Turning with the wind

Those who know me better can verify that I get excited pretty quickly on some idea. And my interest in that idea may dwindle as quickly as it is incited.

Yesterday I tweeted that I might take up on - or in fact propose - leading a guild raid in some earlier instances. I had a plan and I had the interest and I was very much pepped up with the whole thing. Until I checked our guild's current raid schedule. The ICC runs are already in a state in which the only one running is 25 man, three times a week. No tens in some time now and the odd raids -scheduled- are old world reputation and achievement runs. To which there are not many joining, but then again, in 80's gear they are all soloable.

So I got dishearted and decided to stick to the Loremaster stuff instead. If nothing changes, that will be my main interest for the time being.

This lead me to think about the raid leading and beginning it. It would be pretty hard for me to think about starting a PUG, barely knowing the encounters as a raider, let alone take on the leading. Sure, I have read the strategies and know the basics of the encounters, but knowing how different the actual encounters are from the videos or strategies to execute, I doubt severely that I could do it. Successfully.

The current state of the game is such that the LFD 5mans do not teach you anything about grouping, group or class dynamics or goup roles. Levelling content 5mans are - especially the LFD PUGs - just facerolled and most of the time the healer is actually more bound of DPS than healing: the self healing capabilities (and mitigation) of the tanking classes are showing already at low levels, rendering the healing to a couple of HoT's at best. DPS can go rampant and tank lose the aggro and still there is only a little risk of anything going wrong. Only a really messy add pull causes a wipe in there. I've healed a RFK with my lv32 Druid in which I did more dps as healer than an enhancement shaman. And we did the instance without a problem.

Anyhow, the Three rode again yesterday.

First of all, we tried a new composition by having my baby DK first as dps for Headless Horseman and a random heroic. I was a bit amazed that this poor little DK in his green, blue and lv200 purple gear could deliver more dps than Förgelös, who is in way higher gear alltogether. On Headless the difference was significant, but in Gundrak it was even bigger.

In Gundrak my main dps run was against the tanking DK in all purples. Granted, he was tanking and more active due to that, but still I managed to out dps him on each and every boss fight, and in the last boss quite nicely. We passed Eck, as usual, but as the rest of the group left, we decided to go and see if we could do it by ourselves.

I had a tanking spec done - blood one, naturally - but my gear is almost all dps. Just a slight improvement by two or three pieces, but nothing crucial. Dodge at 10%, Parry at 12% and no real understanding on tanking as a DK. My buttons were a mess and I really hadn't even considered what the skills really do.

Add to this, Bishopgeorge's connection had an uncanny trait to disconnect at the most inappropriate moments.

We wiped twice, first due to the fact that I just didn't have the whole grasp of my skills. Second because our healer all of a sudden disconnected. And third wipe came from these combined.

Fourth one. I used every skill to see how and what it helped. In went Army of the Dead, Dancing Rune Weapon, Icebound Fortitude (aye, keep it up all the time) and so on.

And down went Eck.

I realized it only later that we had downed him on HEROIC.

From there I switched to my prot warrior and off we went to Pit of Saron. Now this instance, with which we struggled for so long, seems like a walk in the park. Garfrost is a big lump of meat, Ick/Krick almost annoying fight and Scourgelord Tyrannus is just a blabbermouth. For some reason we always seem to be able to pull the mid-climb mobs on as and wipe: that's just sheer negligence and should be done with. The sad part of this run was that as we ran it for Förgelös so he could get new daggers, no such drops were seen. We had one irritated rogue among us for the rest of the evening.

And off the Halls of Reflection we went.

To be honest, Falric/Marwyn would have been a nice, concise and pushoverish fight, had our healer stayed online through it all. He disconnected around the last wave before Marwyn and we just couldn't push him over the edge. Our first try and he got away with 1/6 of his health.

Second try on Marwyn was pure joy: down he went and without a problem. Too bad the shield didn't drop, it would have made my evening. It's the only improvement I can get from 5 mans anymore, so it would be nice to see drop.

But we have a new brickwall in our way. The last part, the evasion from the Lich King with Jaina. We just do not have enough firepower as it currently is to down the mobs fast enough. Sure, we can do it up to the last wall, but then the lack comes apparent and Lich King collects more souls for Frostmourne.

Next week it will be more Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflection. Hopefully with better luck with gear upgrades, as that is all it seems to be about.

C out
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Whose quests are they really?

I tweeted today that I have made a terrible find, which isn't a surprise at all. All who have read this blog any longer than last few months know that I love stories and quests and have been very much disappointed with the heroic/raid kind of playing. Now I took my warrior, switched to Arms dps and started doing the Loremaster achievement in earnest.

And I'm loving the quests which I'm unfolding. Which I have not completed. Which I have neglected back then, or abandoned because I over-levelled them outrageously.

Granted, my main interest is to do the Old World quests before Cataclysm. I know, it's a bit time intensive goal, especially as I know already I'll be travelling due to work things for two weeks during the time. On the helpful side, I have already almost two thirds done of them, in Eastern Kingdom I just crossed 577/700 quests done as I was checking Wetlands for unfinished quests.

Before that I finished the Grizzly Hills achievement and found some nice quest chains which can easily go neglected if you are just levelling up. The Drakuru-chain is obvious, as it has an achievement in itself, but how many really stumbled upon - and completed - the Arugal chain? I do not have to finish it, but I want to, really.

While I was doing the Grizzly Hills quests I noticed something I don't think I have noticed before. The odd quests and small chains in the Old World emphasized this notion even more.

Whose quests is the player character actually doing?

As far as I can see, the quests are always important to the questgiver, and are of utmost important to them. I can't remember right from the top of my hat any quests or questlines where the player character was impelled to do the quests for personal involvement or which would have revolved around the player character in any real way.

The personal involvement of the player through her/his character's personal involvement is seriously missing in the quests, as far as I can tell.

Like in the business world, the reward of money or gear isn't enough a drive to make the quests enjoyable or rewarding to the player. (In some recent studies on salary being a reward in a job they found that after certain salary level the salary ceases to be the reward or reason to work for more.) If there is no personal involvement or enticement, the player is pretty much alienated from the questing and thus the quest-reward cycle feels like a grind, something you must do to get on with the game, to level up.

I'm a strong advocate for choice in quests and equal reward for making a choice that affects the position and demeanour of the character in the world around him. You make the choice and you face the consequences rather than you do the deed and the NPC enjoys the outcome.

What would be your solution to this lack of personal involvement in WoW quests?

The truth comes out of an infants mouth (YAWP)

Not exactly an infant, naturally, but a small kid. In this case my youngest son, 9 years, who got the luxury of playing his DK on Sunday while I was first having a nice jog and then a long walkie with one of the dogs.

His DK was lv60 when we got his UI set up and I left. When I returned half an hour later, he had gotten almost one level more, without problems in the quests and was already stating that the game feels easy. After another hour and a half the DK was lv62, my son had needed help with only two quests and he was convinced that the game was easier, his unholy DK was a brutal killing machine and the mobs in Hellfire Peninsula gave more exp than earlier.

Who am I to agree? The truth in this case came from the mouth of a young gamer who knows neigh English, plays a game which he shouldn't even touch and who has earlier - before patch 4.0.1. - been suffering from utter difficulties with the levelling process.

I also confess that I did the unthinkable and installed Carbonite once again. Only to rationalize my Loremaster project, that is. And I have to say I was very, very pleasantly surprised after I got it running on my machine. Gone is the heavy and straining memory usage, the addon works fluidly and the new additions are pretty nice, too. Partly with the help of it I finished the Grizzly Hills loremaster part in a breeze, and still had time to read the quests.

Next stop Zul'Drak and then it's all Old World till either I finish the Loremaster or Cataclysm hits. I have already made a decision that I will queue for randoms only as a dps on my warrior, as this gives me a bit time to do quests on the side. I did tank only one boss over the weekend, all the rest of the few randoms I was dps.

Like someone commented earlier in Twitter: Why bother with the gearing if I'm not raiding?

C out
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Three again

The patch still haunts me. Sure Auctioneer got an upgrade, but for some reason it's not working on me, so I have to install it anew. Out with the bad air, in with the good.

So the Three Stooges rode again. First it was guiding Bishopgeorge, our resident evil healer, with his talents, gems, reforging and skills, so he could heal us. However, the action bars and their bindings seemed to cause more problems than anticipated, and the game client didn't help by freezing on him at awkward times.

However, after some half an hour or so we launched to our meeting with the Headless Horseman. I started repeating a phrase even before we went to the queue, that "do not touch the pumpkinhead, do not touch the pumpkinhead". Guess what? Both Förgelös and Bishopgeorge moused over the pumpkinhead, disconnecting almost simultanously and losing the first fight! Bishop had a faster boot, and could toss one heal before the flaming bastard unfortunate soul was released. So, we went for another.

Did I mention that Bishopgeorge should have checked his glyphs, too?

The second run. Random dps got frozen and I -the tank- too my chances: it worked for a change! Alas, the Headless Horseman was killed and everyone was rejoicing.

So Bishop checked his glyphs, made them work and off we went for a random.

Ahn'Kahet.

Nice, I thought, as I ran to the first mobs at the entrance. Weird, I thought as I was doing over 3k dps on the mobs. "Is this really a heroic?", asked Bishop, because it was too easy to heal for him. "Yes, it is", I had to reply. 

Even more weird was our threesome consensus when the DK putting out some decent 2.5k dps died in before the first boss. "This can't be heroic!", claimed Förgelös. "Yes it is, I queued us on heroic", I said with confidence. 

And she died on the boss. And on the first hulking giant.

And then I noticed that the hunter in the group didn't rise above my 2.7k dps at all.

Turned out that the DK had just dinged or had had very, very poor luck in the gear draw. His gearscore was around 1k after the instance. The hunter wasn't much better, gearwise, but he was obviously a smartass and alt of a raider: Bishopgeorge died more than once, and after the second death -as he was running in- this hunter a) started a vote to kick Bishop, reason: slack, and b) asked "could we go faster, gogo" while we were waiting for the healer.

Sufficient to say, I took that as a sign he wanted to see the whole instance, lead the group to Amanita and proved that it was a heroic. At one point Bishop got a revelation, message from above or just woke up, as he noticed that he didn't have Fade bound in the action bars, and thus was like a plum ripe for picking for the mobs in rampage...

The rest of the instance was pretty uneventful and goes without a note that either of these extra members in our team didn't as much as thank us.

We had to contemplate the situation for a while after the run, because this was pretty unheard of: we, the ones who go to die where others run amok laughing, were actually boosting -not only one, but two!- newly geared players, and only our healer got killed! What the heck is going on in the game!

Then we cleared FoS and PoS only to learn that it is possible to wipe still even though we are super elite boosting machines, and that there is something wrong with the ghost flight as the ghost griffons fly at the speed of a snail. Going uphill. On fine gravel.

As usual, the time passed too fast on the route, and as we started to bang the doors of Halls of Reflection it was way past our bedtime. "Our playtime always comes to end when we come this far", went Förgelös, quite a bit annoyed for the fact that he hadn't had a single upgrade the whole evening. Which was true, in fact. 

So we decided next time spend our whole evening trying to best the Halls of Reflection. Only because Scourgelord Tyrannus is our puppy and we are so good in the boosting.

Because we can!

C out

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It's not fun anymore

I did try my best to overcome my gripes with the current state of warrior tanking, but I just couldn't. Really.

For some reason the whole thing doesn't seem to work. Don't get me wrong, I like the talent change and the challenge it poses to all classes. Even though the talent system is so streamlined that you could call it a dumbed down version of the earlier one, there are less options to really gimp your toon down to unproductive leach. In fact, there are none at the moment: the PvE and PvP specs perform pretty nicely in the other function as well, thanks to overlapping talents.

But the game feels unresponsive.

Before the patch, when I pushed a button, the skill happened. WoW is very much renown for this, being very responsive in the combat, and thus very enjoyable to play. Yesterday I ran a couple of heroics and Headless Horsemans and it just didn't feel right. Even if I take the inability to hold aggro in a multi-mob situation off of the equation, the combat felt like it just wasn't following my commands.

In this I'm in the same boat with Baenhoof of the Tankatronic blog, where she says:

The one thing…the ONE thing that I cannot fucking stand about this patch is the goddamned ability queueing. I dont -want- to have to WAIT until a dev lands onto one mob before I can tab over to the next (tab is fucked up now, by the way) and slowly hit that one, too.

I like mashing keys. Its fun. Its part of the reason why the warrior is my main and not the paladin or the DK. The ability queueing feels sluggish and unresponsive and needs to be gotten rid of. It was part of the reason I enjoyed WoW over say, Aion- everything was more streamlined and tended to feel faster.

I’d really appreciate a choice to revert back to the old, quicker way of doing things- and from the look of the official forums, so would everyone else. 

She points out exactly what I mean: it feels sluggish, and I feel I don't have control over what is happening in the game.

Then again, if I'm to believe Spinks and Kadomi, I am not any good as a tank, either, as they state that nothing has really changed in the way the warrior should be played and haven't noticed anything changing in the playability of our class at all.

The other option is that my computer or addons are borking the game, but that doesn't hold when I'm very content with the other classes I'm playing (DK, Spriest and druid). They seem to be up there, performing nicely, so why the protection warrior feels so like he's sleepwalking?

I'm just no good at it, and where the other classes have gotten the fun back into their game, the warriors got the work part back. Like a moonkin in one of the heroics said: "your class got the raped in the patch, pal" after I voiced my concern over the well being of the rest of the group.

That is exactly how I feel. It's more a work than games.

It is not fun anymore.

C out

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