Dot Hack The World

I failed to come up with a clever or relevant post title so I just slapped whatever song was currently playing on winamp in there. Now you know.

There aren’t a lot of cataclysm changes out yet, so there isn’t much to discuss there. We have some talent changes, and a whole bunch of zone things.

I do have to say, I love goblins. Flat out. Best addition to the horde ever. What other race would build a defensive cannon so large it can be seen from orbit? And just look at their sense of style! Banana wallpaper! Golf courses! Pineapple bedsheets!

What do the worgen have to compete with that, huh?

Oh right… top hats.

Those top hats better be available somehow horde side. I desperately require one, so that I may log off in a tux and top hat and look bloody spectacular on the armory. I suppose I could always throw on my haliscan set again. I did, after all, expend some effort for that sombrero back in the day. Did it solo and everything.

(Conspiracy hat mode)

What if, just what if, the Warcraft and Starcraft universes are actually the exact same universe?

Think about it.

It struck me a few weeks back that the draenei and protoss look almost exactly the same. Their body structures are nearly identical. They both have the exact same legs (protoss sans hooves), they both have glowing eyes, and their spines are near identical.

The protoss look like a somewhat stereotypical advanced space race looks like. Spindly limbs, thin body, that just somehow manages to look exactly like what the draenei would look like in a few million years, provided evolution functions in the warcraft/starcraft universe.

(It probably does, though we have no real evidence for it in either case. The Zerg evolve intentionally, and that hardly counts. Both protoss and zerg races were created. Everything in WoW was essentially created as is. Trolls seem to be the only thing that ever actually bothers to adapt to their surroundings. Everything else just says “fuck it, I’m a tiger, I don’t need to evolve” and remains unchanged.)

Consider also that all draenei can heal. They have a deep affinity for the light, and thus even the lowliest of sword grunts with no skills whatsoever can still wield holy magic. On the protoss side, all protoss have a deep affinity for various psionic abilities, where even their lowliest of sword grunts can still summon lethal blades from nothing.

Consider this picture of the Halls of Origination. Now compare that to this picture of the protoss central structure, the nexus.

You could say they look similar due to Blizzard pulling from Egyptian architecture in both cases. I say, there is no such thing as Egypt in-universe for either the warcraft or starcraft universes. So where did the common architecture come from?

Well? Who created most of the stuff on Azeroth? Who built the Halls of Origination? Who went in and created life, leaving behind guardians, elevating the dragons from mindless beasts to powerful, thinking creatures?

They’ve been called makers, creators, they are basically gods in the world of warcraft. The Titans. Effectively, they created Azeroth, birthing most, if not all, of the sentient life there.

Sound familiar? Was there, perhaps, an advanced race of mysterious beings in Starcraft that went about creating life? That created the protoss and the zerg? The Xel’Naga?

I posit that the Titans and Xel’Naga are one and the same.

Consider also the relative nature of the Burning Legion and the Zerg Swarm. Or, rather, the complete and total absence of any difference between the two.

Both the Legion and Swarm are hell bent on conquering everything.

Both are diametrically opposed to the draenei/protoss.

Both, lorewise, are assimilators. The zerg were originally just tiny, sentient bugs. They assimilate the DNA of other races, twisting and evolving them to suit the greater will of the Swarm. Anything that benefits the swarm is incorporated, the rest is erased from reality.

The Legion spread across the universe, either annihilating or assimilating everything in their path. Sometimes they meet a race such as the orcs, and bring them into the fold of the Legion. Everything else is simply destroyed.

Each individual zerg has their will bound to their master, the Overmind. Each individual warrior of the legion has their will bound to their master, Sargeras. In both cases this can be broken.

Sargeras physically led the Legion for millenia, until his physical body was (possibly) destroyed, rendering him little more than a driving will  behind the Legion. Which is pretty much the definition of the Overmind.

Consider also that a cerebrate does not stay dead when killed. Unless slain by a Dark Templar, a cerebrate simply regenerates and reappears elsewhere.

*cough* MAL’GANIS *cough*

Read Full Post »

Onward to a Bright, New Future of Some Sort

Exams are done, for better or worse. I hallucinated spiders on my keyboard.

A day and a half to recuperate, and then Friday is moving day. And then no internet until May 5th! Oh noes! Such tumultuous change.

I’ve been awake for all of twenty minutes after sleeping all day (yes, literally) so thoughts are a little polar bear manifesto at the moment.

So two general thoughts.

-=-

I was at a friend’s place yesterday, so I tried out WoW and sure enough there was no lag to speak off. Well, I mean I was on a laptop and they were torrenting and stuff, so I was sitting at around 250ms, but still. No lag spikes, no disconnects. I got to raid again!

As frost.

I could have stuck with arcane, but meh. I don’t dislike any mage spec, and if I hadn’t gone frost a hunter would have had to go Survival. And frankly, having tried survival myself? I would never, ever inflict that on someone. Besides, the hunter in question has been die-hard marksman his entire WoW career. Warlord title, never once specced beastmaster throughout the entirety of TBC, you know the type.

So with a frost spec in hand, I shipped off to Icecrown Citadel and found out the hard way which mobs can be stunned and which can’t. Nothing is as heartbreaking as watching your 26k damage spell turn into a 5 second stun that deals nothing. Imagine blowing all your cooldowns as arcane, slamming arcane blasts into a boss, and then freaking out because everything’s critting for 2k. Then you come to the horrible realization that you’re casting rank 1 arcane blast for some reason.

That is how much it hurts.

Still, having a permanent Dribbles (I call him Dribbles, capital D, and don’t you forget it) to follow you around is plenty awesome. If only he would stop despawning whenever I took a portal or loading screen to somewhere. There were a few times where I noobed it up, forgot to summon the thing, and then he missed out on the wave of raid buffs.

Sorry Dribbles. I shall try to not be a terrible frost mage next time. You know, that little guy is truly the immortal one around here. Standing in whirlwind, casting happily along with 50 stacks of mystic buffet, and doesn’t afraid of anything.

Tangent: raiding as a frost mage is extremely strange, thematically. I am a frost mage, a master of ice and snow, the midnight sun and hot springs. And yet, in order to raid optimally, I have two roots and one snare. Both fire mages and arcane mages have access to those, plus frostbolt, and they can spec for even more.

It is very strange.

-=-

So 10 and 25 man raids are going to be normalized. They share lockouts, heroic modes are chosen on a per boss basis, and even the loot quality is exactly the same between the two, as is the difficulty.

Look, everyone from Tamarind to Honorshammer has bemoaned the fate of the 10man ghetto. You could either raid with the big boys in 25man, get the best of the best loot, experience hard core fights, or go 10man and be held in contempt as scrubs by fellow players and even the game itself.

10man raiding never really felt like raiding an instance for 10 players. Instead, we were traipsing through 25 player content that was lobotomized for us. Whenever we ran into difficult fights, we’d look at and research the fights on tankspot and elsewhere, to find strategies we could use. There we would watch a holy priest with val’anyr effortlessly healing through hardmode Anub’arak using nothing but shield and renew to keep the entire raid alive.

This strategy didn’t work. Not even close. Using nothing but renew and shield to heal someone results in that someone dying four or five seconds later.

It isn’t easy being a strict(ish) 10 man guild in Lich King. Our raid comp is nowhere near ideal (no shaman, for instance), and without the gear 25 man raiders use to carry themselves through 10man content we have to use some extremely weird strategies to defeat bosses sometimes. We’ve had to use Death Knights to juggle kinetic bombs and tank the shadow bolting boss, for instance.

For example, last night I was the only caster DPS in the raid. Me and a lone hunter made up the entirety of the ranged DPS. At least the druid got to be boomkin for the first four bosses, but after that it was full time tree.

Anyway, point is, 10man raiding never really was 10man raiding. It was 25man raiding with less players and worse loot.

I didn’t (and still don’t) care nearly as much as my fellow guildmates do. Being able to raid with 10 people trumps any consideration such as loot; doing 10man raids with 10man gear made for some interesting difficulty curves; and the respect of faceless others is so unimportant to me that the colour of my toothbrush is more important.

It’s easy to see where they’re coming from. Clearing ToC-10 and wondering why an iLevel 200 trinket is still best in slot. Watching strat videos just to watch the elite core of a 25man guild take the best possible raid comp into a 10man instance and crush it effortlessly with gear that is more than twenty item levels higher than your own. On and on and on. That gets frustrating after a while.

10man raiding can be difficult. It has been in the past. Remember Zul’Aman? There was nothing easy about it. Even the perfectly optimized 25 man raiders would head in there and struggle.

I suspect Blizzard’s goal with cataclysm is the same goal they had with lich king: offer 10man raiding as a legitimate thing to do.

Will this change sound the deathknell of 25man raiding?

I posit the question: why on earth would it? People who want to raid 25m do so, and suffer no penalty nor benefit from it. People who want to raid 10m do so, and suffer no penalty nor benefit from it.

Raid leaders shifting from doing 25m to 10m raids in order to lessen the stress of their job! Oh noes! So they have more fun raiding?

People who currently raid 25m, but don’t actually like it that much due to the social strains (or maybe they just do it for the loot), will be able to raid 10m without feeling like a ghetto raider and have more fun with their friends!

People who currently raid 25m and actually do enjoy it will be able to keep doing what they love in huge epic battles!

I don’t see a downside anywhere.

Read Full Post »

Ret Paladins

Ret paladins are not overpowered, and have been underpowered for quite some time. They can put out absolutely huge burst damage against unprotected targets with lower than average resilience, and they have very powerful team based defensive buttons. That’s it.

We all probably remember that one week where ret was ruthlessly overpowered. A ret paladin on the field of battle was a mobile nuclear weapon, capable of completely devastating a target in a manner of seconds. Just like every other class with a DPS spec (except warriors, hunters, and priests, cause screw those guys). But that’s all in the past, and thus irrelevant. Let’s talk about today’s ret paladin.

Ret isn’t even doing that great in raiding. I mean, DKs suck in PvP but have a very strong presence in raids; ret paladins don’t even have that much due to crippling scaling issues.

Today’s retribution paladin suffers from an extreme case of “melee class without any melee class tools”. Namely, a ret paladin does not have any gap closing buttons, snares, interrupts, and other than one extremely restrictive defensive cooldown are the squishiest melee class in the game. Only a rogue caught in the open with zero cooldowns is easier to kill than a ret paladin is.

To put it another way, ret paladins have one defensive ability available at any given time. Technically speaking, they have Divine Shield (total immunity for 12 seconds), Lay on Hands (refills health bar), Divine Protection (half damage), and Hand of Protection (total physical damage immunity). All of those cause Forbearance, meaning the Paladin can only use on of those on themselves every 2 minutes.

Now, for arenas, this means the paladin picks one of those and that’s all they get, really. Lay on Hands is, of course, unusable, and Hand of Protection is usually strictly reserved for other players. So the choice comes down to Divine Shield or Protection, and it’s always Shield. Of course the paladin could use these more liberally if the given arena battle lasted longer than the two to four minutes (or significantly less) most arenas are decided in.

This situation is made even worse as the paladin’s only offensive cooldown, Avenging Wrath, is completely unusable within 30 seconds of any of the above (except, I believe, HoP, though I have never HoPped myself so I can’t be sure) and vice versa. Popping Avenging Wrath is always a huge gamble, because what if you need to bubble in the next 30 seconds? You’re SOL, that’s what.

It’s a slightly different picture for battlegrounds, as Forbearance doesn’t persist though death. Conceivably, the paladin could use Divine Shield and pop Lay on Hands on themselves in under 20 seconds, or even less depending on when they get to the graveyard. I can see how this might create an odd perception, due to the paladin effectively showing up in combat with a fresh defensive cooldown every single time.

Still, Divine Shield can be dispelled by priests and warriors, both very common classes, Divine Protection can be dispelled by anyone with a dispel button, as can HoP, and Lay on Hands is extremely overrated. Technically, yes, the paladin can Divine Shield and use that 12 second immunity to just flat out delay anyone without fear of failure for that entire time span, but… well, technically every single class can do that as long as someone reasonably competent is at the helm.

All this vaunted survivability that everyone likes to attribute to the ret paladin spec is nothing more than player skill. Think about it.

How does a warrior PvP? Charge, intercept, even intervene in some situations to close. Once there, they can use hamstring/piercing shout to stay in melee, throw up a powerful mortal strike effect, extremely huge amounts of damage (provided a decent weapon and ArP rating, which let’s face it all warriors have by now), and if things go haywire they have interrupts and numerous defensive cooldowns to rely on at a moment’s notice.

How does a ret paladin close to melee? They cleanse snares from themselves, perhaps blow freedom, or get out of combat so they can mount and charge. The latter is usable by anyone, the former two easily counterable by anything that actually uses snares (except moonkin, because they suck). Then, they have two interrupts on one minute cooldowns, no snares of any kind, and precisely one defensive cooldown to rely on provided they didn’t blow their only offensive cooldown.

The only reason ret paladins ever survive as long as they do is because good ret paladins think like casters. Ret paladins survive because they continuously duck around corners, constantly pillar hump to avoid damage and let their heals tick, and constantly fight opposing melee class from range.

To put it another way, ret paladin survivability is not a part of how the spec is designed. There is barely any survivability at a ret paladin’s disposal. What they do have are LOS blocks and very strange “melee” abilities.

Look at the range on the paladin’s abilities. Judgement has a 10 yard range. Divine Storm is 8. The only things a ret paladin has to be in melee range to do is crusader strike and auto attacks. Everything else can be used from outside the 5 yard melee range. Paladins beat and out survive warriors because the paladin does his best to never actually be in melee with warriors.

A ret paladin who thinks like a melee character and tries to act like one will fail over and over again. A ret paladin who thinks and acts like a frightened holy priest actually gets results and is called overpowered for it.

It’s worth pointing out that ret paladins can absolutely, completely, totally, utterly destroy the undergeared/underskilled/unattentive players.

Against undergeared… ret paladins scale rather poorly against resilience. Art of War gives rets the ability to heal themselves whenever they crit with certain abilities, thus the less resilience a given target has (read: undergeared) the more they crit, the more they can heal themselves easily, the more “unstoppable” they appear.

Against underskilled… this is self explanatory. As a spec, the ret paladin isn’t a complicated class. Few abilities with few applications means that their strategies are extremely limited and they are very easy to counter. However, the vast majority of players are not PvP savants. They don’t have split second reaction speeds or fantastic spacial awareness. When fighting a ret paladin who does, these people get destroyed.

Against unattentive… again, self explanatory. A ret paladin can bear down on a priest who isn’t paying attention or AFK making a sandwich and obliterate them. A ret paladin who gets to start combat already in melee range against an unshielded/hotted target has a major advantage.

Against anyone of equal gear, skill, and is paying attention? A ret paladin isn’t going to be able to do much at all besides stumble around, cleane their partners and give freedom to their more powerful teammates.

In any case, this must change. It absolutely must. I don’t think a lot of people quite understand how horrific the loss of cleanse is for ret paladins. Cleanse is our primary form of team support (dispelling CC) and a very potent defensive button (dispels snares and things like Immolate), both for the paladin and his teammates.

To put it another way, an arena ret paladin spends something like three out of every five GCDs on cleanse. Possibly an exaggeration? I kid you not, I have Cleanse bound to S on my and I have hit that button more than any other on my keyboard. My average arena rotation as a ret paladin was:

Judgment -> Divine Storm -> Crusader Strike -> Cleanse -> Cleanse -> Judgment -> Cleanse -> Cleanse -> Cleanse -> Cleanse -> Repeat

Losing Cleanse is a huge blow to ret paladins. Absolutely huge. Mages losing polymorph huge.

But as always, Cataclysm will fix it.

Read Full Post »

And Then the Power Went Out

So the power went out Tuesday night. KABLOOEY and right in the middle of playing Dragon Age, too. But who will save Ferelden naow?!??!/1

There was a pretty huge snowstorm here on Tuesday. The wt, clumpy kind of snow, the kind perfectly suited to making snowmen and utterly destroying power lines.

It is now friday, and the repair dudes are estimating it will take another ten days or so before they get power restored. I mean, holy shit, ten days? I mean I knew living a couple minutes drive out of the city had its risks, but… damn, ten days?

Anyway, I’m shacked up with a friend now. Believe it or not I actually do have a couple of those. And I have internet access again! Woo! This is perhaps the most important thing, though I still lack a proper desktop. I’ve been forced to abandon it for now. Sadness!

So lets see if I can summarize a week’s worth of stuff into a single post.

HUNTERS

The hunter focus mechanic has me worried. I have an 80 hunter at which I am reasonably competent, and am extremely fond of marksman. I’ve found BM extremely boring since the death of steady shot weaving, and Survival is quite possibly the worst play style I have ever tried.

Read Full Post »

So This Will Mostly Be Rambling

Damplify Magic is gone, and Frost and Fire Ward are biting the dust, that we know “for sure”. What other magey things are getting the expansion banhammer?

Maybe teleports/portals are being simplified so that we have one button to port/teleport wherever we wish, similar to how an engineer’s Northrend wormhole machine works. Summon one thing, and then just select your destination from there.

Maybe Mana Shield will finally die.

It’s not that I dislike Mana Shield, really, it’s just that it is such a poor ability. And I don’t mean just WoW’s version of Mana Shield, I mean every single rendition of Mana Shield in every single game ever that has featured such a mechanic. Admittedly I haven’t played every RPG ever, but I would be quite surprised to find a game that featured a mana shield mechanic that was actually decent.

Decent as in “balanced and has a point”. The mana shield mechanic in, say, Fable, was truly excellent in that it could make you immortal and give you unlimited experience. WoW has one of the best versions of Mana Shield I’ve seen, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with mana shield itself.

Read Full Post »

Mage + Cataclysm = Squee

The real question is, of course, why are the shamans crying so much?

But I’ll get to that.

For now, some ruminations.

Everyone is getting three new excellent buttons to push. But look at them from a categorical point of view. Us Mages, for instance, got a major DPS utility ability (Time Warp), a skill bragging DPS button, and a major AoE control utility ability.

Look around at what other people got. Death Knights got a DPS utility button and two major PvP utility buttons. Feral druids got a movement utility button. Hunters got two new utility buttons. Shamans have a cooldown that lets them cast anything they want whilst moving. Utility. Utility. Utility.

Sure, there are straight up DPS buttons or healing buttons here and there, but the majority of new things Cataclysm is bringing are centered around utility. That word will lose all meaning so, so I’ll try to avoid utilizing it again. Damnit.

Look at it this way. Every class has a toolbox. Inside that toolbox are tools. (NO SHIT SHERLOCK.) DPS classes open their toolbox to find a series of hammers. Healers have bandaids, gauze and pepto bismol. Tanks have those incredibly annoying safety whistles. (To make things hate them more! eh? eh?) What Blizzard appears to be trying to do is add more variety to everyone’s toolbox.

Sure, we DPS guys are still going to wave around our massive ballpeen hammers, healers are still going to be able to cure cancer with bandaids, and tanks will continue to blow their safety whistles right in your ear while you’re sleeping seriously cut that crap out or I swear to whatever gods will still listen to me I will cultivate an ant farm in your colon. But that’s not all we’re going to be bringing into play anymore.

Read Full Post »

Initial Reaction to Mage Changes

More coherent thoughts on monday when I’ve been able to think and marinate in the glorious, glorious changes.

Read Full Post »

P-P-P-P-Politics

Much as I’m enjoying my European Politics of the 19th century class, this post has nothing to do with that. Rather, it’s about the in-game politics.

Thanks to PC Gamer UK, it has essentially been confirmed that Thrall is stepping down as leader of the Horde to go save the world (Guardian of Tirisfal or not, what do you expect the world’s most powerful shaman to do when everything goes to hell?) and the rather bloodthirsty Garrosh is replacing him.

So here’s a shocker.

Nobody likes Garrosh.

There is a ton of opposition to the idea of having Garrosh lead the horde, and this is based entirely on how he’s acting now (racist douchebag).

In case you missed it, Garrosh has come up with a rather unpopular little law. Essentially, all non-orcs/tauren are being banned from the center of Orgrimmar, as he considers only those two races strong enough to properly guard the capital.

Elves, trolls, goblins, undead… y’all suck!

Gee, thanks Garrosh. After all the trolls have done for you…

Read Full Post »

The Oracle of Delphibet Soup

(Shamelessly stolen from Doofy the Paladin, World of Matticus, BigRedKitty, and probably a bajillion other bloggers.)

Not to be confused Alphabet Soup, Delphibet Soup’s younger, insane sibling.

Alphabet Soup has the unique property of spewing gibberish when asked questions.

Delphibet Soup has the unique property of giving highly accurate predictions, whether you ask it or not. 75% accuracy, according to the bowl here.

You have no idea how difficult it was to make the “%” sign with a single noodle. Maybe if I sharpened the spoon…

OH GOD THERE’S BLOOD EVERYWHERE WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

/afk hospital

I’ll let the Soup take over from here, shall I?

Read Full Post »

Long? No. Strange? Yes. Very Strange.

What a strange year it’s been.

I celebrated one year of successful blogging this year. You can see the shenanigans here, where I lament about my new found popularity (which has subsided somewhat) and make even more promises I forgot to keep.

I’m a terrible blogger, I really am.

I’ve learned a lot of things about blogging. Things like pictures, formatting, avoid walls of text, that sort of thing.

Here I have to give a massive shoutout to Blog Azeroth. I learned so much from that forum very, very quickly. The only downside was having two search bars on the site for about eight months before I removed the excess one.

Props to TJ, for sending me an e-mail outlining the reasons why I sucked and how to improve the situation. Ok, sucked might not be the word. Terrible? Audaciously horrendous? Mystifyingly craptacularly bad?

One does not argue with TJ. One merely does as she bids, and stands in awe at the magnificence of her correctness.

Bigredkitty linked to me. And then put me in his blogroll. I’m still there somehow. I think he just forgot to remove me. He’s a busy guy, I can let that slide. His about page still says “Um, we’re a hunter. More later.”

It’s said that for over a year now.

Read Full Post »