reevaluate how they perceive these three reasons and probably change their stance on raiding entirely.

One of the biggest and most controversial changes to the game that Cataclysm is implementing affects the settings of raids. 40 man raids are well and truly dead and have been dead since vanilla, regardless of the minority who still cries out for “that epic kind of raid” which was really more of an organisational clusterfuck than anything. That’s not changing. BC established the 10 and 25 man raids… Wrath made it so every raid could be swapped between those settings. Suddenly everything was accessible to the small groups and you didn’t have to join a competitive raiding group to see all the content.

The nature of gear and item levels, however, suggested that you really did. When I killed the Lich King on 10 man, most of the raid was wearing at least some stuff that they’d picked up in ICC25 – my gear is presently about half and half. It’s not essential, you can kill him without it, but why would you? If you have access to the better gear, more often than not you are going to take it just to make it a bit smoother. For the best chance at seeing all the content, you have to suck it up and do the 25s for the gear, even if (like me) you don’t particularly like 25s.

So Cataclysm is doing away with that. The 10/25 mode for each raid will still exist, but the difficulty and gear levels between the two will be identical. 25 mans will obviously drop more items per boss total so that if you *can* do 25s, you *should* do 25s just to gear up at a more efficient pace. But if you’d rather not or don’t have that luxury, worry not. You’ll still have access to the exact same gear as everyone else and thus, accessibility to all content has been heightened even further.

I don’t like 25 man raids, so this change suits me personally. I do them now because they’re available in the guild I’m in, I like getting gear upgrades, and because I like being amongst those people. Unfortunately, though, you’re really not amongst the people when you’re in a group of 24 others. Some people thrive in this kind of environment and get to know everybody there. Me? I don’t. I know a reasonable amount of people in the group, but there are always the stragglers who come and go each week that I know nothing about. And even assuming I knew everyone there, how are you meant to get to know each other when there’s that many people vying for attention at any given time? Say you’re in Vent with the whole raid… you can’t all talk at once, so only a few people end up in the limelight and a whole bunch remain silent. Plenty of people just come along for the raid and nothing more, never talking in guild or chat or Vent or anything like that.

For those of you who say you should be in a raid to focus on clearing the raid, fine, that’s fair. But I’m a social animal and play WoW to be part of a community, so this kind of thing concerns me and affects how I play the game. I’ll work to kill a boss in ICC25 to the best of my ability, and oft-times I’ll work a lot harder at it than any one of, say, the fill-in DPS that come and go each week. I’m a tank, it’s crucial that I’m working to the best of my ability as often as possible. But you can never be sure with 25 people that each and every one of them is willing to bring their A-game. At the end of the day, I just don’t enjoy it as much as I could in a smaller raid. The social environment just isn’t the same.

10 mans are a different story. It’s a small, select group. The Fist of Reckoning 10 man saw me personally knowing and trusting and respecting every person in the lockout, and I liked it that way. There wasn’t a struggle to build a social network – we’d all be chatting and laughing and joking and strengthening the existing friendships in almost every raid. I could depend on each of them to help out and do their best to make sure we walk away victorious at the end of the day. That’s how I’d rather see the game played. Since Cataclysm is changing it so I can still be competitive and see what the game has to offer without leaving the comfort zone of that group of friends, then it will probably always have my support.

Right now my 25s see me raiding primarily for Glory and Profit, but I want to raid for Fun again, and I always feel closest to that when I’m playing with my friends in a 10 man. Cataclysm may just make that primary for me again, and so as a result I can’t wait.

The fine art of getting really angry

Every expansion sees the character classes be shuffled, tweaked, rebalanced, buffed, nerfed, and what have you with every little patch. Some may argue that Wrath hasn’t been all that fair to certain classes, and I do agree… but I have to give Blizzard credit. Talent specs and options were practically non-existent in vanilla and were still pretty lackluster in BC. Of the nine classes when the game dropped, the vast majority had only one viable spec (if that!). Paladins healed or they were laughed at. Warriors pretty much had to tank, though they’d usually do that in an Arms build. It was really quite a mess.

Fast forward to BC, and more classes find themselves with options. Some fights in raids were damn near impossible without Paladin tanks, Feral tanks rose to massive prominence, Shamans… well, they weren’t liked that much, but Heroism/Bloodlust stacking was critical so there were still five in every raid. Either way, most of the classes suddenly found themselves choosing what spec to be, and while there were oft-times “better” or “best” specs, the hybrids at least had plenty of options.

Now it’s the end of Wrath, and while there’s still not a perfect balance as far as power goes, but the vast majority of class specs are more than welcome and completely viable in most situations in the game. Less so in PvP, but that’s the unfortunate nature of that aspect of WoW where group composition is king. In PvE, Blizzard has said there are only four specs they consider to have really failed come 3.3.

Sadly, one of those specs is a Warrior spec. That’s what I’m going to address today: the state of Warriors in Cataclysm, and what I hope changes.

Let’s talk Prot first, because it’s nice and simple. I never played a Prot Warrior before Wrath, so I don’t know how they used to scale or perform, but they were always the go-to guys for tanks. But two things changed for this expansion. First, Paladins were given substantial buffs to their tanking abilities. Second, Death Knights entered the scene with their ability to tank in any spec. Suddenly, Warriors aren’t the clear cut choice anymore, so Blizzard updates and redesigns the Prot tree considerably. Ultimately? They did a really damn good job.

Warrior survivability is up. We’re suddenly able to AoE tank a lot better. Our rotation isn’t just spam Sunder/Devastate to max over and over. We have an answer for just about any situation thrown at us, and while it might not be as easy and pain free a situation as a Paladin or Death Knight facing the same obstacle, we have enough versatility to match them in just about every field. We are, in my honest opinion, the most interesting tank. Not the easiest, but the most challenging and ultimately rewarding and satisfying. Prot’s redesign for Wrath was excellent, that’s all there is to it. Coming into Cataclysm, I’d be satisfied if much of the tree remained unchanged and the playstyle was left intact. Things are changing, of course, but from what I’ve seen so far Prot Warriors are still going to be a bundle of fun.

Yet despite the fact that Warriors are my favourite class, I like them for one spec and one spec only. My off spec is almost never used for anything, simply because the other trees are completely unsatisfying and because I prefer to tank whenever I’m allowed. Warrior DPS is, simply put, broken in the final stages of Wrath. The scaling curve of damage potential ends higher than any other class, sure, but it starts much much muuuuch lower.

The nature of rage is a tricky business. It was normalised in BC, and yet the normalisation left most Warriors screaming in horror because they were even worse off than before. Now that normalisation is happening again in Cataclysm, many Warriors are biting their fingernails and hoping they won’t screw it up monumentally again. I didn’t live through rage normalisation, so I’m just remaining cautiously optimistic. Blizzard, so far, appears to be doing reasonably well with balancing our rage generation in the beta.

Rage generation is critical to Warriors because without it, our DPS is crippled. We have to sit around and wait for white attacks to land before we can do anything special, since white hits generate rage based on how much damage it’s doing. And that’s why our damage curve starts so low: on the low end of gear, our white hits barely do anything, so we don’t have much rage to do our real damage, so we stagnate. But start getting some better gear, and we scale faster and higher than any other class. Reach the magic number and we’ll never run out of rage so we can just spam away our special attacks. Add high armour penetration into the mix, and then the purely physical damage of a Warrior will skyrocket even higher.

That’s why Warrior DPS is currently broken – the fickle nature of rage generation. And that’s also why one DPS spec is completely broken.

As it stands, Fury is best able to capitalise on limitless rage. They don’t have many special attacks to speak of – their extremely boring rotation consists of Bloodthirst, Whirlwind, wait a few seconds, Bloodthirst, wait a bit more, Bloodthirst, Whirlwind, wait again. Save for Slam procs and Heroic Strike spam, that’s it. But that’s the catch: Heroic Strike spam with limitless rage means you can just keep it queued infinitely. With enough gear, your second weapon white hits give you enough rage to keep you afloat while your main weapon hits harder. Plus, more Heroic Strikes mean more Slam procs. Get your BiS gear, and your Fury Warrior becomes a raging ball of metal death.

Arms Warriors don’t have that.

I vastly prefer Arms to Fury, because there’s more to do. For the same reason that I got bored of Prot Paladins when I had to sit and wait and do nothing while things came off cooldown, Fury Warriors just have way too much downtime. Even Ret Paladins have more to press and a more interesting setup than Fury. Arms has a little more to do: Keep your Rend up, hit your Overpower and Execute procs, hit Mortal Strike whenever possible, and Slam if you’ve got nothing else proc’d or off cooldown. There’s more to keep an eye on, and it feels more methodical. The common analogy is that Arms is the careful, precise Warrior who steps in at the right moment with the right strike. Fury Warriors show up to a fight drunk and half naked while screaming and hitting things wildly. I don’t like that undisciplined style.

But Arms is one of the four failed DPS specs of Icecrown Citadel. You can still do decent numbers, but that’s despite – not because of – the spec. As you gear up, you’ll get more rage, but even with the Endless Rage talent you won’t get nearly as much as the two weapons of a Fury Warrior. Additionally, even if you do get to the point where you have near limitless rage, you have virtually no way to capitalise on it. You’re entirely reliant on that single weapon of yours to give you that extra rage, so you can’t queue up Heroic Strike or you’ll lose it all. All it means is that you’ll be able to use your abilities when they light up… which you’ll find you can do at a low gear level anyway. They don’t have the rampant scaling of their cousin as a result.

So that’s how Wrath looks. Prot is fine, fun, effective. Fury is boring, starts crap but then skyrockets to Grom Hellscream levels of asskicking. Arms is a fun spec, but starts crap and finishes subpar. With luck, Cataclysm will be the answer to correcting the situation of Warrior DPS.

Like I’ve said, rage is being normalised in Cataclysm to simply giving a flat number when you hit rather than based on damage, which means that there should be less of a curve in low gear levels and less overpowering insanity at high levels. Heroic Strike is no longer spammable and is simply more of a rage dump ability, so Fury won’t be able to capitalise on ludicrous rage anymore. Armour penetration is being removed too, so that brings our scaling more in line as well. Curiously enough, a stat we never really care too much about currently – haste – may in fact become one of the most sought after stats at low gear levels just so we get more white hits, and thus more rage. This is especially true since crits will no longer give extra rage. I can easily foresee a future in which a certain amount of haste is the first and foremost thing a Warrior gears for… well, after hit, of course. Single Minded Fury might actually be better to gear up with in Fury, simply because you’re hitting faster and generating more rage in a shorter time.

The next thing that I would like to see changed for Cataclysm is more to do with our rotations. Arms has a good rotation with plenty to do right now, so I hope to see that maintained with a little more power to it than it currently has. Fury… Fury needs a lot more in its rotation because right now it’s dull as hell. We’re getting a couple of new toys, to my knowledge – Whirlwind will become an AoE only ability, not something you use on single target, but we’re also getting a damaging ability that can only be used when enraged (and we have a few of those). There’s also Colossus Blow, an ability on a mid-length cooldown that increases the damage our strikes do afterwards (and also replaces Execute for Sudden Death procs in the Arms tree, something I quite like). Fury will probably still end up feeling a little minimal, so something new to fill in the blanks would probably be very nice.

Overall, though, I do approve of what Cataclysm has in store for Warriors. It’s going to be an interesting time ahead, and I really hope to see Arms make a comeback. Regardless of what happens, though, you’ll probably still be there with a sword and board, tanking away.

Moving forward, looking back

Once again, I’ve found myself not playing WoW very much as everything winds down. Last time, that lead to me quitting the game. That probably won’t be the case this time, but as usual, not a lot is happening and everybody is waiting for Cataclysm. We’re sitting and hoping that some time in November will be the magic release date, but until then there’s not a lot to do.

I log on for the occasional raid, and today the old gang got together and lived it up in BGs for a while. By and large, though, there’s not much single player appeal left. Aside from the tedious rep grinds I have left just because I like to be a completionist and always have some big target to aim towards (previously Loremaster, now The Exalted), I’ve cleared just about everything. Now would be a good time to cancel the subscription, but I don’t want to. I still like the occasional raids and I like having the options open, just in case.

Effectively, my break gave me the time and focus to see WoW as a breath of fresh air again, so I don’t really like the idea of having to turn it off, albeit temporarily. But every day is the grim reminder: I’ve killed the Lich King. Wrath is over. It’s time to move forward.

But I can’t help but look over my shoulder as I go. Compared to Burning Crusade, Wrath was my WoW heyday. I went from just playing casually in some areas to getting involved in them all, while finding a really good group of extremely close friends to enjoy it with. Even when WoW goes, I really hope to stay on good terms with them all. I went from sucking at BGs to being a dominant force within, as well as breaking into the arena (though never progressing too far there). I went from an average tank and a meh DPSer to a good player in whatever role I chose, and I worked hard to become the best tank I could be.

Plenty of good things happened in the expansion. The questing improved by leaps and bounds, the cinematic feel, story, and progression of the game has been massively updated since vanilla/BC, the design of the raids has by-and-large improved and the accessibility factor has made WoW a far more approachable game. I won’t go into the argument of whether or not it’s better this way, but accessibility suits me simply because I didn’t want to dedicate myself even more completely to the game than I have been. Then there are things like the Dungeon Finder, the quest helping, the multiple raid levels… Wrath saw lots of upgrades to the overall gameplay that we’ll likely be reminded of for years to come.

Unfortunately, it also saw a lot of experiments that didn’t always go quite as well as they could have. The many tiers of raid gear and difficulty modes saw stat scaling get ridiculously out of proportion, which in turn lead to class balance and scaling becoming very skewed. There was the Trial of the Crusader raid, which… well, the fights were interesting and fun the first couple of times and a trash-free instance was nice, but it was just so lackluster. And having to run those same five bosses over and over and over again for months just became a complete drag with no story and no appeal.

Plus the tuning of the hard modes was such that while you could clear regular in about an hour, you couldn’t even hope to scratch the first boss in hard mode without all the right gear, setup, composition… the whole accessibility thing went out the window. Some might argue that it’s good that the hard modes are still “sacred”, but it really did feel like the wall was not tuned well. Especially compared to Icecrown Citadel heroics.

So yeah, Wrath had its ups and downs. But overall… it was good. I’ve enjoyed the last two years more than I have most of my WoW times.

Though when I do look back, I’m left to wonder that simple act of providence that put me where I am now. My friends should know about it… what if my guild leader hadn’t gotten lucky in that five man run and met you guys, then subsequently invited you when we started Naxx? I might have never crossed paths with you in any way, and might not have become such good friends. Nowadays you guys are the ones I actually really bother to play WoW – or hell, games in general – with, and I can imagine my life being extremely dull without you guys around.

Scary thought, really. I’m very glad things turned out like they did. That’s the one thing I’ll definitely treasure about Wrath and hope it carries over to Cataclysm… that companionship and camaraderie. Here’s to a brighter expansion, guys.

I think I’ll talk shop about Warriors come Cataclysm in the next post. Stay tuned.

No king rules forever

Looking back over the last post, I think it could be easily misconstrued that I don’t play the game for the game, I play it for the people and the story. While those are, in fact, the primary reasons I play… something that’s all style and no substance is still relatively meaningless, especially in video games. No matter how important those things are and no matter how good they are, a bad game is still a bad game. World of Warcraft is not a bad game.

There are times where it feels like I’ve played it all before… and really, I have. I’ve done most of the raids in the game, I’ve seen all the dungeons, I’ve beaten most of the quests, I’ve earned most of the PvP achievements. I’ve taken most characters to decent levels and seen the level cap more times than I really needed to. If you wanted to dabble in semantics and play the whole Casual vs. Hardcore game, you’d be hard pressed to place me since I don’t play that much anymore but have still done quite a lot with my time.

Back in Burning Crusade, I didn’t have the kind of guild or social contacts I needed to really take me places. I didn’t see Karazhan until the day after Wrath launched, and I’d already hit Level 71 in that time. I barely did all the dungeons on normal, let alone Heroic. I never got to do a 25 man raid or partake in much high level PvP. For me, the story, the quests, the lore, and the roleplay really was all I had. But as I built up my contacts, settled into one character and one character role, and eventually helped build a guild shortly before Wrath that went on to raid until Ulduar, the gameplay and the lure of endgame finally began to draw my attention. I found one thing that changed the way I felt about the game, one thing that I started to crave.

I started to relish the thrill of a brand new boss kill.

It’s kind of a shame that gear has been made so easy to get in Wrath of the Lich King. Before this starts a flame war, I don’t think this because I don’t feel that people should have gear. Gear is just a means to an end, and not even a crucial means – gear narrows the margin for error, but it doesn’t remove it entirely, and that’s where skill and co-ordination take precedence. Gear might allow you to get a boss down a few seconds faster or live for a few seconds longer if you stand in the fire… but you’ll still lose if you don’t perform your role and DPS as hard as you can, or you’ll still die if you don’t move out of the fire pronto.

But the problem is that gear suddenly became so prevelant that everybody put it first and foremost. I’ve heard tales of vanilla raiding, and at the end of the day even having one epic was a sign of hard work and dedication. As such, they didn’t focus so much on getting them – if they did, it was largely incidental. People would get together in their 20s and 40s for one thing and one thing only – the boss kill. They worked together and fought as one to see that gigantic son of a bitch die, and that was what they played for.

The focus has shifted, now, and boss kills are a means to getting more gear. It’s easier to do, it’s faster to do, it takes less time and a lot less grinding to get to a point where you *can* do it. But it’s never been my way. Gear is always, for me, that slight method of improving my margin for error. But as a tank, I live or die due to my skills at minimising my damage, keeping the enemies on me, and trying to limit what the healers have to do to keep me going. And so now I raid because at the end of the day, I want to go home with a shiny new achievement and a theoretical boss skull in my backpack.

It’s been a long, long time since I felt that thrill. Getting Putricide and Sindragosa down did the trick for a while, but there was always the one boss that I wanted to kill. It felt, at times, that I would never get the opportunity to even fight the Lich King, let alone see him die. But that all changed yesterday.

Arisza the Kingslayer has a nice ring to it. I think I’ll keep it until Cataclysm drops.

Great job guys, you fought like absolute champions. It wasn’t easy and we spent a couple of hours working on it, and the final attempt for the night saw us down him with barely three seconds left on the berserk timer… but we got him.

I’ve completed my final wish for Wrath of the Lich King. The expansion is well and truly over for me now, and though I’ll continue to play here and there, raid for gear and for hard modes and social company… it’s time for a new challenge. Bring on the Cataclysm! I have a second Dragon Aspect to kill.

Lore and order

I first saw World of Warcraft over the shoulder of a friend, and was quite surprised because it didn’t match up with my mental image at all. I think that was likely because I hadn’t ever seen a paid MMO before – the ones I’d witnessed were produced on a smaller budget with a lot less quality than WoW. Additionally, I’d played Warcraft 2 and 3, so somehow just focusing on the one character didn’t match up with my images of it. I knew of the game, of course – I had friends talking about it from the beta to launch and onwards well before I ever saw so much as a screenshot of it. That first glimpse was a couple of days after battlegrounds first came out, since he was trying those out.

A long while later, I was staying at a friend’s place for the night when my second introduction to WoW occurred. He’d purchased one of the $2 trial CDs that you can find for sale everywhere (and which probably attribute to WoW’s accessibility quite a bit, since it’s rare to have an MMO with a demo) and had fired it up for a bit, saying that it was pretty neat and I might like it. He’d never played the Warcraft RTS games like I had, so it was all new to him, but I was keen to give it a second look. I ended up using his account to make my own character, my very first – his name was Thrudd, and he was an Orc Warrior. By the time I was Level 3, I knew I had to give the game a whirl myself.

So I did. I purchased my own trial CD and played the game a hell of a lot during that trial period. I was so enthralled with it that I bought a second trial CD since I didn’t have the funds needed at the time to buy the full game (and anyway, Burning Crusade was literally around the corner by a month or two away as a point of reference). Shortly after Burning Crusade launched, I finally bought the real game for myself along with the xpac and got stuck into it. The rest is history. I will also freely admit that my first character made on the full game was a Blood Elf, simply because I hadn’t tested those yet. RP servers hadn’t ruined them forever for me by this point.

Speaking of RP servers, that’s where I rolled those first few characters. And that really gets me to the point of why I started playing in the first place.

See, for me it wasn’t the allure of the MMO genre. I didn’t even like MMOs at this point (and I’d argue that I still don’t) since, again, WoW was the first real, paid for, non-Korean-grind-to-insanity kind of MMO. It wasn’t necessarily on the strength of the game, though it always has been fun. The two primary reasons that I played World of Warcraft were that I had enjoyed the RTS games immensely and really wanted to see how the story and the world continued, and because it was a new stomping ground for me to RP in.

At this point in my life, I was a rabid roleplayer. I’m still very much into it these days, though I’m not nearly as active in as numerous communities as I was then. I’m far more selective now about my roleplaying companions, although admittedly I’m not entirely content about how infrequent my RP is these days. Regardless, that’s for another time. The point remains: I was a big RPer, and when I saw that WoW had RP servers, I knew I had to be a part of it. I loved the games, loved Blizzard’s comparatively unique take on Orcs and Trolls, liked the Night Elves and the concept of playable Undead… and eventually came to adore the Draenei and their complete uniqueness.

So that’s why. I did it for the lore. And the more I came to play the game, the more I explored the world, the more quests I completed, the more characters I made and roleplayed… the more totally engrossed I became in the lore. It was a lot of fun for me to read up on the stories of the game, particularly the parts that I had missed by being a BC Baby, and being a big part of the action was very appealing. Every character I made from then on was designed from an RP standpoint before they were played, and I tinkered with their stories as time went on. To this day, I get writing practice by RPing and writing short stories regarding Arisza.

Arisza has a fairly fun story, really. I set her up as a librarian on Shattrath during the peaceful years of life on Draenor. You know the sort – the quiet, shy, bookworm kind of character who preferred to read about lives than live them. And she could have lived a lot of them – Draenei, you know, and Arisza has been around for well over a millenium at least. So she sat there for hundreds of years, keeping chronicles of Draenei history and culture and art from being lost in the Nether.

Then suddenly, Orcs. And her library *was* lost to the Nether, along with most of Shattrath and all its defenders… including her parents. That was something of a wake up call for her, and Arisza intended from then on to take more action in the world. She wanted to work to preserve history  rather than keep records of it that could be so easily lost and destroyed. So she learnt how to fight, and ended up going with the group that hijacked the Exodar from the Blood Elves and brought it to Azeroth. Soon enough she found herself exploring this new planet and getting very, very deeply attached. So she vowed that she’d do whatever she could to avoid a second Draenor and preserve Azeroth to the best of her ability… in both her new way, and her old way.

Arisza reads a lot of books and goes exploring as much as she can. She’s something of a Draenei Indiana Jones, and I’ve often tried to play up that aspect of her character. In a way, she represents my love of the Warcraft universe – she wants to learn it all and cherish it, just as I do. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog, and that’s the reason I’m playing Arisza as I do.

And for that reason, it was plainly obvious to me from the very outset just what kind of title I wanted Arisza to wear. Even as I levelled her and geared her up to replace the aging Paladin character, I began to work on the side at the real achievement of her character. Finally, a few months ago, I got what I wanted.

Cataclysm is going to change Warcraft forever, and much of the locations and the lore that I came to really respect and appreciate and love will disappear. So if nothing else, I’m glad I got to see it all before it went.

Like Arisza, I’m a preserver of history. A couple of years from now, I’ll be able to tell new players of World of Warcraft just how things have changed, what used to be interesting and cool. Maybe one day I’ll even be worthy of the title of Loremaster myself. We’ll see, I suppose. Either way, WoW grabbed my attention for the lore and the RP, and to this day the lore and RP keeps me here.

This fortress feeds on tears

Ahhh, Icecrown Citadel. Many people were waiting expectantly for this raid from the moment Wrath of the Lich King was announced. Many more of us were waiting even longer than that, our expectations fuelled by the somewhat cliffhanger ending of The Frozen Throne were Arthas is victorious as the new Lich King… and then he waits for the right time. Well, his waiting saw him build a pretty sweet palace in the middle of the frozen north, and so last year we finally gained access to it.

It’s a good instance, I’m not going to say otherwise. But it’s really hard for me to muster up a huge deal of enthusiasm for it now, since I’ve been in there months and months. Yes, I really only started raiding it properly in March/April, which meant I ended up considerably behind most of the people I knew and the people I’ve come to know since. Trying to find a group was not an easy thing at first, but after a time in the new guild of It Came From Behind generally making myself known as a pretty decent guy, I was pulled along to one of the 10-mans once a week as a secondary tank.

I was kind of lucky in that regard, because the main tank was the run leader and had already mostly outgeared the place. So I would hang around in his coat tails and try to steal aggro from his blasted Death and Decay, biding my time and picking up all the pieces of gear I could. It didn’t really take long before I’d ditched a good number of the old 232s I’d amassed in ToC for some much sexier pieces of loot, and by that point I think I was well known enough in the guild to be brought along to the 25s as the third tank. I’d imagine it was largely due to being good friends with one of the other tanks and the main tank healer (I know you’re reading this and I swear I’m not sucking up to you both) that got me in there, but I’d still like to think it was because they noticed me as well.

And I think I did a good job. I slid into the 25s without too much difficulty and quickly built up quite an impressive set of gear, which is now almost all 264s with a few leftover 251s. Gear has never been a big deal to me, though – sure, it makes you look better both as a player and as a character (I will never get rid of Warrior T10, it’s too awesome), but I’m always in raids for the social interaction and the thrill of the game more than any of the rewards. The best reward is a fun day and a few boss kills, gear is just a means to an end.

So life continued for a few months as I settled into this raiding pattern. It Came From Behind progressed, we expanded, we shifted our ranks a few, and I was there to witness a few of the big kills. Sadly, the 10 man group I was in was something of a stepping stone raid: the raid leader got really fed up that people would come to the raid, gear up, learn the fights, and then progress to the other groups in the guild or just only go to 25s from there on when all he wanted to do was get a steady group to take to the Lich King.

I understand his pain… and I still feel somewhat guilty that I used it in the same way.

Yeah, I wanted to see the Lich King too, but the group was not the best bunch of raiders we could have found. People wouldn’t learn the fights – they’d still need re-explanations or make the same mistakes attempt after attempt, week after week. They wouldn’t know how to play their class effectively, they wouldn’t know how to work as a team, they didn’t communicate well with the others… it just didn’t have the makings of greatness and progression. Now, I do my  best to be a patient guy, and so I was always trying to be friendly with the others and helping them out however I could. But it kinda boggled me. I tend to pick up the things I need to do in a fight pretty quickly – a visit to Tankspot, maybe reading on Wowhead for a minute or two, and then one wipe. Bam, I know the fight and I know everything I need to do. From then on I do my absolute utmost to avoid causing wipes or being deadweight, contributing as much as I can. I try to be a good raider.

This group… didn’t really have that consistency. And so we’d gear up and lose people, so we’d pull in new guys. Gear them up, they’d go. In the meantime, the other groups in the guild would generally progress further, and after a while the first group downed the Lich King and got Kingslayer. But we’d never really progressed that far, since we only worked on it one night a week. One of those weeks saw us with some really geared and really good raiders from the other raid groups joining us, and we saw some serious progression that night: Blood Queen Lanathel went down in a hurry, leaving us at 8/12 bosses for the first time in there in forever. But that was it. The next week saw us with the mooks of the guild again, and the raid leader just got more and more fed up.

It was about this time when my old guild buddies – still good friends of mine with about half of them already in It Came From Behind when I joined up – decided it was time to get the band back together and rock ICC10. So I let the raid leader know that I’d be out that week and that I was going with a group of friends. He… was not happy. I think there was mild drama about it in the officer’s chat where he basically exploded that his raid would go nowhere if people didn’t stick around and learn, something I had sadly figured out weeks before.

But hey. In the end, the band got back together… and in the first week we cleared 10/12 bosses. Not too shabby. Sadly, though, this didn’t get to be a regular thing – we did it a few more times and got 11/12, spending a few attempts wiping on the Lich King, but we just couldn’t get the scheduling down to maintain it. In the meantime, the other guild raid groups were having troubles of their own and eventually disintegrated, leaving myself and a few other friends to effectively rebuild the Fist of Reckoning raids… with the A-team of It Came From Behind to fill in the gaps. And that has worked out well. While we still haven’t downed the Lich King with this new configuration, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Given that we’re spending extra time doing the Heroic modes anyway, I don’t think too many of us are in that much of a hurry.

As for the 25s, well, they continued for a while. I joined the guild when we were wiping on Blood Queen Lanathel, and we’d been stuck there for a few… weeks? Months? A while. It was a wall for the guild, but we managed to get her down two or three weeks after I joined the raid. (That’s not to say it was because of me – tanks have veeeery little input on that fight anyway. But I’m sure I improved raid morale or something. Yep.) I saw our first kill of Valithria Dreamwalker. I tanked Putricide when we killed him. And we were making steady progress against Sindragosa when… well, drama. Tensions. Problems. Once again, summed up in a single word:

Cataclysm.

We’d been in this raid for a long time, after all. Most of us were well and truly sick of it all by this point, and soon enough attendance just began to drop. We weren’t making progress, people weren’t showing up, so other people didn’t show up. As such, the guild hasn’t had a 25 in a fortnight. There’s an upcoming meeting to determine the guild’s fate, and as such I imagine I’ll have interesting times to blog about soon.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but really, that’s been the story of my Icecrown journey so far. I’ve always preferred the small group of friends rather than the big group of strangers setup of 10-mans, anyway, so it doesn’t really bother me that much if we cease the 25s. If I can stay with the 10-man group and finally get my Kingslayer title, I’ll be happy enough with that.

Icecrown is a good instance. I’m not sure I like it as much as Ulduar, overall – the bosses are probably more engaging to me in Icecrown since I was actually able to see them all, and the Lich King is one hell of a final boss. But overall, Ulduar probably attracts me more in terms of design and lore. It’s going to be interesting to see where the raids will go from here. I’ve had some fun times in Icecrown, and I hope that I get to wrap it up with a satisfying conclusion before the next expansion drops soon.

But really… given the way the guild is starting to break up and most of us are playing different games for a while anyway, I really hope Cataclysm isn’t too far off.

Next time, I think I’ll talk Loremaster, since that’s probably the biggest accomplishment I’ve earned since my return.