A Crisis of Confidence

My love affair with Priests has hit a stumbling block. I’ve never liked Disc as a spec and always resented being pushed into it throughout Wrath and Cataclysm for both PvE and PvP. With Mists I vowed I’d never play a spec I didn’t like again and I’ve tried to persevere with Holy, I really have but in PvP in particular I have terrible mobility and when shut down I’m rather squishy to say the least. Sure, gear is part of it, but when you’ve already got over 55 percent resilience (or whatever it’s called these days) but people still regularly crit you for 200k, getting a few percent more isn’t going to make a huge difference.

I miss the days when I could as a healer take on a dpser and stand a chance of winning (i.e. every expansion bar this one). That coupled with a few stupid mistakes in roughly pve related things, brought on in the main part by my shyness when having to play with strangers have left me wondering what good is Sprout. She struggles to do her dailies alone, random battlegrounds are hugely painful because as soon as one or two competent dpsers glare at her she tends to go splat and I’m too short of time and too insecure to raid anymore.

And yes, emo post is emo.

Daily Delights

My feelings towards Dailies are well documented. I hated them from the minute they were introduced in the Burning Crusade, seeing it as nothing more than a cynical attempt from Blizzard to force the player base to log in each and every day. Nothing in the subsequent five years has done anything to alter that view point, in fact I’d argue the opposite. Which brings us to MoP, the expansion of the Daily. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand Blizzard’s desire to gate reputation. They don’t want a repeat of previous expansions where a good chunk of people did nothing but run dungeons over and over til their eyes bleed, reached exalted with everything and then preceded to whine about having nothing to do. However I don’t believe the current system was the way to handle it.

What would have been wrong with having a reputation cap per faction per week just like the conquest, valor, justice and honour points. It could easily have been the total amount of rep per day times seven, perhaps increasing as you climbed the reputation levels. That would remove the frustration felt when for whatever reason you can’t log in on a specific day and yet you need that rep like yesterday. A further simple twist would have been to make it just like conquest in that you can earn X amount from one area (arenas), Y amount from another (battlegrounds) and Z from a third (rated battlegrounds). That way people could do a heroic wearing a tabard for a bit, do a few dailies and perhaps use their professions for a bit more. Variety is the way to stop people getting bored, not shoehorning them into doing a set number of quests every day.

So now we’ve established beyond all reasonable doubt that I loathe dailies, despise them and would quite happily leap up and down on top of them yelling unpolite comments about their nearest and dearest, I want to talk about the dailies I find bearable. Perhaps my all together favourite is this beauty. I love speeding down the wall, eyes half shut as the landscape goes flying past, frantically trying to steer past spilled oil and barricades. In fact whenever I’m passing by, I pop up there and repeat the course and to me, that’s what dailies should be, quests you actually go out of your way to do because they’re frantic and fun.

Another favourite which also favours speed is this one from the Temple of the White Tiger. Now the first time I did this, I hesitated and failed time after time, getting more and more frustrated. Then driven on by Mr Harpy’s offer to do it for me (naturally he being a rogue did it perfectly the first time), I took a deep breath and ran for my little life. Indeed when it comes to this quest, the phrase “he [or she] who hesitates is lost” couldn’t be more accurate.

There are few others I enjoy, wrestling a shark with my bare hands springs to mind as does battling with my “nemesis” at the Temple of the Red Crane but the vast majority are just a mindless time sink in which I grab as many mobs as possible before aoeing them down and profiting. It’s just like having to do the dishes over and over again intermingled with throwing out the rubbish and picking up the leaves from the garden. I log intending to do all sorts of things, pvp, chat with people in my friends list, tame pets but by the time I’ve tackled my dailies, I’m so sick of the game I tend to log off, looking for other things to do.

The issue is exacerbated by the really random nature of the dailies, getting the same set three days in a row is just painful, especially when you happen to hate those particular quests. If dailies are going to be Blizzard’s answer to providing new content then those dailies have to be fun, they have to be varied (and that includes using the model used to great effect in Money Matters) and above all, they should be just one other aspect of the game. Something that people can choose to do, not a path we’re forced down regardless of how much playtime we have.

As a side note, returning to Money Matters, wouldn’t it be awesome if there were multiple different ways to approach the bulk of the dailies. You could take an intellectual route, perhaps tricking your way to your objective or maybe by simply being nice. The next time around you could take a more agility driven path, focusing on speed or sneakiness. Another day, if time was an issue you could steamroll your way through using brute force and strength. The final path would of course involve stamina and being in it for the long haul.

My guilty secret: Pet Battles and Me.

I have a confession to make.

I hate pet battles.

I want to like them, I really do. I’ve been a pet collector in-game right from the very start. I sold the clothes off my Night elf’s back to buy my first pet, a bombay cat and ever since then I’ve run dungeons, quested and grinded my way to various pets. I’ve bought them from the pet store and the auction house. I’ve even jousted just for pets but the truth is, pet battles leave me cold.

I love the detail which has gone into the flavour text for each pet.

I’m in awe of the huge scope of both pet families and models which will become available to us and I already have a sort of wish-list in my head. I wanted quite a few of the new pets for years and now we’re finally going to be able to get them. In fact the only way they could improve in that regard is if they made a mini harpy (which is clearly a huge oversight on Blizzard’s part). In fact I look at the different spells available to the pets, to the love and attention shown to them and then I look at my own class. At the clunkiness of Chakras, Power word: Solace and Holy Nova requiring a glyph slot and I feel slightly annoyed.

Then there is the actual battling itself. In the average battleground, Sprout uses over forty five different buttons/binds on vud’ho. Now that includes both defensive and offensive spells, drinks, racials, trinkets, nets, pots and cooldowns and would be much higher if I included her party favours for graveyard camping. In the pet battles, each pet has three abilities and as you level, each of those three slots ends up with a choice of two abilities to fill it. So you have a stunning choice of 6 abilities per pet but you can only use three at once. To make matters worse, at least from my perspective, the only interaction I have is choosing which pets and which of the few abilities to use. There is no equivalent of the hit cap, instead I’m a 100 percent at the mercy of RNG which can be frustrating to say the least. I suppose I’m so used to being able to improve my performance through the use of addons, keybinds, talents, enchants, gear and consumables that paring everything down seems unchallenging and almost boring. Sure you can cherry pick your team but to me at least that’s another issue. I have certain favourite pets, these aren’t particularly special creatures but they have meaning to me. They are the ones that ideally I would want to use in the pet battles but it’s hard to ignore the fact that other pets would have a higher success rate, perhaps due to the whole rock, paper, scissors effect or simply because they have better stats. So far I’ve just been steam rolling my way to victory with a suboptimal team but I’m not sure I can do that all the way.

Once you’ve captured the pets, the frustration doesn’t end. All critters aren’t created equal which means that quite often you find yourself having to let go of little Flopsy the cottontailed bunny because he’s a common bunny and you’re after his rare big brother. I’d much prefer it if there wasn’t a cap on the number of pets we are allowed. 500 seems like a decent number until you start doing the maths.

Now of course there are some plus points, seeing a horde of rats run at an unsuspecting critter is always good for a smile plus it reminds me of the many day trips to Hamelin I had to go on as a child. I’m hugely in favour of anything which gets people out of cities and into the world (unless of course they’re the jerks who like to follow people around trying to kill the critters people are trying to battle). I imagine that just like with Archaeology the gankers will be out in force for the first few months of the expansion.

Will I partake, yes. I at least want to collect my very own baby Vermling but I don’t see myself going beyond that point. I’ll pick up the various pet models that I like along the way, oddly enough, most of these despite being labelled “tiny” are bigger than my Gnome but I miss the complexity of playing my actual characters. I also don’t like the anonymity of the whole system. What’s the point of keeping score without recording losses? In a way I find it a bit insulting that Blizzard are basically implying that the whole pet collecting community can’t take competitive combat. In my experience at least, knowing who just flattened you can go a long way into pushing you to improve, something we should all be striving for. WoW is a multi-player game in which we compete on so many levels, why should this be exempt?

In short, pet battling feels a bit like a single player Strand of the Ancient, only the demolishers have cute little faces.

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to

I know you should be grateful to receive any gift but I have misgivings about the 7th anniversary present.

First up, it takes a bag space. Always a contentious issue for me and my alts. Secondly, it only lasts an hour at a time. Thirdly, it only lasts an hour if you stay alive for said hour.

I have to echo the conversation in trade chat I came out of AV to, I’d rather have had a mini-pet.

Out of the Mist: First thoughts on the proposed new talent system, Pandas and the lack of Alliance love

Partly to see whether by the time the expansion goes live, my feelings have changed in any way and partly because speculation is always fun.

Talent trees:

My instant gut reaction was one of “Nooooooo”, but after some reflection and a good look at the existing trees, I think this has a lot of potential. Right now, we have talents you want to take, talents you have to take and filler bits and pieces you take only to progress down the trees. I much prefer the idea of only having to pick talents that interest me and getting all the current modifiers just baked into either spells themselves or given as bonuses when you pick your specialisations.

Now we know that spells will be acquired in one of three ways.

• Base-line as part of your class. Probably stuff like Levitate, Prayer of Healing, Mind spike for Priests. Will be interesting to see if all the basic heals (flash, heal, greater) stay baseline. I noticed on the screenshots they provided at Blizzcon, that Holy Paladins got Holy Light as one of their Holy specialisation spells, so from that we can possibly extrapolate that all the efficient heals will only be accessible to healers. If this is true, it will be interesting to see what else is removed from certain specs. For example will healing Priests keep mind blast?
• As a reward for picking a certain spec. For Holy, I would imagine we’re looking at Circle of Healing, Lightwell (unless they finally decide to give up on it), Spirit of Redemption, Chakras and their associated Holy Words and so on.
• From your talent choices.

So if we look at the existing Holy Priest tree, we can see that the entire first row are purely modifier talents, providing increases to a variety of heals and decreasing the cast time of some of our slower heals. Nothing exciting, interesting or thought provoking there. So that’s potentially eight talent points that could easily just be baked into our spec choice.

The same principle continues throughout the tree, whether it’s cooldown reductions (see Tome of Light), increased throughput under certain conditions (Test of Faith) or to specific spells (Empowered Healing). In fact out of the 37 points available to spend in Holy, we only get five new abilities, everything else is just a modifier of some sort.

• Desperate Prayer
• Lightwell
• Chakra and it’s associated Holy Words (I’m only counting these as one ability because you can’t have access to both Holy Words at once.
• Circle of Healing
• Guardian Spirit

Spirit of Redemption isn’t an ability you can choose to use. There is no “kill me now” button on your interface and thus it’s basically a modified and slightly slower death, not a new ability.

Of these we know that Desperate Prayer looks like it will remain a talent point and Circle of Healing is confirmed (at this point in time) as being an ability Holy Priests get for choosing to be Holy. So we will still have access to two of the five. I actually like Chakra despite it’s clunkiness and thus hope it hangs around. Given that they haven’t quit on the Lightwell yet despite years of complaints, I imagine that it and Chakra will make the expansion in some form or another. Guardian Spirit on the other hand, I’m not so sure about. The proposed Priest talent tree has a couple of potential tank cooldowns on offer and I’m a little concerned that raid balance could be thrown if non-tanks have access to more than one tank saver.

So on paper at least, we should lose very little but at the same time have the chance to gain some new and interesting abilities. I think we also have to factor in glyphs here, to me at least, that’s where the majority of spell modification should take place.

New Race:

Not sold I’m afraid. I own a Pandaren Monk mini-pet and it’s one of the most annoying things in-game, up there with Monkey pets, ice lance, spell steal, inner focus and mind spike. If the Pandarian race or Monks of any race make even half as many annoying noises.. grr. Imagine raiding to the soundtrack of nails down a blackboard.

Theramore:

Just no! I’m rather sick of my favourite zones in-game being destroyed for one reason or another. My Night Elves are traumatised by the loss of Auberdine, My Gnomes are still struggling to overcome the fact that they couldn’t take back Gnomeregan, not to mention Southshore and the Battle of Andorhal and now we’re going to lose Theramore.. Poor Spot

Not to mention that from an RP perspective on my server at least, we’re meant to believe that a bunch of people who can’t even win Tol Barad attacks 70 percent of the time are actually going to manage to take a fortified town? I don’t need to lose anything to want to fight, I’ve already lost enough. My hatred burns bright already, for what they did to Southshore (one of my favourite haunts in Vanilla), I’d happily go to war.

The Culture of Losing: Gear, Bots and Strand of the Ancients

This is a rant thinly disguised as a constructive post.

First up, disclaimers.

I realise that random is entirely that. The players making up your team and the opposing team are picked at random from a large pool of people. The battleground map is picked at random too. There is no malicious consciousness set on deliberately ruining your day behind these random choices. Sometimes it just feels that way.

Gear Discrepancies

I don’t want to be playing with sub 100k health and zero resilience wearing people, especially when the opposing team are fielding a full bunch of ruthless wearing, hard hitting, 140k plus, objective focused gladiator wannabes. Nor do I want to face people with no gear, I don’t play battlegrounds to farm people at the graveyard. What’s the point of keeping score when you know the outcome as soon as you see the enemy riding across the map.

I’m not saying that everyone with sub 100k health isn’t objective focused just that if you can’t kill anyone or outheal anyone’s damage, you are a waste of space (Yes, there are exceptions to this and they are usually Frost Mages however they tend to be few and far between). I’m currently playing a Resto Druid and the difference between geared and non-geared players is immense. I spent a good 10 minutes running around Tol Barad with 5 brand new 85 Horde trying to kill me but barely being irritating. If you are in a 10 man battleground and half your team can’t kill one healer you have a major problem. Suddenly you are outnumbered nine to five. Then there is the fact that if you are particularly squishy, you tend not to be able to reach any objectives in the first place. Spending 90 percent of your time in the graveyard is not helpful.

Then there is the lose fast culture. The two teams clash, one team comes off as the clear and definite winner due in part to gear. From the graveyard comes the “lose fast”, “they out gear us”, “we can’t win”, “you all suck”, the latter usually coming from a Deathknight in greens and epics from a previous expansion. The game is basically over, it doesn’t matter how hard you as an individual try when a good chunk of your team are content with taking their losing honor as fast as possible and trying again.

So on to the constructive bit. You can’t enter Heroics without a certain item level of gear so why not implement something similar but different for Battlegrounds. The 40 mans would be available to anyone regardless of their gear as the sheer numbers tend to balance out across both teams. That way brand new 85s would still be able to play with friends whilst gearing up.

The rest, because each individual contribution is much more important in smaller scale PvP would be divided up into two brackets on plus and minus say 340 item level basis (the number would increase as the expansion progressed).  Everyone in levelling gear would only be fighting people in levelling gear. Yes, it won’t stop people in pure PvE gear getting steam-rolled by those in PvP gear but since it seems rare (in my experience) that anyone bar brand new characters don’t have some sort of PvP gear already, it shouldn’t be too bad. It should make everyone’s experiences a bit better and provide more balanced games, removing the need for threads like this on the forums.

Afkers/Bots

Then we come to the afkers/bots, some of which are doing it because gearing up half way through an expansion/season is horribly painful and some of whom just don’t like PvP in general or hate having to play with the “random” factor.  Having recently took part in an Arathi Basin in which five people, one third of our team never actually moved from the start zone, I’m rather unimpressed with people who join games and don’t play. Again, I feel it comes down to the accepted culture of losing that permeates battlegrounds at the moment. Through the random queue system and the various bits and pieces you get throughout the game (especially during battleground weekends) honor just ticks up too fast from losing. There is no incentive to fight hard to turn around a losing game  and since Blizzard don’t seem to care about people botting in PvP, there is no incentive not to do that either. Yes, I’m sure that people who do afk through games would rather pick up winning honor but it’s still better than nothing. Part of the problem is perhaps that honor can be converted to justice points allowing people who don’t like PvP to gear up for heroics/raids in an afk fashion. Botting 5 mans is a bit more obvious than botting battlegrounds.

What I would like to see is a reduction in the amount of honor you receive for a losing game. The object of PvP is to win, everyone in the team should be focused on that and not the fact that losing fast is better than winning slowly. I accept that sometimes bad luck means you can lose ten plus games in a row, so I feel that there should be some honor for losing but it should be minimal. Hopefully this would also mean that the voices crying to lose fast from the graveyard would finally shut up and start focusing on objectives.

I would also like to see the honor all being rewarded at the end of the game, not piecemeal through as it currently is. That way if someone is afk and it takes you half the game to get them kicked out, they get nothing just as they deserve.

I also feel that Blizzard should police their battlegrounds and implement severe punishments on a regular basis for people caught botting/afking. At the very least, all their honor/conquest points for the current season should be wiped along with everything they have bought with said honor up to this point, including any PvE gear/mounts etc. It is after all, a form of griefing. Winning with one hand tied behind your back because you don’t have a full team is tricky and the late night games where you are desperately hoping the opposing team has as many bots as you to give your side a fighting chance are horrendous. I once played an AV in which both teams had 40 players but only six people from eighty were actually fighting. Five on our side, four paladins and my hunter and one on theirs. Needless to say we won, but it took a while. Unfortunately though, whilst threads like this fill the battleground forums, Blizzard keep rather quiet on the subject.

Strand of the Ancients/10 mans

Everyone who likes battlegrounds will have one or two maps they hate. For me, it’s SotA and EotS, according to the forums for other people it’s AV, Isle of Conquest and quite often SotA. I’m also not too partial to the 10 mans because of some of the reasons I’ve outlined above. You can’t afford to have low geared or afk people in a 10 man unless the opposing team has similar and since that’s random, more often than not, they just pull you down.

So I propose that we can set one or two battlegrounds that we just don’t want to ever see. For me, one would definitely be SotA, my heart sinks every time I see that loading screen.  Although popping Treeform and dancing about instant rooting demolishers and players is pretty fun, I could live without the thrill and happily never see the place the again. It’s not helped by the fact that someone always afks straight away before the game even starts. Failing that, I’d like random to be a bit less random. Knowing that if you get SotA, whatever battleground you get next won’t be SotA would go along way to making the place a bit more palatable.

Random questions and stuff

But Teasel, you only hit 85 10 days ago, surely you must have been one of those undergeared people you’re complaining about?

Nope. I timed my arrival at 85 to co-inside with Alterac Valley weekend. When I dinged, I already had 4000 honor points and 4000 justice points so I could already buy a couple of decent 85 items, which I gemmed/enchanted before queuing up for more 40 man goodness. When AV weekend ended, I then queued specifically to the 40 mans for a day or two to make sure I had gear I was happy with before hitting the random queue. I hate the idea of inflicting myself on people if I feel I can’t pull my weight.

Losing fast? Can you lose fast? Oh yes. However, it tends to bring out my bloody mindedness and I’m good at making losses slow and painful. Tagging back bunkers, stealing flags and trying to make sure the lemmings don’t die can be lots of fun especially when they are all calling you names in chat.

Finally, yes I realise that there are rated battlegrounds where you don’t have to carry people with zero resilience (unless you choose to) or put up with afkers/bots. However, I like to battleground throughout the day and finding nine to 14 likeminded people at 6am would be a challenge. Plus fielding a team which works well together takes time and commitment (in my experience getting commitment out of WoW players is a painful process). Besides, people should be able to queue for an aspect of the game which they enjoy without having to put up with bots/afkers and rogues wearing dresses.

All players are created equal…

In between waiting for the cowardly Horde to queue to Alterac Valley, I’ve been thinking about Blizzard’s new Healing Philosophy and why it worries me. To quote Ghostcrawler:

Prior to LK, healers could run out of mana, and for the most part it worked. They didn’t just use their efficient heals, because sometimes their group would die if they did. They didn’t just use their big heals though, because they’d run out of mana (and then the group would die).

I think of healing like a cross-continental road race. If you go too slow, you’ll lose the race, but if you just floor it the whole time, you’ll run out of fuel a lot and waste time stopping to fill it up again. There is a happy medium somewhere in between. However the encounter specifics push you out of that medium, sometimes asking you to choose big numbers over efficiency and sometimes vice-versa.

I know it sounds like we are picking on healers all the time, but once you can run out of mana again, I think everything will just feel better, your choices about what spell to cast next become more compelling, and the healing game overall will be more engaging.

Borrowed from this thread. Now maybe I’m nitpicking but he doesn’t seem to be addressing a couple of important points. Firstly running out of mana even though you’re doing everything right but your group is hugging the fire, not using cc properly and the like is not engaging.  Frustrating, annoying and likely to drive you mad perhaps, but engaging or fun, no.

PvP Implictions.

Now we all know PvP isn’t balanced around 1 v 1 and that’s fine, Warcraft is a multiplayer game. However when you want healers to have mana issues PvP becomes a problem. At the moment as a Disc Priest I have a chance to beat all classes in a 1 v 1. It comes down to how well I play versus how badly they play. Which in my mind is how it should play out, the best player of the two should win.

In theory Dpsers should have high damage to compensate for the fact that they are A. squishy and B. can’t heal. Healers on the other hand, should have weak dps but can heal. However over the years the lines have blurred and with Cataclysm it seems as if all the classes who currently have no self heals whatsoever are gaining them. Take hunters for example, at the moment they are usually a win for me. Yes, they can have high damage but since they have no way of healing, with dots, shadowfiend and reflective shield, I usually have no problems in a 1 v 1. It might take me a while but I can wear them down.

Fast forward to Cataclysm, they get a heal mechanic, their damage will scale up and we get less regen across the board and our fast heals get a hefty mana hike. Unfortunately fast flash heal type spells have to be bread and butter in PvP because even if people’s time to live is increased to the point where you can happily use greater heal to keep them up, kicks and interupts become a problem. Add in the fact that anti healing debuffs are being reduced across the board to 25 percent and I can’t help thinking that whilst health pools are definitely increasing, healing won’t scale at all well.

I fully admit when my Boomkin sees a well geared Disc Priest my little feathery heart sinks and like most if not all dpsers, I hate going 1 v 1 against a healer but even without nerfing healing, Cataclysm is already giving us more tools for dealing with the “cheating swine”. Classes without interrupts are gaining interrupts which will make beating healers easier.

Is that a problem? For me yes. I like healing in PvP, I’ve always healed in PvP. Yet, if I can’t beat anyone in a 1 v 1, it lessens my options in group PvP as well. Why bring a healer who is a squishy liability when you could just bring another dps. Things will die faster and it’s not as if said healer will bring anything when it only takes one member of the opposing team to deal with them, with the healer having to focus 100 percent on keeping themselves alive. Having the philosophy of fast expensive spells versus slow cheap efficient ones is ok in PvE when damage is predictable but less good in PvP when the choice is a simple cast X expensive spell or die.

Gearing and Levelling.

There will always be a sweet spot when gear reaches a certain point. Let’s say it’s tier 14, grab this gear and suddenly you have mana to spare again. If Blizzard hold the faith on their philosophy, they would have to nerf regen which then negatively effects everyone who is below the gear curve. If you start levelling a healer six months into the expansion, things could be worse than levelling one at the start and by the sound of it, levelling as a healer at the start will be no walk in the park. Neither is it good for the healers in tier 14 who are all excited about their new shinies only to log in a month later and find they are back where they were when they had tier 13.

Wow is all about character progression and having one of the three roles either remaining stationary or even worse going backwards whilst the other two move forwards is bad design plain and simple. No one wants to be weaker as they level up and yet that’s what is happening to the healers on the beta right now.

Looking for Group.

At the moment the Looking for Group finder just picks 3 dpsers, 1 tank and 1 healer and pops you all into a dungeon together. That design really won’t work if CC is as crucial to 5 mans as Blizzard seem to want. Will people be leaving group immediately if the party doesn’t contain say a rogue (sap, blind, stuns), hunter (traps, pet to offtank perhaps) and a mage (everyone’s favourite CC polymorph)? Quite possibly I would imagine, especially if healers and/or tanks have instant queues they may turn out to be very picky. In fact I’m not sure I would blame them, if running a certain instance was considerably easier with a particular group composition then I might be in trade looking for the perfect group rather than just joining the LFG as well.

The flavour of CC you bring might be the new gearscore, which for certain classes is a bit nasty. Take priests, our CC comes into two basic flavours, fear (which really isn’t great in an instance unless you pull each trash pack way back) and mind control (which also effectively crowd controls the priest). Neither of those is good enough to keep a mob out of action for long periods of time, especially when compared to the likes of polymorph. On top of that, shadowpriests bring psychic horror but a 10 second cc on a two minute cooldown is hardly ground shatteringly exciting or useful.

General thoughts.

Is Blizzard balancing around raid content, where it’s likely everyone will have replenishment available to them? If they want healers to struggle it’s likely that they are, otherwise in raid conditions, mana would be less of an issue which leads me to another problem I have with this design chance.

Back in vanilla, I was the master of my fate. I had a huge stack of mana pots, nights dragon breath and bandages. Sure, I got the odd innervate but by and large, I had to stand on my own two feet and I was balanced around my ability, not some random buff that class Y might bring. This is the perfect chance to remove replenishment, make mana tide shaman only, alter hymn of hope slightly so it only works for the priest and so on. Give us control and let us live or die by our mistakes not our party makeup.

I fully support healing requiring some thought but I think Blizzard are going about it all wrong. Remove buffs like replenishment or give them to everyone so you can balance content around them (obviously I would prefer removal). Give us the five second rule back and downranking, so that smart play is rewarded, rather than just tying one hand behind our backs.

As things stand at the moment, I won’t be healing a dungeon whilst levelling and for the first ever  in the five years I’ve played WoW, I’m considering making a dpser my main for Cataclysm. Not because I shy away from a challenge, I’ve two manned plenty of heroics in both this and the previous expansion (back when gear was an issue and we actually had to use CC) and I still remember healing a 10 man Stratholme virtually solo the day our tank got his arcanite reaper. It’s not because I think Cataclysm will be too hard, but basically I pay the same amount per month as everyone else and I really don’t appreciate the fact that it seems as if I will be a second class citizen.

Also if you play Horde in Misery EU and are between lvs 71 and 79, queue for AV please. I’m sick of WSG, AB and EotS and my little warrior wants to slam her new shield in your face

Midsummer Memories

Across Azeroth the bonfires are dying down, leaving only a few scattered embers glowing in the dust as a reminder of the Fire Festival. Midsummer is over for another year.

The fires are extinguished

Next to Hallows End, Midsummer has always been my favourite festival but this year I ended up with mixed emotions.

The Good

What with the whispers of something cataclysmic coming on the wind, a reason to revisit old areas is always good. I took plenty of screenshots whilst collecting fires, just in case any of my favourite areas vanish under a large quantity of lava any time soon.

The experience buff was amazing. 10 percent extra experience from mobs plus all the experience from collecting the flames and the dailies saw my Gnome warrior rocket up from around lv 40 to 58 really fast. We got to skip zones like Searing Gorge and Un’goro this time around, choosing instead to do things like steal the flame of  Undercity. Have to say I was amazed that the Forsaken allowed two lv 54s to wander around pinching stuff without killing them. Seemed very out of character for the Horde (not that I’m complaining or anything).

My little warrior also got the spirit of summer to keep her company through all the long autumnal nights. That has to be one of my favourite pets, I imagine it’s soft glowing light evokes summer blossoms, warm breezes and the aroma of freshly baked fire-toasted bun. Just the thing to keep the winter blues away.

The end of the Festival party. I love fireworks and those toasting cups are awesome. I want them all year around please.

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The Bad

Ahune and his satchels. I killed him every single day of the Festival on two characters. My boyfriend did likewise, which I think makes 60 kills. Neither of us got the pet and neither of us got the scythe. In fact the only people I saw getting anything other than emblems in their bags, were two deathknights and a paladin who all got….. the scythe which they can’t use. I know it’s fairly pathetic to whine about a mini-pet, but I’ve always collected them. I had bags full of cute little critters way before achievements made them cool to the majority. The fact that I couldn’t do anything to increase my chance of getting this one made me slightly sad.

Now I love the queue system, it’s great and hassle free but I can’t help wishing either the vanity items had a higher drop rate or like the mace from the brewfest, they were BoE so those who have no interest could sell them to those that do.

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So that’s my whining over until the next festival, although I’ve got sinister squashlings on pretty much every character I possess so the rest of the year should be drama free. We also had some really weird groups for Ahune. I saw at least one mage and several hunters only manage to do around 30 000 damage on the whole fight. They were not surprising out dpsed by the healer. The number of all druid or close to all druid groups surprised me as well. 2 ferals, 2 boomkins and resto… how can you go wrong with that!

Cataclysm? That’s just another word for Disaster right

I have to admit, I’m worried already. Not about the “lol smite” direction of the Priest class or by the removal of the Path of the Titans but by the way raiding seems to be going.

I didn’t like the idea of only being able to run an instance on 10 man or 25 man when it was announced. I like the ability to help out friends by running 10 man Onyxia even though I’ve already killed her on 25 man and I believe that removing that ability come Cataclysm takes a way a bit of the “multi-player” aspect. Now it seems to firmly put the emphasis on alts, which is fine if like me you have lots of them, but I know plenty of raiders who only have one character. Oddly enough, it’s nearly always a rogue (they must be a strangely addictive class).

Then comes the news that you will be able to divide 25 mans into up to 3 10 mans. No no no no. The potential for chaos this could cause is worse than the zombie plague of 08. To illustrate my point, let me tell you a story.

Back when Ulduar was cutting edge content, we were working on Freya plus three. Now for some reason people just kept doing all sorts of stupid things, not controlling their aoe, standing in beams, hugging the person exploding and the like. The raid got more and more mutinous. Half the team kept whining that we were obviously undergeared and that we should just kill one add, kill her and move on. The other half were determined to keep going and since the officers were in the latter group, we eventually succeeded.

Now had that been Cataclysm, no doubt the officer led group would been clamouring to divide the raid and conquer. Sure, we would have got that kill a lot faster but it’s hardly fair on those that get left out. There is always the risk that whoever is making the groups cherry picks the best players (which makes sense if you want first kills) but that can destroy the harmony of the guild as a whole. No one likes feeling left out.

I still have a bad taste in my mouth remembering Karazhan and trying to divide the guild equally into two teams each week. In fact I have at least four separate screenshots of people accusing me of bias and generally being a bitch because of their perceptions of the team I put them in. The thought of doing it on the fly, in the middle of a raid where people are already frustrated and pissed off is a nightmare.

When you couple that with the words of Ghostcrawler himself..

Remember that in LK the 10s were specifically designed to be easier (with a couple of exceptions where we messed up) and many players ran them with the loot they earned from their 25s, further exacerbating the problem. Given the complexities of some encounters, realistically it’s probably not possible for every single battle to be of exactly the same difficulty in both 10 and 25, but we have a lot of room to bring them closer together.

and my heart sinks even further. It’s likely that some content will be harder on 10 man and some on 25 man. Now if you’re pushing for server firsts or even just to beat the guild closest to you on the progression list, taking the path of least resistance is the way to do it. For the sake of argument lets go with the first two bosses being easier on 25 man, you clear them and then the third boss is considerably easier if done on 10 man. So you divide the team up into three, getting over the logistical problems like turning two tanks in your 25 man into 6 tanks for three ten mans and dividing seven healers into little pieces. Now A and B manage to kill the boss no problem, but C struggles. Drama ensues. Someone gquits after having a screaming row with three officers and comes back two days later after their tantrum wears off.

To further add to the drama, lets assume that the guild closest to you on the progression list is a 10 man only guild. They are behind because they don’t have the luxury to scale up to tackle the first two fights which are easier on 25 man. Because they are behind, a couple of their crucial players apply to a guild they perceive as being better. So much for a level playing field.

On top of that, I don’t believe that content which is “not equal” should generate the same rewards. Obviously the problem here lies in the fact that whichever is easiest will probably come on a boss by boss basis, but the hardest stuff should always yield the best reward. Otherwise it’s like handing out gold medals to everyone who enters a race even if they come 15th (a primary school I briefly attended did just that –  my father almost had a fit when he discovered the kid who crossed the finishing line about 4 minutes after I did, got the same reward).

Yes, I’m horribly cynical but I swear I didn’t start out this way. Being an officer in two raiding guilds over the last 5 years has shown me all sorts of depressing things the dregs of humanity will do for gear. Raiding for a lot of people is about loot, how fast you can obtain said loot, what sort of loot it is and so on. I’ve experienced guild life from the most casual to the server first level and the people in those guilds behaved very similarly to each other, whether we were talking Naxx or AQ40.

I suppose I don’t like the idea that Blizzard are trying to sell a level playing field, when it’s obvious that there will be a myriad of pitfalls for raiding guilds to fall into.

Personally I prefer 25 man raiding. 10 people is family and friends around a barbecue on a Saturday night. It doesn’t feel epic or exciting to me. I like my raids to be as multi-player as possible. However, I realise and accept that not everyone thinks like me but I don’t believe that Blizzard’s solution will keep many people happy in the long run.

25 mans assuming you have secure leadership, could potentially still have the upper hand because they will be able to always take the fastest path to first kills. That won’t make 10 man guilds who have been sold a promise of equality happy for long. 10 mans could possibly work out as being more challenging that 25 mans across the board, that would force people like me who want a challenge to move to a format I don’t particularly enjoy. Not sure how long that would sustain my interest. Are there enough raid leaders and competent tanks for a massive shift to 10 mans? My guess would be no, but selfishly if push comes to shove, I have a pet raidleader who also doubles as a pet tank.

Yes, it’s still the alpha and a lot could happen between now and Cataclysm going live, but I have to admit I’m losing excitement on a day by day basis. Yes, we coped with shrinking raid size in the Burning Crusade, we coped with running ToC four times per character in one reset and I’m sure we’ll cope what ever happens in Cataclysm but…..

No plainstriders in Northrend, here’s why!

The evil werewolves in Grizzly Hills ate them.

I’m suffering a bit from WoW related ennui at the moment but I’m not 100 percent sure why. I have goals, lots of goals I want to achieve in game but when it actually comes to logging to do them I end up hanging around chatting to people or bouncing quietly in a corner.

• I’m 50 quests away from Loremaster on my Priest. The end is finally in sight, I know where to look for the remaining quests and I’ve even started a couple of blog posts on the subject but……
• My druid and shaman are both lv 72 with lots of shiny BoA accessories but despite having bought them winter flying, epic flying and dual spec, they are hanging out in the beergarden. Which other than telling me that money in WoW is far too easily earnt isn’t really helpful.
• My baby warrior is a level away from a dirty noisy mechostrider.
• I’m working on my 100 mount achievement. My guild got three glowing pink flying bird things from Kael in TBC, all three people have now quit or gone casual. The only time I’ve seen a hawkstrider drop in Magister’s Terrace, I was outrolled by 1… its owner is now casual. Dwelling on lost rolls leads to bitterness, especially since Kael is now denying ever having a hawkstider and refusing to drop another one.

I think part of the problem is the gated raid system with a set number of tries that Blizzard seems to feel is the way forward. Now, my server is at times anything but stable. Its one of the biggest in the EU I believe and come raid time, especially on a Wednesday/Thursday the latency spirals. We lost three tries on Anub’arak yesterday for example due to all kinds of weird lag. Spikes standing still whilst killing someone on the other side of the room being the best example. It shouldn’t be a “Tribute to Mad Skill” but a “Tribute to Server Stability”.

“The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks.”

The thought of having four new encounters to beat then having to wait, whilst still doing all the stuff we currently do because there isn’t enough new stuff to go around doesn’t create a feeling of excitement in my bosom. Yes, maybe I’m being extra pessimistic as we don’t know what the live versions of the normal instance will be like but ToC doesn’t inspire confidence.