Month: November 2013

I think I’ve covered the majority of my Warlords of Draenor reactions in my two previous posts, about raids (obviously) and itemization. There are a lot of other things to talk about, but I don’t have particularly much to say about any of them, so I thought I’d stick them in a single post. :)

Garrisons

Well. It’s an interesting concept. I’m not thrilled yet. Cory Stockton seemed really excited about them. I’ve never really cared about player housing, so maybe it’s just something that eludes me as being SO COOL. It’s like the farm, but like, times a thousand or something, one of them said? I liked the farm, but more than one was difficult to do consistently. Are all of our characters expected to have a garrison? Isn’t that a LOT of garrisoning? I think someone asked if our alts could be our garrison followers and I think that would be a pretty awesome option.

I am a bit intrigued by the limited access to professions you don’t have through your garrison and followers, but obviously need more info.

The mini-game of setting up missions sounds cool, but some of them take days? A week? Not sure how I feel about that, although, at the moment, I’m not impressed. I haven’t really given it a lot of thought, though, so maybe it’s fine that they take X number of real-life days.

Inventory Updates

YAY FOR HEIRLOOM COLLECTIONS. And toys, I guess, although I don’t have many of those. Would LOVE to see tabards added to collections. Love that quest items won’t be stored in your bags. Love that you can craft directly from the bank! But will you need to have your bank open? Or can you do it anywhere in the world as long as the mats are in your bank?

Stacks upped to 100 items. Beautiful.

Level 90 Boost

Okay. Seriously. Is anyone else a little concerned about letting people loose upon the world (and LFG…) with a level 90 they’ve had extremely little experience playing? Anyone? I am petrified of the level 90 “tank” who shows up in LFG for an introductory dungeon who doesn’t know a damn thing about what they’re doing. The words I fear seeing as an excuse for poor play: “lol 90 boost lol”.

That said, I think it’s a good idea to bring back past players who stopped playing a while back. I’m pretty much buying the expansion (I still want to get a realm first skinning, dammit) so I’m wondering which character of mine I should boost to 90. Right now, I have my hunter, Kurn, at 90 and I also have my shaman alt at 90 (since he’s my miner/herbalist). If I’m remembering correctly, I have:

Madrana of Eldre’Thalas at 85
Madrana of Skywall at 85
Skywall mage at 85
Proudmoore druid… at 80? 85? I think 85.
Eldre’Thalas priest at 85
Eldre’Thalas warrior at 80
Eldre’Thalas mage… in her 50s, I think.
Eldre’Thalas rogue bank alt at 5
Eldre’Thalas horde druid at 8. (Yes, 8.)
Ursin horde rogue at … 15, I think?

I think the most hilarious thing to do would be to take my level 5 bank alt on ET to 90. Except I don’t like playing melee classes. But it would be pretty amusing to have my bank alt sitting at a level cap.

What’s interesting is that this could also be used on a level 1, newly created character. So if you’re looking for another profession alt… there you go. That’s also a possibility. I don’t actually have a blacksmith or engineer…

If I’m smart, I’ll resub a couple months prior to the expansion coming out (at the latest) and get Madrana of ET up to 90, along with the priest. And maybe get the warrior up as high as I need to in order to continue to max out inscription. Then I should start a new toon, boost to 90, make it an engineer/blacksmith and I’ll have at least one toon with each profession.

If I’m less smart, I’ll resub just before the expansion drops and waste the boost on Madrana.

Honestly, it could go either way. >.>

Heroic Upper Blackrock Spire

I’m worried that this will mean a complete revamp of LBRS as well. I love Blackrock Spire. Both Upper and Lower, plus Blackrock Depths. These are some of my favourite dungeons in World of Warcraft. Will using my Seal of Ascension still spawn Vael in the Rend fight? Will you still be able to see LBRS from UBRS? I mean, LBRS is a maze, a true labyrinth, but it’s MY labyrinth. I know that place! UBRS is a lot more linear. Will the Father Flame event still exist? Will we still kite Drakk to the Beast’s room? I mean, so much of both of the dungeons are completely outdated, but… still. I have spent the equivalent of DAYS OF MY LIFE in UBRS/LBRS. Days. Probably even a week’s worth of my life in there. This is definitely the curmudgeonly old Kurn talking, but don’t you fuck with my Blackrock Spire(s).

I disliked revamped Scholomance. True, I think I only ran it twice (on my level 50-something mage) or maybe three times (I have a vague recollection of running it on Kurn to see what had changed), but I really, really didn’t like it. Also important to note, I didn’t like the original Scholomance much, but at least I’d gotten used to it. I hope they don’t mess with UBRS too much. To see an instance I LOVED get messed with would make me very sad.

And if they get rid of Lord Victor Nefarius saying “Foolsss… Kill the one in the dress!”, then WoW is truly dead to me. Best emote ever.

Avoiding Breakpoints

And now, for something completely different: actual praise.

I love how they plan to tackle various loot/raid mechanic issues with flexible raid makeups. The way I understand it’ll work is this:

If, at 10 people, you get one debuff cast on someone, and at 15 people you get two debuffs, here’s how it breaks down for numbers in between:

10 people: 100% chance of 1 debuff
11 people: 100% chance of 1 debuff, 20% chance of a second debuff
12 people: 100% chance of 1 debuff, 40% chance of a second debuff
13 people: 100% chance of 1 debuff, 60% chance of a second debuff
14 people: 100% chance of 1 debuff, 80% chance of a second debuff
15 people: 100% chance of 2 debuffs

Beautiful, elegant solution. And if you have debuffs going out several times a fight, I’m guessing these chances are calculated per debuff, so you could end up with 1 sometimes and 2 other times. It’s great.

As to loot, if you get 2 pieces on 10 and 3 on 15, then you get the same chances as above per person (20%) to get that third piece of loot. Also elegant.

Brilliant solutions here, actually. Like, I couldn’t be more pleased with how that seems to be turning out.

Item Squish

Part of me is sad that we’re not going all the way back to Vanilla levels (hands up, all those who are shocked… yeah, that’s what I thought) but I think the amount of damage and such seems reasonable, from what I heard at the panel. In my hastily typed notes, I have:

1100 int, 2209 Fireball down from 20640 int, 47k Fireball

Should be interesting to see how that all turns out… and how quickly it ramps back up.

Lore & Story… and Stuff

Look, I’ll admit it: I started playing WoW for reasons completely unrelated to the story. I don’t tend to care too much about the lore, as long as the story interests me. Killing Illidan, even if I didn’t know who he was? Interested me. Killing Arthas, after having only a vague idea of who he was at the start of the expansion? Interested me. Killing Deathwing, after seeing him BURN AUBERDINE TO SMITHEREENS? Very much interested me. Pandas? Not so much.

I am on the fence about Warlords of Draenor. Here’s the thing: we’re obviously going to defeat Garrosh & Co. and the Iron Horde will not come through the Dark Portal to our version of Azeroth. I mean, when have we NOT defeated the bad guy, right? We’re heroes. That’s what we DO.

So if what we do in Draenor doesn’t affect our actual past (the devs have said it won’t have any effect on “our” history at all) and if we’re basically going to win anyhow… then what’s the point?

Plus, the fact that it won’t affect our past bothers me. Continuity and timelines and stuff is something I enjoy (and have enjoyed since the Back to the Future movies). If you go back in time and prevent your parents from getting together (like Marty almost did in BttF), there have to be repercussions to that stuff, you know?

Being a fan of Star Trek, too, I’ve had a bit of exposure to their ideas about timelines and time travel. And they state the same thing: you screw with the past, you risk screwing with the future. Picard’s instructions to his crew in First Contact were to settle down and keep a low profile.

I know that, reasonably, the reason Garrosh’s meddling in the past doesn’t affect “our” past is because that would be a stupid amount of work just in the name of consistency. But it still bugs me.

Also. Orcs? More Garrosh? Ugh. Almost makes me want to resub so I can go defeat his smug ass in Siege of Orgrimmar. I’ve wanted to bash his face in since Trial of the Crusader. Also, since I pay very little attention to the lore, I don’t really know all of these orc clans. I know OF many of these chiefs, like Ner’zhul, Grom Hellscream (Gromsblood, anyone?)… I love that I now understand why the Eye of Kilrogg is so named (Kilrogg Deadeye). I like that I know OF pretty much all the clans and stuff. But I don’t know terribly much about them. Honestly, a lot of these names are recognizable to me just because I know there are servers named for these characters!

That said, the BC-era player in me is excited at the opportunity to revisit a somewhat familiar land. When I heard that Karabor is the home city for the Alliance, I gasped and literally said “I love my Medallion of Karabor!”. I wonder if using my Medallion of Karabor in Warlords will bring me to Black Temple in Outlands or Karabor in Draenor. ;)

I love that Nagrand is there. I loved that zone. Apart from, you know, almost living there. Between killing clefthooves for leather and farming elementals up on the plateau, I spent a lot of time in Nagrand. It’ll be nice to take a look at another version of it. (I will die laughing if Elemental Plateau still exists! The existance of Pure Pools of Water is what got me fishing on Kurn beyond the ~100 or so points I had in fishing from random fishing as I had levelled.)

Flying in Draenor

The big news post-BlizzCon is that flight in Draenor is likely to be postponed until patch 6.1. I estimate this will be between 2 and 4 months after launch. Patch 4.1 was about five months after launch. 5.1 was was only two months after launch.

Frankly, I don’t care too much. The levelling process, to me, has always been on foot (Cataclysm excepted). I’m used to it. I’m a bit miffed that I have to wait until AFTER I’m level 100, in that even when I AM 100 I won’t be able to fly, but really, whatever. I get that they want to herd us carefully. I don’t mind too much. Besides, when’s the last time you spent quality time with your ground mounts? (Okay, I have the Baron’s mount, I have my epic pally mount, I have the Brewfest Kodo… I have fun ground mounts.)

That said, I understand that people are pissed. It’s always the same argument, though. When we couldn’t fly in Northrend ’till 80, it was the same thing. Couldn’t fly in Pandaria ’till 90? Same thing. After a certain time, you just don’t care about hearing the same pointless arguments. The devs don’t want us to fly, so we can’t fly. End of story.

Other Stuff

I’m looking over my notes and I don’t have a lot else to say… I guess I’ll just include a few things at random from the opening ceremony and Warlords announcement.

– Love that they’re porting Hearthstone to iPhone and Android. (Haven’t been playing. Should play more.)
– Although I probably won’t play, the Heroes of the Storm trailer was pretty awesome.
– Loved the memories that Rob Pardo showed. TM vs. SS, 40m Ony, Dark Portal, AQ gates, ZG’s corrupted blood (which is the whole reason I started playing!)
– I have a note here saying “for the motherfucking Alliance, yo”. I’m not sure what the hell that was for. Still, I just laughed as I read it, so I thought I would share.
– I do like that it’s 10 levels. These 5-level expansions make levelling weird.
– “Oh God, not the Arakkoa!” I don’t need a whole expansion of Majik (if he plays) yelling “KA-KAW!!!” at me.
– I like the ogres.
– Looking forward to seeing Hellfire before it became Hellfire.
– Love the Gronn! I miss Gruul and his sons.
– Looking forward to the pre-launch 6.0 event for sure. The Dark Portal. Man, such memories.
– Player models: Not a lot of stuff to say yet. Wait ’till we see the new humans and night elves. THEN I’ll have stuff to say. Although I will say I quite like the work they’ve done that I’ve see so far. The undead’s bones, the dwarves look great, love the orc, too.
– Upgrades to core spells rather than gaining new spells: I like. (Probably until they screw with my spells. We’ll have to see.)

Okay, I guess that’s it for now. What about you? What do you think about flying? The story? Are you as scared of level-boosted players as I am? ;)

(Oh, and before I forget, there’s a big post-BlizzCon sale going on over at Kurn’s Guides! Check it out!)

Believe it or not, guys, I am going to try to leave my curmudgeonly “get off my lawn” self aside in this post. I may not entirely succeed, but I’m going to give it a shot. ;)

Removing All The Things!

One of the problems the developers have recognized is that getting a piece of gear kind of sucks, when instead it should be this great thing to get. Why? Because you get it, then you have to probably gem it, then likely enchant it, then you need to reforge it (and, let’s face it, most of the rest of your gear) and then you can upgrade it with valor.

That’s not REMOTELY intimidating, is it? Well, yes, yes it is. Intimidating to some, annoying to others and just a basic fact of life when it comes to high-end raiding. But still, it takes some of the joy away from getting the actual piece of loot.

So they’ve removed reforging entirely, which I think is a fantastic call. I didn’t like the reforging balance game and it still didn’t prevent people from wanting their supposed “best-in-slot” piece, despite the fact that you could change the stats on that item.

Not only that, but to prevent worries about caps and such, they have also removed hit and expertise.

I’m less sure about this move, but I think it’s more my old, curmudgeonly side that walked uphill, in the snow, both ways, that’s saying this. Maybe it’s because I clued in to the importance of hit rating when I was in Burning Crusade and, since then, have always taken care to be hit-capped on a DPS character. Or maybe it’s because I think it’s dumbing down the game. But having even a little bit of experience in having to juggle hit and expertise caps on my hunter, I can appreciate that this is quite a big quality of life change.

I wasn’t a fan of expertise being needed by a hunter in Mists of Pandaria, still seeing it as something “the melee” had to deal with and didn’t like that agility mail was really interchangeable between hunters and enhancement shaman, but again, that’s probably the grumpy side of me. So the removal of expertise doesn’t bug me. Hilariously enough, I still think of expertise as a “new” stat, although it’s been around since mid-Burning Crusade, if memory serves.

My question, and perhaps it’s been answered, is… are we always going to hit with our abilities? Our white attacks? I’ve seen people speculating that it means we’ll always hit with our specials and have a small chance to miss with our white attacks, which sounds reasonable to me. But how are they going to deal with level disparity? Hit has always been dependent on your level vs. your opponent’s level. Raid bosses are viewed as being 3 levels higher than you, which is why 15% hit (nowadays. It used to be 17% for casters.) was needed, while only 5% was needed for a player of equal level.

I think that they’ll need to somehow preserve the missing mechanic for level disparity, but I’m not sure how to do that. Like, if you’re 4 levels lower than a boss, is it going to be impossible to hit? What if you’re out in the world and you’re four levels higher than some toon you want to gank, is it going to be impossible for them to hit you? I’m hopeful that they’re already on top of this stuff, but a bit wary because, well, hit has always been in the game. (Really, as soon as they removed defense gear, removing hit had to be an option eventually because the entire combat roll table changes.)

And speaking of removing defense gear, now they’re removing dodge and parry.

I get it. These aren’t exciting stats for tanks. Aren’t prot pallies gearing for haste these days? To me, though, it sort of further consolidates loot. Will there be much, if any, gear that tanks will want that strength plate DPS or agi leather DPS won’t want? Will a ret pally need anything tankish in order to tank?

Well, judging by the other major change, possibly not.

Dynamically Changing Gear

The other major change is that gear is now going to change by specialization. That’s to say that if a pair of plate shoulders drop, with, I don’t know, 100 strength, if you’re a holy paladin, they will have 100 intellect instead of strength. But if you change your spec to say, retribution, they will turn into 100 strength. Without hit and expertise caps to worry about, armor changing based on spec seems like a really brilliant plan. No more “shoot, I left my tank gear in the bank”, because guess what? Your tank gear IS what you’re wearing (basically). All you have to do is change specs and voila, you have tank gear. (This is just for armor, of course, so rings, necks, cloaks, trinkets and weapons will be more specialized, but still.) Not only THAT, but if you have, say, 4pc tier as a holy paladin, your 4pc tier will become 4pc TANK tier when you swap specs.

Rohan says that this is a brilliant solution to the persistent Intellect plate problem, since there’s only one class/spec combination in the game (out of what, 34 specs?) that uses Intellect plate. (Having raided as that class/spec, I can’t say I was ever disappointed to see Intellect plate drop, but I understand other people not enjoying that.)

It also mostly solves a problem I know that we dealt with a lot in Apotheosis, back in BC and even in the newer incarnation: how to deal with offspec loot? Problem (mostly) solved now. You don’t have to “waste” DKP or EPGP priority or any of that for tier gear for offspec stuff because your main spec gear turns into your offspec gear (for the most part).

However, I have some concern over this. I’m really trying to leave my grumpy, cranky self out of this and I think I’m about to fail, but this touches on an issue I looked at a while back: the devaluation of gear. In that post, I talk about how the “magic” is gone from gear, that gear itself doesn’t really matter. That caused some confusion, so let me try to state it a different way:

The fact that gear can dynamically change based on location in the game (Challenge Modes, Proving Grounds) and now based on talent specialization just shows that gear is nothing more than a mechanic in the game.

I’m not sure that’s so much better than my other attempts to explain it, but let me try to expound on it a bit. Ghostcrawler said, at least twice, that gear/items are the best thing they can give to the players. They want you to care about it. But my question here is, how much meaning can be ascribed to a chestpiece that has intellect one minute and strength the next? That’s ilvl 500 one minute and ilvl 463 the next?

There have been pieces of gear I have chased after. It took me 28 runs of Scholomance to get my T0 helm. It took me sixty runs of UBRS to get my T0 chest and I only got it during Wrath of the Lich King. I worked hard for my Rhok’delar. I’ve helped others to get Atiesh, Dragonwrath, Shadowmourne, Val’anyr. I have resented bosses who haven’t dropped my preferred piece of loot (stupid Halion, stupid Saurfang, stupid any boss for the spirit/haste ring in Dragon Soul…). So I have chased loot, I’ve wanted loot in the past so badly that I could almost taste it. (And I’ve also just accepted that loot is a tool to help me and my raid group progress.)

But once Blizzard started messing with their tech and actually changing the gear itself, that’s where I got hung up on things. If a piece of loot is supposed to be a tangible reward (as tangible as anything gets in the game, anyhow), then how can the devs keep messing with it and expect us to still feel amazing about getting it? Does that make sense?

I wanted the Beaststalker Helm because it was a good helm for me and it was also part of my tier 0 set. I wanted my epic bow because it was the reward after a long, challenging quest. So let’s look at another piece of loot that I wanted, that had nothing to do with tier or being a reward for a quest.

Zod’s Repeating Longbow. In Wrath of the Lich King, I was doing the occasional PUG or GDKP raid on Kurn and I desperately needed a bow. The bow I was using was from heroic dungeons. It was tragic and sad. Zod’s, even the normal version, was basically the best bow I could hope of getting as I raided casually on my hunter while raiding much more seriously on my paladin.

Getting that bow was a huge boost to my damage, to my stats and to my viability as a player in a PUG or GDKP run, not to mention in my daily dungeon grind.

It was that bow in particular that I wanted, that I felt would really aid me in what I did as a player in the game. The stats were unchanging. It would always grant me 108 agility, always increase my DPS 561.4 (on average). This was a bow I absolutely coveted back in Wrath of the Lich King.

Would I feel that way about a bow today? Or in Warlords of Draenor? While an upgrade is an upgrade, the bow itself is not a static item upon which I can always rely. It’s that dynamic shifting that makes the loot feel, to me, less tangible. Less real. (Of course, “real” is a relative term, considering we’re talking about pixels on the screen.)

So when they talk about solving the Intellect plate “problem” and making primary stats change on gear, based on spec… I have to ask myself why should we even bother with gear? Why not just give everyone a base set of gear that upgrades by 1% or something every time that person kills a raid boss? There’s no need for gear to help us progress. They can automagically change our stats and, thus, our character’s strengths whenever they feel like it.

What about enchants, gems, reforging and upgrading? I would say that those actions (upgrading least of all) are enhancements because the player actually applies those items (or not) to the item in question. That makes it feel as though the player is enhancing the still-tangible item, rather than having things be changed for you.

I’m probably still not explaining it right, but this whole dynamic gear thing doesn’t sit right with me. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’ll solve more problems than it creates, I’m still a fan of removing reforging, all that stuff, but if things keep changing in various circumstances, why bother with them, you know?

(I know. Loot is something that a lot of people view as an end-goal. You have to have loot. This game is BUILT on loot. So while I may be going a bit far in suggesting that perhaps we have a base set of gear that upgrades itself over time, I still think it’s the same principle as what we’ve seen with scaling gear levels and what we’ll be seeing with dynamic gear stats.)

Tertiary Stats

Interesting. I don’t wholly know what to make of these, but I do enjoy the idea of movement speed as a tertiary stat on items. I like the idea of Cleave as a stat, though I’m unsure how that works (or would work) for a hunter. At any rate, it’s interesting and I’ll be looking forward to more information about them, for sure. I do worry that people will try to assemble whole gear sets with specific tertiary stats and that those will become “the norm”, but if they really do keep them rare, or on specific slots of gear (ie: movement speed on boots while cleave is on gloves, for instance), I think it could work out well.

All right. I’m done talking for now. Talk back! Tell me what you think about itemization stuff!

(And stay tuned, either on Twitter or Facebook: big stuff happening at Kurn’s Guides this week!)