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.

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