Thoughts on being 90

Whilst levelling is a journey full of wonder and amazement, arrival at 90 is like landing at the airport to discover they’ve lost your baggage, customs want to strip search you but you’ve won the lottery to compensate. Sure there are a lot of positives but some definite negatives thrown into the mix as well.

1. Dailies, dailies, dailies as far as the eye can see. The choice is overwhelming as is the feeling that you should ignore the “fun” ones (Tillers/Anglers/Cloud Serpents) whilst concentrating on the rest in the run up to raids and the arena season starting. Given that I don’t go back to work until Thursday, we have been spamming the lot but it definitely feels like overload. On the plus side (a phrase I never thought I’d ever use in this context) most of the daily hubs involve going to one specific area and slaughtering & collecting. On top of that, compared to the Molten Front, killing vermling, playing catch with baby dragons and beating up sharks with your bare hands is a refreshing change.

2. Heroics aren’t really heroic in any shape or form. When I queued up for the first time I was really nervous remembering back to the start of Cataclysm when on some trash packs mana was an issue. I didn’t need to worry, in fact even after boss fights my interweaving of power word:solace into the mix meant I didn’t need to drink then either. I know the challenge modes are there for just that purpose but I would have liked the Heroics to be slightly tougher. It just feels a bit wrong where the Stormstout brewery for example felt harder on normal at 86 than it did at 90 on heroic (just wearing blue 450 gear in every slot apart from my 463 legs and my epic trinket from Coren).

3. PvP is awesome. My favourite all time battleground now has to be the Temple of Kotmogu. It’s fast paced, fun and a bit like arenaing but with objectives other than making sure you’re the last team standing. I definitely don’t feel squishy as Holy unless the whole opposing team piles on top of me (or I’ve been hogging a power ball too long) which is a good start to an expansion too. I plan on doing a proper post covering my choice of glyphs + talents as Holy for each of the maps once I’ve finished testing a few things.

4. Scenarios! I love all of the ones I’ve played so far (apart from Theramore). They’re quick, varied and because it’s not just standing still and healing like a proper dungeon, great fun (ignoring the lore side of it, Theramore is just a bit too much like running a dungeon).

The loot bags are annoying though, I know RNG is RNG but so far Mr Harpy has had an item from pretty much every second bag and I’ve had zero which makes gearing up a little more irritating.

5. Priesting. Why oh why can’t chakras last after death and on zoning. I know it’s not a massive issue for most things but it’s still a quality of life issue. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with Holy. Mana is 10 times better than it was at the start of Cataclysm in both pve and pvp. In fact the only other thing which annoys me is the lack of useful minor glyphs for my chosen spec. We have a choice of ten, four are shadow specific, one is disc specific, one is holy specific but requires your death and the others are just flavour.

6. Pet battles. Fear my Hopling because it will lick you to death! This turned out to be more addictive and less annoying than on the beta. I’m still working my way through pre Outlands pets but I hit 250 unique pets a while back and am route to 400 albeit slowly. I have to admit I went and tamed an Infested Bear Cub even though I said I never would. (By the way, they only seem to spawn after midnight if you’re looking, at least that’s the only time I’ve ever found any sign of them). Also whoever designed Jaguero Isle to have a separate weather system to that of southern STV can take a spinning crane kick to the face.

7. MoP transmogrification. Yes please! The cloth pvp set consisting of a pants suit had me panicking slightly but the weapons and off-hands are stunning.

8. Pandas. I’m still not 100 percent convinced, but I’ve made one even though she hasn’t made it out of the start zone yet. She’s a Priest (surprise surprise) called Snowflower after a book I fell in love with a little while ago when I found a beat up copy in a charity shop. I’m slightly saddened by the fact that my favourite beta hairstyle isn’t available at the character creation stage but am hoping it will be an option once she escapes the Isle.

9. The Storyline in general. I’m really impressed with the stories this time around. Blizzard have added some really lovely touches and some tragic moments. I was particularly taken with the fact that my evil double giggles.

It’s a great mix of tragic, comedic and thought provoking.

I think I started out looking for things to criticise, wanting to believe that WoW had nothing left to offer me, that I reached my final destination as far as the game was concerned but it seems that somehow despite my cynicism, Pandaria’s beauty and sense of wonder has managed to pull me back.

“Cream coloured ponies and crisp apple strudels”

The theme this week of Blog  Azeroth is “a few of our favourite things”, suggested by Ardol. Given that it involves lists, I couldn’t resist taking part. However to avoid a four thousand word essay on why I prefer that poet over that one, or why these are my favourite movies I’m going to keep it mostly WoW related.

So without any further ado, here are some of favourite things.

Underused NPCs

• Sergra Darkthorn: Having successfully defended Crossroads for the last 4 years, surely its about time Sergra got a promotion. She’s everything an Orc female should be, tough, scary and kinda hot in a deeply disturbing fashion. Sergra for Warchief!
• Rayne: She pops up everywhere the Argent lot do but doesn’t really do anything that exciting apart from fight in the battle for Lights Hope and even then she’s killable. Hopefully come Cataclysm, she’ll get a proper job in her own right rather than just hunting for savage fronds.
• Shandris Feathermoon: What exactly did the General of the Sentinel Army do to upset Tyrande that got her stuck in the back of beyond for the last 5 years? Sure said back of beyond is named after her but …. its still a depressing dump with zero action going on. With any luck, Cataclysm will hit Feathermoon pretty bad and she has to be deployed somewhere with fighting and such going on. Maybe the Sentinel Army with their General at their head need to return to Hjyal.
• Grand Admiral Jes-Tereth: Give the poor girl an navy to play with please.
• Pained: Less annoying Jaina and more Pained please. After all Jaina just wants to be left alone to study right so Pained should be allowed out to play in her place.

Zones

• Grizzly Hills. From the music to the quest lines, I love this zone.
• Desolace. Isn’t as gloomy and depressing as it’s name suggests.
• Darkshore. Not to be confused with Darkshire. Has sea monsters lurking off the coast and can look absolutely beautiful at sunset.
• Eastern Plaguelands. EPL has always been fun. Picking up Blood of Heroes for the first time and getting two dead elites to the face. Bumping into the Crimson Courier and friends.. always good for a laugh. Then there is the dismal feeling to the zone, all giant fungi and ghosts. It’s home to the most epic of quest chains, The Battle of Darrowshire which makes me cry everything I either watch Cranius’s video or do the quest.
• Feralas. Lush, green and beautiful I can’t help questing here.
• Silverpine Forest. It’s creepy, creepy is good.
• Darkshire. See above.
• Westfall. Bright, breezy and relaxing. Just the spot for taking a picnic or spending a relaxing break.
• The Barrens. Home to zebras and giraffes which my hunter wants to be able to tame come Cataclysm.

Vanity Pets

• Sprite Darter Hatchling. Wtb more quest chains which reward you with mini-pets.
• Sinister Squashling
• Siamese Cat – The first mini pet Erinys ever got. It dropped on her first ever clear of the Deadmines. Add in the fact that I’ve loved siamese cats since I first saw Lady and the Tramp as a small child and this was the perfect pet for her.
• Darting Hatchling. My Gnome warrior has this as her main pet and it’s adorable dust cloud as it sprints off makes me jump every time I catch it out of the corner of my eye.

Dungeons

• Naxxramas. Gothic Architecture, green goo and dancing, you can’t go wrong with that. Mr Bigglesworth needs to be a boss though.
• The Scarlet Monastery. “Arise my Champion!”.
• The Deadmines. With a murloc chef, pirates, killer parrots and a whole ship hidden in a cave, the Deadmines ticks all the boxes.
• Dire Maul East and West. North isn’t worth a mention because it’s full of horrible dirty Ogres but the rest is just beautiful. Plus who doesn’t love an instance with a library.
• The Black Temple. You can see Azeroth from it’s windows..

The Best Looking Priest Tier sets

• Tiers 3/7. Lovely pale colours and a halo. Halos even on Shadowpriests are amazing.
• Tier 6. Just the thing for evil Priestly types. Faces on your shoulders and a hood of doom.
• Tier 8. This is the one I learnt to love. It may not look particularly Priest like, but it’s still taking up bank space.

A special mention should go to the Devout set and it’s upgraded sparkly lemon version though.

Raiding comfort food. All things which can be prepared in advance and ideally eaten with one hand.

• Homemade guacamole on ryvita.
• Smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches on rye bread.
• Celery sticks with humus or more guacamole (at the moment I’m addicted to the stuff and could happily eat it seven days a week).
• Haribo. Totally unhealthy but gives you a great jelly high for PvP or instancing.
• Warm strudel, doesn’t have to be apple although apple is good, with fresh cream.

Books/Authors

• A.S. Byatt’s Possession. I had to read it for a contemporary literature class I didn’t want to take in the first place and three or four pages in, I was hooked.
• Ray Bradbury. I don’t think he’s written a book I haven’t enjoyed reading. They showed us the movie version of “Something wicked this way comes” at school when I was about eight, I’ve avoided ceiling cracks ever since.
• John Connolly’s Charlie Parker books. I read the first one looking over my shoulder expecting a murderer to come leaping through the window. Yes, I have an over-active imagination but in my defence, at the time we did live next to a 500 year old graveyard allegedly haunted by a variety of ghosts including a bunch of monks.
• Charles de Lint. Discovered his books entirely by accident in an Canadian airport. It was a happy discovery, although trying to sneak several hardback novels onto the plane as hand luggage was considerably hard work.
• Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry.
• Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and David Copperfield.
• All Jasper Fforde’s books
• Raymond Feist, but especially Magician.
• Kelley Armstrong’s books, especially Haunted and Dime Store Magic
• Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff was my first ever crush and quite possibly set the tone for my dubious taste in men for my teenage years.

I’m going to stop here so I can go off and re-read Charles De Lint’s “Tapping the Dream Tree”, but I’m sure there are plenty of books that I love and have failed to mention. In general I tend to go for scary stuff, thrillers, crime, supernatural. I have pretty much every book Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Richard Laymon have written for example.

101 things to do – Jump on Medivh’s bed

Despite having run Karazhan countless times on multiple characters, I only recently discovered Medivh’s rather nice bed. Situated at the top of the tower of Karazhan its spacious, bouncy and surprisingly comfortable.

The biggest bed in WoW?

Who wouldn’t want a bed so big, you need a ramp to get into it. Although if you fell out in the night… those floors look pretty hard.

Come to think of it, Karazhan itself would make a comfortable dwelling. Lots of stained glass, big dining room, plenty of guest bedrooms and stables for all your mounts. Sure you might get the odd unwelcome guest and the ghosts might complain about new ownership, but for that library, I think its worth it.

Heaven

As long as they aren’t all copies of Middlemarch in different languages. That would be hell. Sorry.

Although I’m biased. Karazhan is probably my favourite Burning Crusade instance. Its creepy, gothic and full of ladies of the night.

Wonder if Middlemarch would be more bearable if a Night Mistress read it to me? Hmm, think my Priest is going to have to relocate to the Deadwind Pass.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

On Thursday we achieved a Tribute to Insanity, something which as a guild I never thought we were capable of (too many people fond of trying to tank the Faction Champions). By Friday morning it seems as if the guild is pretty much on the way out. Already the rats are leaping from the sinking ship in search of greener pastures and Icecrown seems impossible. Why you might ask… a simple forum post in which our GM stated that she wants to play a bit less. I suppose its one way of finding out which people are interested in a community and which are just after shiny purples.

Obviously things are not yet written in stone, but the prognosis doesn’t seem particularly good. Which leaves me in a strange mood, on the one hand I’m angry because my raiding has been brought to an abrupt halt and I had no control over it. Yes, I could look for another guild but finding one which wants both a priest and a warrior would be tricky if not impossible. Then there is the fact that over Christmas we have family commitments to keep and then in January we are moving house meaning that trialling for a new guild even if we could sweet talk our way into one as a package would be hard. Then on the other side of the coin is a sense of relief. If the guild had continued its fairly hardcore raiding, we would have been letting people down when January arrived and we had to disappear whilst we moved (our raiding roster was fairly tight and my boyfriend is/was the maintank). Not to mention the fact that I find the game less and less enthralling these days.

On a slightly more interesting note, here is a video of our heroic Anub’arak kill.

We use 2 tanks (both warriors), one on the boss and one tanking all the adds in an unhittable block set. 6 healers, basically 1 per mark plus one full time on the tanks (in the video two of them are holy paladins who have the tanks beaconed as well). As a disc priest I got the exciting job of taking one mark plus keeping shields on the rogues to make sure they stay alive as our strategy relied fairly heavily on tricks.

But it seems to borrow (and paraphrase)  T.S Eliot’s words,

This is the way the guild ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

At least we got to end on a high I suppose.

Time to “Sweep the leg” again

Flicking through all the 3.3 patch goodies on MMO Champion, I couldn’t help but notice something.  Lurking in amongst the names of the weekly raid quests is every priest’s favourite fight. Instructor Razuvious, he the dashing blue armour and the four rather disappointing students. So because I’m sweet and kind, I thought I would share the macro which made my tanking experiences considerably more bearable.

/target Instructor
/petattack
/click PetActionButton6;
/click PetActionButton5;
/raid —-> YOURNAMEHERE has Taunted <—–
/sw 20
/script Stopwatch_Play();
/in 20 /rsay === TAUNT NOW! ===

Obviously you want to change YOURNAMEHERE to your actual character name (I forgot the first time, something which I have never been allowed to forget). Basically it simplifies the fight down to cast mind soothe, cast mindcontrol and hit the macro which pops bone shield and taunts him. Then whilst tanking all you have to do is dps using blood strike and wait for your partner to taunt it off you.

I found it on WoWhead whilst digging through pages of information trying to figure out why even when hit capped my mindcontrol was very temperamental. Which leads me to the other piece of useful advice on the subject, make sure your paladins switch off shadow resistance aura. The last thing you need is your minion gaining 130 shadow resistance just as you mind control him. It tends to lead to squished priests and then everyone else running around blaming you for somehow being incompetent (especially in PuGs).

My cup runneth over

Literally.

I love this offhand, first time I’ve ever had one which isn’t either some dusty old tome or a random body part. Here’s to hoping that Icecrown continues the unusual offhand trend. Besides a perpetually full cup has to make you the life and soul of the post raid party, hope that’s something tasty like bitter cactus cider or a good dalaran white pouring out of it.

Its been a busy and interesting week. We finally got enough people online and in the same place whilst the server stopped lagging enough to kill Anub’arak 25 heroic mode. That has to be the most horrendous and hateful fight ever conceived to heal. When he finally died, my hands were shaking so badly that I stopped healing my mark with penetrating cold, which would have been fine if it wasn’t me. Dying three seconds after the boss is embarrassing.

• Disc is definitely better than Holy here.
• We ran with 6 healers, 2 paladins, 2 druids, 1 shaman and 1 disc priest which meant than in phase 3, once the marks where handed out, we had one healer left who was concentrating on the tanks/throwing out downranked rejuvs on people looking dangerously close to death.
• My job fun as it was, was to keep shields on both tanks (MT and OT –  actually a fight where the OT is far more important than the MT eek), keep up my mark in phase 3 and throw shields on our 4 rogues whenever their health dipped really low. That’s a lot of global cooldowns when your hands are shaking.
• Most importantly get GridStatusRaidIcons, which places a mark on anyone with a debuff, allowing you to assign raid marks for healing penetrating colds easily. However, make sure you have it turned off the rest of the time as annoying really doesn’t do it full justice on most fights.

In other news, I want to complain. Look at the names of the tier 10 sets, ScourgeLord for deathknights, Ymirjar Lord’s for warriors, Blood Mage and Frost Witch… and what do priests get. Oh look we are wearing the Crimson Acolyte’s Raiment.

“The word acolyte is derived from the Greek word akolouthos, meaning companion, attendant, or helper.”

Wonderful, everyone else gets evocative powerful sounding sets but even the name of our gear reinforces the fact that we are “standing at the back in our sissy robes”.  Although the whole set has a Disney feel to it in my opinion (possibly caused by the really ugly stitching), think I’m going to spend most of Icecrown dancing around with my magic broom singing cheerful songs and refusing any crunchy apples if offered by a warlock wearing that witches hat. Its just too big a risk, my guild can only muster two dwarves, Dopey and Grumpy and I wouldn’t trust them to look after me. The other thing that bugs me slightly is, shouldn’t the raiment of the Crimson Acolyte be well, crimson? Definitely not pastel blue, neon green, orange with pink bits or purple and yellow. Thank Elune that I’m a female Nightelf and thus look good in everything.

So only raiding for 2 fun packed nights a week means more time for random running around the world, alts and working on achievements. Yay. Although I’m looking forward to Icecrown I rather hope its at least 4 weeks away.

On a bicycle made for two

The other morning whilst browsing my favourite mini pet site I learnt that the rather flimsy looking gates of Zul’Aman no longer needed a party of five to knock them down. Naturally being a rather squishy cloth wearing type, soloing was out of the question but what a hunter can solo,  a warrior and priest can most certainly two man. So we loaded up the bike with supplies and snack food (might as well make a picnic out of it) and headed off to troll country.

I really do feel Blizzard missed a trick by not adding a troll instance to Northrend. Icetrolls up to no good would have fitted in perfectly and would have been a lot more interesting to play with than the Faction Champions and tired bullied Yetis.

Took around 15 hex sticks and the killing of 2 out of the 4 beast bosses, but with 10 minutes to go before the server shut down for some “emergency maintenance” I stopped rescuing random idiots and found the ultimate frog.

So thats another mini pet ticked off the list. Although its reaching the stage where I’m just going to grit my teeth and start farming for the rest of them.

 

Run away little girl

In this almost quiet period before the release of Icecrown I’ve been playing around with my talents yet again. Out of curiosity and a sneaky desire to slaughter some of our melee on Kologarn, I picked up Body and Soul. Its uses are myriad and amusing so here is the list I came up with to justify my mini sprint in case I had to explain myself.

Northrend Beasts

Gormak the Impaler

1. If you use a tactic like ours, where all the casters with snobolds run to melee, this helps them get there that bit faster
2. Gets people out of fires a tiny bit faster, although its still hampered by the fact that they actually have to stop casting and move (if only body and soul forced the person you cast it on to move whether they wanted to or not… would be heaven)

Not one but two Worms

1. Helps unite the people with poison with the person or persons with fire
2. Gives the tank a little speed burst to reach a re-emerging worm faster
3. Gets people away from those with the fire before they burn to death

Icehowl

1. Allows slightly more leeway when it comes to running away from his charge
2. If you are on the opposite side of the room to him when he crashes, you can assist the dpsers along side you get back swifter.

Lord Jaraxxus

1. Handy for melee with the legion flame, lets them get away from the rest of the melee fast.
2. Great for running away from pesky volcano adds who decide to erupt on top of you.

Faction Champions

1. This baby was made for kiting. I throw them on anyone who is being chased by melee and likely to get squashed, i.e the people in the raid who can’t pvp.

Twin Val’kyr

1. Good for your soakers, helps them reach that sneaky orb a bit faster
2. Great for making sure you can always change colour before the channel
3. Fun for dodging orbs on your way to switch colours back

Anub’arak

1. Helps kite spikes around
2. Lets you run away from annoying little beetles with really sharp teeth (one of our trials who is no longer with us, managed to get that stack thing up to 26k a tick…. evil bugs).

Ulduar

XT

1. Useful for getting the debuffs out of the raid cluster that bit faster. Especially handy to be popped on the slightly slower than average caster every raid has. You know, the one watching tv or drinking a beer at the same time with only one eye on his or her monitor.

Kologarn

1. Seeing how much attention your melee actually pay to what’s going on around them. Guaranteed there is someone in every raid group who can be made to fall off the cliff. (Not recommended for use on your tanks or your raidleader though).
2. Handy for dodging eyebeams
3. Useful for running away from rubble

Thorim

1. Good for escaping Sif and her wintery touch.
2. No excuse for being hit by the charge with body and soul.

Mimiron

1. Handy for dodging lazors
2. Useful for getting melee away from bursts or w/e its called
3. A bit of speed for slacky dpsers who don’t see big bubbles of water until its a bit too late
4. Also great for running the frogger bomb gauntlet, either for helping people you like to avoid them or running people you don’t like into them

Vezax

1. If anyone’s tanks still kite, the mini sprint would be useful here
2. Good for dodging shadowcrashes
3. Handy for limiting the Mark of the Faceless Damage

Yogg-Saron

1. Allows you to move from one side of the room faster as you hunt tentacles
2. Better running away from people with maladies
3. The self depoison is handy. The mana drain is the most annoying of all the debuffs on that fight.

Algalon the Observer

1. Helps you reach black holes that bit faster
2. Handy for finishing a cast and then putting distance between you and cosmic smash

Basically most fights have some aspect where a mini speed boost is useful, whether its on yourself to ensure you don’t get hit by something or on someone else. If you are brave or crazy or just plain lazy like me and PvP as holy, its equally fun in a battleground setting too. You can run annoying fellow teammates off cliffs in Arathi Basin. You can assist flag carriers in WSG or EoTS and most importantly, you can run like the wind albeit briefly as angry enemies pursue you.

In conclusion, its a been a lot of fun but my main worry is that it could become a crutch. Something I rely on to avoid scary stuff, which of course could mean I go squish a lot when playing Disc (just like not having glyph of levitate on my disc spec…..). Therefore, amusing as it is, once Icecrown is released, I’ll most likely drop those two points back into something less gimmicky. In the meantime however running away was never more fun.

The Broodmother returns

and she seems a little past her best.

Back in Vanilla Onyxia always felt a little epic. First there was the slow and torturous journey from Ironforge, by air, by sea and then finally the long ride around Dustwallow. Then the trash, in which at least 5 melee would sacrifice themselves to the fickle Gods of Loot before finally the swift buffing up and the whining about the lack of Dwarf priests by the Maintank.

Now its portal Theramore from whichever spot your raid happens to be in (obviously this is only the case if you rolled the the correct side:p). Pop path of frost and saunter across the bay, zerg trash and go “Oh, doesn’t she look smaller”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hung up on the glory days of Vanilla WoW at all. The game should evolve and change, and no, taking 15 minutes to get there didn’t add anything particularly awesome to the encounter but she’s a watered down version of her old self.

A few simple fixes would help make the encounter a little more exciting without making it impossible to anyone but the most hardcore of dragon killers.

• She’s tauntable and no longer has a threat reduction. Why…… give the tanks something to worry about instead of bouncing around aoeing whelps. Besides watching her munch up all those little casters who nuked their happy little hearts out in phase 2 when she landed was one of the highlights of vanilla Onyxia.
• More whelps. Who can resist lots of adorable little dragonlings trying to defend their mummy, besides dancing around spamming Holy Nova was pretty much the highlight of the fight.
• Flame walls. Who doesn’t <3 flame walls. Especially when they bug out and disappear on you. Every so often the flame cracks should join up into one massive tidal wave which chases random people around the cave.

That said, its a fun enough fight and the loot obviously helps fill in the blanks/makes for great alt gearing up. However my biggest issue comes from the Head Quest. Having handed in the 60 version in the past, I was expecting something a little more exciting than visit a dark and dangerous pub in the Mage Quarter and have some warlock hand out the item. No head over the gates, no yelling and glorifying of the slaughter, just a passing transaction. I’m at least hoping that come the next expansion, Zardeth of the Black Claw and his collection of broodmother heads will do something nasty and preferably deadly.

Also, in case anyone was wondering/worried, it turns out she still drops Draconic for Dummies VI.

The new Onyxia does raise one interesting question though, why did Alliance Mages get teleport Theramore and the Horde, teleport Stonard. Heroic Sunken Temple coming soon perhaps?

The flaws of gated design

I hate loathe despise detest Blizzard’s attempts to keep raid progress slowed down. One hour a week on Algalon and now the 50 tries per week on the heroic version of the Trial of the Crusader. Yes you can argue that bad players/play shouldn’t be rewarded and allowing people to mindlessly fling theirselves at content until finally by sheer brute force they bring it down is bad design. But wait a second, but that “bad design” is there in every other aspect of WoW. I can battleground and arena to my hearts content, I could spend as much time as I wished attempting Ulduar’s hardmodes… yet here I am limited. Why exactly is that? We have already had to wait 5 weeks for the heroic version to open up and now we have to battle bugged and laggy encounters, losing tries through no fault of our own.

Yes, our server is high population but even so.. zero lag whilst finishing off the normal which spikes to 2k to the second we pull on heroic is well …. frustrating. Add in despawning mobs and I can’t help wishing they stopped making loot pinatas like the 5 man version of said instance (although thats pretty bugged too) and focused on making sure raid content was actually playable.

In short, I would be happier with time or try based limits to my raiding if Blizzard could guarentee that their servers could cope with the load. Based on our experiences last night (and I checked the forums, we were not alone), its obvious that they can not.

I also don’t see the point of normal mode and heroic mode. Normal is far too easy and whilst Anub’arak is a fun fight, its way under tuned on normal for its loot. One shotting everything the first time you see it is just wrong. Ulduar and its hardmodes are far more challenging than the normal version of the Trial yet the rewards for facerolling through the latter outway the former. It just feels like another artifical mechanic which required little to no effort on Blizzard’s part (since all the gear is exactly the same plus or minus a few stats) to try and keep people occupied.

Yet the same people who think that tier 9 should be farmable albeit slowly from heroics won’t allow people to farm pvp weapons from battlegrounds. Shows a double standard I really dislike. The gear from the top tier of raiding and from the top tier of arena should only be available from those locations, effort should always be rewarded especially in a game which is all about progression. I don’t choose to arena, I’m fine with that and whilst I enjoy PvP I’m just not willing to make the time to commit to taking arenas seriously but I also don’t expect cutting edge arena gear. The same should be true of raiding, you don’t need tier 9 to raid heroics any more than I need the current arena gear to battleground on my priest.

I suppose this all boils down to the fact that Blizzard are not my parents and I find it really frustrating that they are trying to limit our play, either by artifical limits (1 hour/50 tries) or by making things not available through grindy methods (PvP weapons from Battlegrounds) yet in the same breath they are trying to push us into doing the daily heroic every day so we can improve our gear faster.