Wrath’s Raiding Progression Blues

The path of raiding progression in Wrath of the Lich King has been interesting, to say the least. Blizzard has been experimenting with some new ideas (i.e., hard modes, 10/25 versions of the same dungeon) and their tinkering has had some odd effects. At the release of the expansion, you had a 10-player encounter as the pinnacle of progression in Sartharion+3. Nowadays, with the availability of eight different raid lockouts per week in post-entry level content, a lot of people are really being hit by burnout. Both of these outcomes appear to be unintended.

My guild is currently hit with an interesting dilemma, although it’s nothing too surprising really. With Trial of the Crusader and Onyxia added to the game, we’re having a lot of trouble getting people back into Ulduar. Basically, people are taking the road of least resistance. They can run 25 ToC and Onyxia and come away with nice loot from easy encounters. On the other hand, Ulduar hard modes and ToGC are difficult, expensive (due to a lot of wipes) and don’t guarantee loot. To make it worse, even if we do complete a hard mode encounter in Ulduar, there’s a good chance that the loot with be disenchanted, since many people are getting higher ilevel loot from ToC. (Much of the Ulduar hard mode gear is on par with ToC loot, even with the lower ilevel, because the stats are itemized better and they have more sockets. Nonetheless, it seems that people would rather have the newer, shinier items.)

It’s interesting to see how our officers are dealing with the attendance problems. It looks like we’re going to cut back our raid nights a bit and mix the easier encounters into the same nights we attempt hard modes. As it stands, we have one easy night (Onyxia and ToC) and two hard nights (ToGC and Ulduar hard). That’s probably the real source of our issues, but the overall situation has been created by Blizzard. It’ll be interesting to see if Icecrown will bring similar issues for guilds.

Quick Tip: Leveling Weapon Skill

Rogues were granted the ability to use one-handed axes in the last major patch. While I think that WoW’s weapon skill mechanic is a useless and archaic system that needs to be dumped posthaste, the guys over in Irvine don’t seem to agree. For the time being, it seems that we’re stuck leveling up our weapon skill prior to ever being effective with said weapon. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep removing the most effective ways of increasing said skill.

Here’s the latest, easiest way to level your weapons. Unfortunately, it’s only really useful for higher level characters.

1. Head to the Argent Tournament grounds. A peak time for your server’s traffic is ideal.

2. Equip one (or more if possible) of the weapon type you desire to level. A faster speed weapon and intellect buffs should help speed the process along.

3. Head over to the big ring on the southern side of the Tourney grounds, where champions joust for their daily quest.

4. Run around like a madman (or woman, bull, heifer, etc.) whacking the NPC jousters until you reach the desired level of skill. They won’t attack you at any time and you’ll be helping people with what can be one of the more annoying daily quests.

If you don’t have one of the weapons you’d like to level up handy, you can always grab a temporary weapon from the nearby faction vendors for a few Champion’s Seals. Once you’ve leveled up your skill, as long as you don’t take two hours or longer, you can get a full refund on the weapon. With one-hand maces, one-hand axes, daggers, one-hand swords, two-handed swords, staves and guns available, the majority of the weapon types are covered in the Horde and Alliance tents. You can also grab a heirloom bow, two-hand axe or two-hand mace from the big Argent tent, if need be. Those tend to cost many more seals, but help fill out the weapon selection. If I reckon correctly, it looks like polearms and crossbows are the only weapon not available “for rent”.

Using this method, I was able to level my axe skill from 1 to 398 or so. That’s close enough for me and the last couple of points would probably take as long to achieve as all the rest put together. All in all, I probably spent an hour chasing the NPCs around. It would have been much less than that if I had stopped leveling around 390 or so.

Not only did I level my skill in a quick, relatively painless manner, but I also got a lot of thanks from people for helping them with the quest. Of course, I did get one guy that was annoyed with me. He didn’t want to “cheat” at jousting. I suppose there’s always one person out there to put a damper on things.

Fan Depiction of Troll Druid Cat Form

Toothy Kitty

I found this on Livejournal about a month ago and thought it looked pretty cool, even if it’s 100% fan art. It’s a little chunkier than I would imagine a troll form should be, but I still like it.

I really hope that Blizz creates unique forms for Worgen and Troll druids, and by “unique” I mean different types of animals. For instance, Trolls could change into snakes and Worgen could change into wolves for their melee DPS forms. Of course, it would be kind of lame if Worgen only transformed into various sized wolves for the various roles.

In any case, the design of the new forms is one of the many things I can’t wait to see regarding Cataclysm.

On Goblins and Punting

If gnomes are punted, what will we do to goblins? Toss them? That sounds like the most likely candidate, but “goblin tossin’” sounds like a euphemism for something nasty to me.

Just something to think about while waiting for Cataclysm.

More Masks!

About a week ago or so, (the day after my last post about the Worgen/Goblin masks, I think,) MMO-Champion discovered many new masks in the latest update of the patch. It’s funny, because that’s pretty much exactly what Boubouille (MMO-Champ’s proprietor) predicted Blizzard would do to cover up the leak of the previous masks. It’s also kind of funny because in my blog post I said something along the lines of “to the best of my recollection, Blizzard has never done anything to purposely throw us off the scent of upcoming content”. I won’t say that’s what they’re doing here but it is suspicious.

Again, these thoughts have been posted elsewhere, I’m sure, but here’s my quick take on the image in question.

This time around we see eight new masks, male and female, for four different races. Most of these are textures that have been in the game for years. The only new one is the female Ogre, since none currently exist in the game world.

It’s pretty clear looking at these that there is a marked difference between the new additions and the previous leak. Mainly, they’re all of lower quality. None of the textures have been retouched from what we see in the game, aside from the Goblin and Worgen masks. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Naga and Murlocs get an update at some point, since my money is on the next expansion featuring large expanses of water, but currently these masks have the original textures.

As stated earlier, the female Ogre mask features art which isn’t found anywhere in WoW. It’s very low quality and looks like it was simply pasted in from some other source. Some commentors around the ‘net are even claiming that the female Ogre art was ripped from one of the Warcraft pen-and-paper RPG books, but I don’t have any links or images to back that up.

The bottom line is that these new masks are not convincing, primarily because they are not of the same quality as the Goblin and Worgen ones we saw earlier.

Where I’ve Been. What I’ve Been Up To.

Well, as so often happens with bloggers, I’m sure, I’ve been taking a bit of a break from writing. A lot of factors contributed to my absence, but it was sparked by illness and nourished by WoW burnout. It was difficult to sit down and write about a game that I hardly played for a few weeks. After I got back into WoW, my free time was so limited by being generally busy that blogging was the first thing to go. Nowadays, I have a bit more time and I have a lot of things I’d like to write about, so I’ll try to post consistently again.

Anyway, I’ve been raiding Ulduar and I’ve seen every boss killed on easy mode at this point. Hard modes are hard, but I’ve been getting some practice in with those. For the most part, they’re not really stressful for DPSers, but they’re a big learning curve for tanks and healers. Of course, they’re a gear check all around, so don’t get me wrong.

I’ve been accepted as a trial member of the guild I wrote about previously. Summer and WoW burnout has left a lot of groups LFM, so I was able to apply to their guild not long after they told me they were definitely not in need of more melee DPS. They seem like good people and it’s nice raiding with other rogues again. Since Wrath launched, I was pretty much the only active rogue in my old guild. Their raid schedule is nearly perfect for me, which is the main reason I changed guilds. While typing /gquit was difficult, it’s great to be able to spend more time with my wife and son.

Lately, to stay sane, I’ve been playing alts, neglecting the Argent Tournament and checking out other games. I have a lot to say on all those topics and will undoubtedly share some of those thoughts on the blog. There’s nothing like a short break playing another game or switching classes/factions to re-ignite your interest in WoW.

One thing I’ve recently been thinking about is my need to review things. When I watch a film or read a book, it stays with me for days, haunting my thoughts. It’s strange really, but I can’t stop thinking about the creator’s choices and what they could’ve done to make a better product. I guess I’m an editor at heart. It’s difficult for me to ever come up with my own, original ideas, but it’s easy for me to see how someone else could improve their own work. Of course, that’s really not unique to me. It’s much easier to criticize than to create.

Anyway, I’d like to try out posting some reviews on the site. First up will be the Arthas novel. If that goes well, I might move on to a couple of the games I’ve been playing or perhaps the single summer “blockbuster” that I’ve had the time to view.

In Defense of Worgen and Goblins

In case you missed the big news the other day, it appears that Worgen and Goblins will be the new playable races in the next expansion for WoW. This was all derived from some data-mined textures for new Hallow’s End masks. As per usual, the WoW community has been abuzz with speculation and theorizing.

Everyone’s chiming in with their opinions. In case you couldn’t tell from my post about Worgen from a few months ago, I’m pretty excited about the opportunity to play both races. I’ll likely create new characters to do just that, if this information does turn out to be accurate. Of course, not everyone is as accepting as I am.

Two bloggers in particular have either simply written-off the information as “a spurious easter egg” or are making arguments why the races won’t work.

I’d like to present my thoughts regarding why the inclusion of these races do make sense and why the data-mined information is likely sound. I’ll start off talking about the validity of the assumption that Hallow’s End masks = new playable characters and I’ll probably get to the other part in a follow-up post.

Hallow’s End Masks = New Playable Races

I’m sure these ideas have been expressed elsewhere, but I’m going to collect them here for their easy dissemination (and for my own benefit).

1. All Hallow’s End masks up to this point have represented playable races.

This is an undisputed fact that serves as a solid precedent. If you assert that these are merely Easter eggs, you’re the one stepping out on a limb. Has Blizzard ever leaked “spurious” information to throw players off track regarding upcoming content? I can’t think of a case.

2. The masks feature a female Worgen.

Female Worgen aren’t found anywhere else in the game, to the best of my knowledge. The inclusion of these masks would be their first appearance. Why would the artists go to the trouble of creating female Worgen masks unless they were planning on using that texture elsewhere? If they were simply adding various NPC skins as new mask textures, it seems unlikely that they’d design a whole new gender/race combination for such an insignificant part of the game.

3. The masks feature retouched textures.

Similar to Blood Elves in The Burning Crusade, Goblins and male Worgen are likely to get a texture and model upgrade if they’re used as player races. These three masks clearly showcase redrawn art. Again, why would the artists go to that trouble if these textures weren’t going to be used elsewhere?

There are likely other arguments to support this information as valid, but those are the main three that I’ve seen around the net. Be sure to comment if you have any other good reasons why we should expect to see Goblins and Worgen based on these mask textures.

I’ll update again soon with some more arguments regarding why these races are a good fit for the Horde and Alliance. Of course, you can always read my old post about the Worgen for some of my ideas in the meantime.

Gnomes Aren’t Epic?

In case you missed it, WoW Insider posted a story about the Blizzard cinematics team appearing at a college for some Q&A. There were a few interesting statements in the article, but there was one thing that jumped out at me. The team stated that we shouldn’t ever expect to see a gnome in a WoW cinematic because they’re not epic enough.

Gnomes, along with Tauren, are my favorite WoW race. While they are most often depicted as cute and humorous, I think they certainly could be used in an epic film to great advantage. Just take a look at many of the epic films that feature diminutive heroes. Lord of the Rings, Time Bandits, Willow and even Star Wars are just a few examples. I’m sure that a movie afficianado could think of many more. All of those films certainly had epic moments, and I would argue that these moments were augmented by the presence of short heroes rather than diminished.

If nothing else, there’s one big reason (pun intended) that makes small heroes attractive: A battle seems much more dramatic when you have a hero with a small profile against a larger enemy. This works on both a visual and an emotional level. The smaller hero becomes more of an every man or an under dog. He’s much more sympathetic when faced with great odds. When he succeeds, his victory seems much greater. By creating the impression of a large disparity in power between a protagonist and the dangers he faces, the fact that he overcomes such great strife makes the victory all the more epic. It’s the David and Goliath effect. If Goliath would have won, that story would have been quite forgettable.

Another way to make Gnomes epic in a cinematic would be to display their natural affinity for engineering. While a little pig-tailed Gnome might not seem grand enough for the cinematics team, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to put that same character into a gigantic suit of steam-punk battle armor. Perhaps you could show them racing across the battlefield on one of their mechano chickens or using a huge death ray. There’s a lot of fodder for creativity here.

If any race is not epic, I’d argue it’s the humans. After all, I spend every hour of every day around them. They’re really quite common place and yet they’ve been in every WoW cinematic and most of the other work produced by Blizzard over the years. Looking at fantasy as a whole, orcs and elves are pretty overplayed too, but humans are obviously the most over-represented.

Less humans. More gnomes. That’s my stance.

Bad Blogger

Well, I’ve been a bad blogger lately, haven’t I?

Basically, I haven’t had a lot of time lately, and blogging was the easiest thing to scale back.

Actually, I haven’t been too much busier than normal, at least not with important things. It’s mostly my video game consumption that’s increased. I’ve been raiding Ulduar, doing the Argent dailies and trying to spend extra time with my family to make up for my increased raiding. On top of that, I’ve been playing Free Realms. And on top of all that, my computer has been having problems and it often gives me a blue screen of death when I alt-tab from a game to Firefox. As you can imagine, that cuts down on my blogging, since I typically have one game or another running in the background while I write via my browser.

Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun in Free Realms and I haven’t yet spent a single cent. The free content is definitely enough to keep me entertained for quite awhile. You do need a strong tolerance for hitting dead ends all the time if you decide not to pony up cash. A lot of quests are marked as member only, including chain quests. You might start out doing an NPCs tasks and suddenly you’ll be unable to continue unless you pay up. Also, some of the quest rewards are similarly locked. I’ve earned some decent armor and weapons that I can’t equip unless I pay for the $5.00/month subscription plan. It really hasn’t been bothering me that much, but I could understand how it would really grate on some people. In the end, I’ll probably sign up for a subscription since it is a pretty good value. I’m just going to wait until I’ve exhausted more of the free content. Oh, and I’ll probably never spend any real money in the item shop.

Ulduar is going alright, but it does seem slow at times. We’ve downed everything up to the Keepers and Freya. We’ll likely get Hodir as well this week. We haven’t even begun looking at hard modes yet.

I’m feeling uneasy about Ulduar. It seems like there’s a lot of unrest in my guild and the WoW community as a whole.  A lot of bloggers have closed up shop lately and/or are posting less about WoW and more about their personal lives or other games. There’s no a problem with that, but I’m also feeling a bit of tension in game.

Perhaps it’s simply the fact that our raid hours are difficult for me to make and that I probably have different progression goals than most of my guild, but I’ve been feeling a little discontent and I think that feeling is shared by some of my other guildmates. The Ulduar hard modes are likely to shake up a lot of guilds as time goes on. I really want to get in there and start working on them for achievements and loot, but I’m afraid that many people in my guild will stop showing up when we begin working on them. They just want to see the content and don’t care about anything else, really. That’s fine, but you can now experience every boss without meeting the goals of  more hardcore players. I think that some guilds will find that they all have different goals for raiding now. In the past, there was only one progression path and it met the goals of every type of raider. Now we have four progression paths (10/25 normal & 10/25 hard) and guilds will likely start splitting on exactly which path to take.

Anyhow, while there are a lot of guilds looking for applicants on my server, there aren’t any looking for rogues that are near a similar level of progression and maturity and have a schedule that works for me. The one guild that I wrote about before aren’t taking applications for melee dps at this time, but I’m keeping my eye on them like a hawk. I expect that they’ll bleed some members when they get to hard modes as well.

Well this post was longer than I intended. I certainly have a lot I’d like to discuss on this blog, so I suppose I should try to be more disciplined about it. I really want to talk about the insane grind that is the Argent Tournament, where I think it’s going and my success with it thus far. Not to mention some ideas I have concerning where lore is going with Icecrown Citadel. Oh, I also won a copy of the new Arthas book from another blog, so I’ll probably share my thoughts on that once I get the chance to read it. Lots to say, but little time. I guess I’ll have to put Free Realms on hold for a few evenings.

(Kind of) Free Realms

Free Realms is a new online game that very recently (about an hour ago) opened up to the public. It’s a very casual, cutesy game aimed at pre-adolescents with both free and pay elements to it. I’ve been beta testing for the last week or so, and I have to admit it’s a lot of fun.

If you’ve been reading about it at all in the blogosphere, then there’s not much new I have to say. I’ll just reiterate what everyone else is saying.

• The game is highly polished.
• The wide variety of game play options means there’s always something interesting to do.
• The download/install process is amazingly quick, seamless and simple.
• While a lot of the game is free, it seems like you’re constantly hitting brick walls where you need to pay up to see more content.

I’ve been able to successfully run it and WoW at the same time (both in windowed mode), so it might be a viable option for a time killer during the low parts of your WoW career. I’ve definitely had no problem playing it while on long flights or waiting on group members. I’m not sure I’d dare to play it while raiding.

Anyway, if you choose to check it out, I doubt you’ll regret it.