Gated Systems and Assorted Musings (WARNING: Bearwall)

Quite the bombshell.

ICC is going to be gated, and gated very heavily. As in, on release, we only have access to the first four bosses. This is all we get for weeks. “Several weeks”, to use the exact quote. Then we get to fight the next three, and after several more weeks, the next two, then after several more weeks, the final three.

And then, and only then, does heroic mode unlock. And did I mention that you get limited tries on the final boss of each wing?

This is… interesting.

On the one hand, this is perfect for casual aligned raider guilds. No pressure to continue past a certain point, because there isn’t anything beyond that point. On the other hand, this is a huge cockblock for the high end guilds, and possibly immensely frustrating for mid-level raiders.

Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

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VoA PuGs and the True Nature of People

25-man VoA forming up. I was on my paladin at the time, so I figure what the hey. Ret DPS isn’t exactly difficult (read: easy as crap) and I could use the Relentless gear, it would save me some honor farming. So I join in, do literally all of the summons myself (thanks guys), though thankfully I did at least have a dedicated clicker.

Gah, big advantage to 10 man raiding right there. Summoning is so easy when you have to deal with 8 people at absolute maximum.

Anyway, so in we go. Trash drops like nothing. We get to Koralon.

Our two tanks are Rhyokin (a well geared orc warrior with the title Gladiator) and Iliad (tauren DK, also well geared and also a Gladiator). Now, I respected both of these guys a great deal. They raid hard, they PvP hard, they seemed like pretty cool guys, overall. It’s also worth taking note of Nhiosis, a fantastic warlock with 85k lifetime kills.

If you bothered to armory them, you’ll notice they are all from the same guild.

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Whatever This Patch Is…

It had better be important.

I don’t think I’ve ever been flat out booted from the game and forced to download an emergency patch before. Seems like this must be something hugely important, what with booting me in the middle of a hard-fought WG, costing me the honor and tokens for winning. 20 minutes of hard fighting, wasted. Thank god I have time to do three WGs a night. I don’t know how I’d deal with this if I actually had something like a social life.

The forums say this is just a tools update, for the launcher (which I don’t use, and haven’t for years) or downloader or something.

Why this couldn’t wait literally ten hours for patch night boggles my mind.

Oh well. At least by punting me in the middle of the evening, this gives me time to deal with all the real life stuff like going to the bathroom or making dinner that I already did so I could play WoW all evening. So instead I’m just reading about Bat Boy and how Mel Gibson is to become the next pope. There is literally nothing else constructive left to do except sit here and watch the patch fail to update correctly over and over again.

Or, more accurately,try to start wow.exe, watch it do absolutely nothing whilst it demands access to fully control explorer.exe, and when given permission, instantly crashed explorer.exe.

Whelp, I’ma restart this here computer, and hopefully I don’t have to wait through that 50 minute download again.

See you on the flipside with an exciting story about how I put some guys I used to respect and revere on ignore.

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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.

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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”.

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Orphaned Post: WoW is the Most Complicated Game Ever

This was written a while ago as a reply to a reader style question that was featured at wow.com. The question itself was along the lines of “WoW is far too complicated. Imagine my shock at discovering that rogues have three separate hitcaps!” That would be for specials (yellow damage), poisons, and auto attacks (white damage), for those not in the know.

It’s a little harsher than most of my other posts, which is partly why it never got posted in the first place.

This orphan post goes live today, as I figured it would be… interesting, in light of changes that were announced at Blizzcon.

Armor Penetration is too “mathy”.

Jesus Christ in a handbasket.

~=~

Now here’s a complaint you don’t see very often.

WoW is too complicated!

I know, right? Ridiculous.

Blizzard has always been in the habit of not telling us players how things work. Stuff like spell hit, crit, things like haste, stats like that were never given an explanation. They were just there, and it was up to the players to figure out what they did. Its always been that way.

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In Which Fireball Makes Me Angry

It took less than a month to get the gear together to legitimately try a FB/TtW build. (Yes, I still refuse to capitalize that middle t.)

I’ve got 4pT8 now, and am only 1% shy of the hit cap, though it doesn’t seem to matter. A thousand casts of Scorch on a test dummy and no misses. I’ll be trying the farm content this way, see what happens.

I had heard a FB spec was random in it’s DPS, but man… there is nothing that can prepare you for DPS swings that huge. I’ll be poking along at 3k DPS, when lady luck smiles on me and suddenly I’ve dealt 100k damage in ten seconds.

Lemme put it this way. Spamming scorch and using HS procs as they come can grant me DPS anywhere from 2k to 3.5k.

It’s like that one D&D game where I one shot a dragon, then killed a party member accidentally, cut off my own foot, and impaled myself all in the same round. Admittedly the dragon one shot was a coup dentist (or whatever that french word is), but still, it ain’t easy beating 65AC as a level 6 monk.

D&D nights that cause the DM to weep aside, all this respeccing has instilled in me a deep sense of anger that my beloved arcane tree is being so rigorously ignored.

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On Elitism and Free T8

As you may have heard, Emblems of Heroism and Valor have been phased out in favor of Emblems of Conquest. Everything that used to drop Heroism/Valor badges now drop the latter.

In short, yes, this means that as of 3.2, you can get T8.5 gear by running plenty of Heroics.

Naturally, the elitist are up in arms and furious QQ, the casuals are pleased they can gear up new 80 alts faster, and the intelligent realize that this, in essence, changes nothing.

There’s an attitude I’d like to talk about.

“I’m special.”

Let’s start with the basics. Nearly everyone suffers from this at one point or another, and in a single word, this is called “elitism”.

Some of us suffer from it a lot, some of us just have small, easily squashed inklings of elitism.

Pike over at Aspect of the Hare had a blog post up a while ago that exemplifies what I mean.

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One Spells

Avast ye, there be sailor language ahead!

Neither shamans nor druids are intentionally designed to use one spell as an absolutely primary spell. My beta-era comment about CH was that we didn’t want to give it a cooldown or the like as Circle of Healing had. Don’t over-interpret “core” or “iconic” as “absolutely primary spell.” That’s overstating it. Having a spell you use 90% or more of the time is really lame

This is really excellent to hear. Frankly, spamming a single spell over and over again has never really been fun. It’s why I didn’t reroll a Destruction warlock back in BC… pressing one button over and over again seemed hella boring.

Yes, I am aware of the irony, considering I played a one-button fire mage instead. Ahh, but I have thee there! Fire mages had to rotate Scorch in, as well.

That’s… what, a second spell every 29 seconds?

These days all you young fellers have got all this fancy, flashy Living Bomb and Hot Streak stuff. We got to push a second button every 29 seconds, and we were damn grateful! Yessirree bob, and we had to slog uphill through naga and blood elves the whole way!

Honestly, the trash was waaaay more interesting than the vast majority of the boss fights.

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Swimming Upstream

Rational thinking would have us believe that “casuals” are ruining gaming. Companies like Nintendo and Popcap appeal to the lowest common denominator, spend next to nothing making these games, and make gigantic wads of cash from them.

Thus, making these smaller casual games is more profitable, and so more and more companies make them, abandoning the “better”, more “hardcore” games.

At least, that’s the impression so many have. It’s difficult to even count the number of times “casual games are killing the industry” has been thrown around.

It’s difficult to even fathom how horrifically wrong this idea is, either.

“Casual” games have been on the rise for many years. Some treat it as a passing fad, others herald it as the apocalypse… both are wrong.

Casual games did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. Their creation was carefully engineered to produce large quantities of profit for the companies that created them.

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