Micro-Transactions and the Pet Store

So much rage over such an inconsequential little thing. You can now buy vanity pets for real cash. Big whoop.

Ok, seriously, what the hell people. What so many of these complainers seem to forget is that microtransactions in WoW isn’t even a new concept. Don’t you guys remember paid race change? Paid faction change? Paid character recustomization? Paid SERVER TRANSFER?

Paying real cash for something in-game is not new. If you’re comparing WoW, with the whole pets thing, to all those microtransaction style “korean” MMOs, you are years too late.

What about the card game and the “loot cards”?

Here, lemme go to ebay and search for “spectral tiger mount”.

BOOM. A thousand fucking dollars.

Ten bucks is nothing for a very high quality vanity pet. I mean, Lil’ K.T. will laugh at players you kill in PvP. These two are among the very best pets in the game. But eh. Cost is beside the point.

You get all worked up about them directly selling pets for cash. A vanity item. A vanity item that, by it’s very definition, doesn’t change game play at all. A vanity item that isn’t even new or unique, but instead follows a very long string of other vanity items and services that have been part of WoW for years.

What is wrong with you?!

How many people bought the Blizzard feed for the pet alone? I know of at least 3 in my 10-man guild. How many people get the collector’s editions for the pet only?

But I get it. I do. You think Blizzard crossed a very serious line here, and nightmares of “slippery slope” dance in your head (please note the part where the concept of slippery slope is a logical fallacy). Selling pets directly is a little bit different from selling them indirectly, you say. You’re just wrong, is all.

Blizzard will never sell actual, game altering items for real cash. You will never be able to buy your tier sets for twenty bucks, you will never be able to buy fifty badges of I-already-did-this-content-goddamnit for a one time credit card payment. It’s just never going to happen.

The pet shop is only the beginning. I expect there will be many more pets added, and more than likely mounts and tabards and the like. I can almost guarantee that there will soon be a huge Hummer mount available that costs fifty bucks to get and awards you the title “Isn’t Compensating”.

But to think this is just the first step towards buying gold or gear? You’re wrong.

Playing the Game Wrong, Amongst Other Things

I’d like to direct you to a post over at Righteous Orbs, though really the only relevant part to my own post is this part:

When I hear the words ‘Flame Leviathan’ I’m thinking kraken meets phoenix, you know? I’m think tentacular wings dripping fire. I’m thinking awe. I’m thinking terror.

I am most assuredly not thinking GOLF CADDY.

If you don’t read Righteous Orbs yet, sucks to be you because NaNaDuraCell or whatever it’s called hates you.

Anyway, point is, Tamarind went into Ulduar-25 without even knowing what Flame Leviathan looked like. Poor Tamarind had no idea what was going on, what to expect, nothing.

Changing gears a little bit, I was chatting with me DK friend, and was all “didja see the green dragon fight?!” and he was all “Nah, man, I never look at that stuff” and I was all “What? Why not?” and he was all “I prefer the new fights to be a surprise, you know?” and I was all “. . . ?”

See, to me, going into an instance without knowing what to expect is equivalent to going into an instance with unkempt gear or terribad talents. Knowing your own class, having the right gear and talents, and knowing everything you can about the next boss fight are all one and the same to me.

Holy $%*# Paladins

A few nerfs to holy paladins were announced last night, though I suspect most of them won’t make it through. The LOH one, for instance, has already been removed.

I play a paladin, but I’m not going to talk (much) about the repurcussions to paladins. Rather, I’m going to talk about what such a change has revealed about players in PvP.

My sample size, so far, is limited to the vocal, posting members of the official forums, MMO Champion, and Arena Junkies (AJ).

The two nerfs “everyone” (used in the loosest sense) is talking about are as follows:

• Sacred Shield can now only occur every 30 sec. (up from 6. The holy talent, Infusion of Light, will reduce the frequency back down to 6 sec.)
• Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.

The LOH nerf has already been reverted, the SS nerf is just being thought about. Something is going to happen to SS that doesn’t impact deep holy paladins, but does impact everyone else.

Both of these changes have almost universally been met with loud cheering. Everything from “thank god, finally” to “suck it, paladins” to “finally nerfs to the most unfair class in the game”.

Arcane Shatter

Going frost for PvP is so Burning Crusade. The new hotness? Arcane, baby!

I prefer arcane over frost for general PvP, largely for the following reasons:

• Mobility
• Mobility
• Did I already say mobility
• Cause Seriously
• This spec is MOBILE
• Also stupidly powerful crits

Specifically, I use a specific kind of arcane spec, known as “arcane shatter”. It’s a kickass spec, full of ass kicking, though it’s honestly a rather cheap spec to use against the undergeared and underskilled. It’s possible to defeat most opponents by using only slow and arcane barrage. That poor ret paladin…

Anyway, the spec itself is rather simple. 51/0/20, picking up all the good stuff arcane power, icy veins, slow, ABarr. It detours from a “normal” arcane PvP spec in that it doesn’t use arcane blast or arcane missiles. The main nuke is, in fact, frostbolt.

Feels Good to Lose

I’ve railed against RNG before, and it remains my hugest complaint about WoW.

RNG is a necessary component of an RPG, or so I’m told by my past self and others. Which I can definitely see, I mean Hot Streak would be less fun it was simply a button you pushed every six seconds, and I think we’ll always fondly remember the T8 machine gun*.

I get all grumpy when RNG crosses the line from fun, mix-it-up mechanic to game breaking, why the bleeding hell did that just happen territory.

Killing Pokemon the Fire Watcher (or whatever his name is), and he drops warlock pants when warlock is the only class not present in the raid is frustrating. Getting feared and watching as the fear path takes you around a pillar then directly into a wall, ending only once you are out of LOS and fifty yards away from your partner is the pinnacle of frustration.

How many people, honestly, really liked random mace stun procs? How many people saw some poor priest get randomly stunned, and exclaimed “OH MAN LOOK AT THAT SKILL!” or “Well played!”

Me, March 23, 2009.

My opinion has not changed. Game breaking RNG is not healthy. A weapon like the ROFLHERALD adds nothing but arbitrary stupid to PvP. (If science can be a verb, then stupid can be a noun.)

When the Clouds Appeared

No post yesterday, due to history mid-term today. Apparently, no matter how much you read, how much you cross-correlate to other books, there will always, always be something you missed.

Such a thing as complete knowledge does not exist. Which makes it all the more embarrasing when you spent a day studying something and then it doesn’t even come up on the exam.

This is the best major ever. Screw math, I wanna learn about german economics in the 19th century!

Needless to say, there were a few questions that I just did not know the answer to. You know how sometimes you see a question, but you can make an educated guess or take a stab at it, and usually get close? Yeah. Not even that.

So Rasputin was a famous french romantic painter obsessed with shipwrecks, labour unions are called “le labour unions” in France, and a potato was the cause of the russian revolution in the 19th century.

At least there wasn’t a question on chartism or entarchy. Gaaaah.

Some interesting thoughts sparked by the last post.

The New Deep FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

• Deep Freeze: This spell now deals a large amount of damage to targets permanently immune to stuns.

Translation: Deep Freeze: This spell now deals a truck load of damage to raid bosses and many trash mobs.

Obviously this won’t work against enemy players, ever. It’s a PvE only thing, and frankly this is good, as the damage it deals is HUGE.

How huge?

REALLY HUGE.

As in, self buffed only, it will hit harder than frostbolt crits, and itself will crit for ludicrous numbers like 18k. Yes, 18k. Yes, self buffed only.

It’s bugged right now in that it doesn’t benefit from Ice Shards, but even without it, Deep Freeze is still happily critting away in the 13k, 14k area. Again, I must stress that this is without any raid buffs whatsoever.

With raid buffs up, 13% more spell damage, Totem of Wrath… oh man. It’s just… I mean… wow. Fully raid buffed we’re looking at DF crits of around 24k. This right here, even using DF once every 45 seconds is still going to result in an increase of about 10% to a frost mage’s personal DPS (not including WE), which is about 6% for overall DPS.

Even if nothing else happens, even if the permanent WE and this DF thing are the only changes that make it live, these are HUGE changes.

Prot Healing and Static Defense

I specced the paladin prot, gave that a try. It’s very… different from the traditional holy. Understatement of the year. 19/52/0 is the spec I went with, head to toe in holy pvp gear.

So here’s what I’ve learned:

The loss of Holy Shock isn’t nearly as big a deal as I thought it would be. There have been very few situations where an arena game was lost due to a lack of an instant cast heal, and honestly we probably would have lost every one of those situations anyway.

Holy Shock was, honestly, a crutch. I don’t really need it, not even against dual DPS teams.

The extra utility a deep prot spec has is glorious. Avenger’s Shield ain’t no repentance, but a powerful snare/silence followed with HoJ every 30 seconds is extremely potent. We’ve even beaten druid teams! And, of course, the extra survivability is great. Something like 9% complete damage reduction, and 15% spell damage reduction.

Not that I can tell. Chaos Bolt + Conflagrate still hurts like hell, especially when both crit. Ow.

The trend of learning things the very hard way continues, and honestly it’s pretty fun. Paladins have a crap ton of utility, a huge array of Hands and weird little things that are extremely useful in arenas. Presumably.

How I Spent My Evening

That, my friends, is what we call a draw in arenas. 47 minutes of pure fail and AIDS.

Yes, I have an 80 paladin, currently dual-specced PvP holy and a raiding retribution build. Yes, I arena on said paladin, though it’s mostly me and Decessus dorking around and screaming obscenities at each other. Largely because I haven’t PvPd as holy since my very well loved shockadin spec got nerfed into oblivion, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

It’s really exciting really. There are lots of guides on the internet on how to succeed as DK/Pally. Here, I’ll sum them up for you:

• The DK should remove the G and H keys from his keyboard so that facerolling is less painful.

And that is how you arena. Never mind the fact holy paladins and death knights of any spec haven’t been overpowered in months.

News From the Front!

• Water Elemental: Waterbolt mana cost reduced by 80%.

Whelp. There’s the answer to the WE’s mana issues. Isn’t that convenient! (Shout out to Magejuego!)

In other news, buffs to fire PvP!

No seriously. Check this stuff out:

• Blast Wave: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
• Burning Determination: The duration of interrupt immunity granted by this talent is now 20 seconds.
• Dragon’s Breath: The mana cost of this talent has been significantly reduced.
• Firestarter: When this talent is triggered, it makes the next Flamestrike cost no mana in addition to being instant.

Something is very wrong here. Major buffs to frost PvE and fire PvP in the same patch? What is this madness?!