Category: facepalm

I caved.

Kurn / / facepalm, ramblings

I wrote about temptation a couple of weeks ago, in that I had been severely tempted to play World of Warcraft, in a way that didn’t seem to be abating.

Well, I also saw in my Battle.net account, under my WoW account, under the Rewards & Referrals section, that I had a 7-day free trial that I could apply to my account.

While it’s not about the money, I eventually caved and took the offer of a free, short-term return to WoW. I think it’s so tempting because it’s so short. A week? That’s barely enough time to do stuff, if indeed there is stuff to be done. A month is a long time and while one doesn’t have to play for the full month, it sort of felt to me as though I’d be chaining myself to the game for a month if I resubbed. I know, I’m weird. But I’m someone who tends to binge rather than do things in moderation. For me, it’s often safer to abstain entirely than try to indulge myself on occasion. And WoW is definitely proof that when I do something, I go all out.

So late Monday night/early Tuesday morning, I caved and applied the 7-day trial to my account.

What have I done?

– I have spent a crapton of time over at the Island of Free Lewts.
– I have done both halves of Mogu’shan Vaults in LFR.
– I’ve got three each of the sigils I need for the first step of the legendary questline.
– I’m also honored with the Black Prince.
– I’ve done a couple of heroic dungeons.
– I’ve done Bronze and Silver Proving Grounds for DPS.

The Timeless Isle is a ridiculously fast catch-up mechanic. I’ve never seen anything like it. Badges in BC pale in comparison to how quickly you can gear yourself up on the Timeless Isle. Even better, you can mail your alts the drops that aren’t for your armor class. While my paladin is still 85, she has no less than three Timeless Isle plate pieces waiting for her to open if she ever gets to 90. My shaman has two Timeless Isle resto pieces (since Kurn had already picked up pieces in those slots). My druid, who is level 85 and on Proudmoore, still, even has a couple of pieces waiting for him if he ever hits 90.

I don’t remember my precise item level before I started, but I know it was less than 463, because I remember thinking to myself that Challenge Modes or Proving Grounds were kind of out of the question until I had gear that COULD be scaled down. So let’s imagine I was somewhere around 458 or thereabouts.

I’m now at 492.

RIDICULOUS.

As such, I have spent a lot of time reforging. And transmogrifying. And reforging some more. Oh, and enchanting. And gemming. Did I mention reforging?

Even with the help of something like AskMrRobot, reforging is a serious pain in my ass. Adios, muchacho. I won’t miss you.

I’ve never really been able to take advantage of a catch-up mechanic, such as the Timeless Isle, because I’ve just never needed to catch up. I’ve always been subscribed! It’s interesting to come back after a year and see what mechanics are in place for me to enjoy myself.

That said, while I’m pleased to be acquiring gear, I don’t feel accomplished. I feel lucky. I lucked out by getting most of my Timeless Isle stuff. I got lucky by coining my new bow off Will of the Emperor. I don’t feel as though I worked for any of it.

As to LFR, here’s a secret: I didn’t do any research at all on any of the bosses in Mogu’shan Vaults. I just dove in head first and winged it all. Hell, I didn’t even realize Stone Guard was a boss fight! I thought it was a slightly more difficult trash pack.

Overall, I felt moderately badly at my lack of preparation but then I realized two things.

1) LFR is easier than I remember.
2) People are dumb.

Even if there was a mechanic I didn’t really grasp, I still figured out how to move out of it. Flanking orders or whatever? Yeah, not hard. Get off of the platform before it drops? Not very difficult.

And yet, people died to everything imaginable. Tragic, really.

Further, I seem to be ranking. Granted, it’s LFR. Plus, I’m playing as survival and I imagine most hunters are being Beast Mastery (?), so there’s more opportunity for me to rank on fights if there are fewer people who have done the fights as those specs, but good God, there’s no way I should be ranking after never seeing the fights and being so very rusty. (I may or may not have done the second half of Mogu’shan Vaults LFR with a +Strength leatherworking embossment instead of a +Agility…)

I’m hoping to see the rest of the LFRs this weekend before my week comes to an end, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to swing it. It would be nice to see Siege, though.

So I also did a couple of heroic dungeons. Heroic Stormstout Brewery which was pretty much the same as normal, from what I remembered, and the other was Heroic Scarlet Halls. I miss my old Scarlet Monastery, but this was all right, I guess. (I was not pleased to see what they’d done to Scholo, back when that change happened, so at least SM isn’t too different.)

I quite enjoyed the Proving Grounds that I did. I honestly wish that my paladin were 90 so I could go in and heal forever in the Proving Grounds, but she’s not and I’m not going to ding her 90 during this trial. Next up will be Proving Grounds Gold DPS for Kurn.

Honestly, I’m not sure that this trip back to WoW is going to stick. As of right now, I don’t think I’ll resubscribe once the week is up, at least not until closer to the expansion. Maybe I’ll change my mind, maybe I won’t.

All of that said, though, it’s been nice to revisit WoW for a bit. My brain needed it, I think, but once this binge is over, I think I’ll be satisfied for quite a bit of time. :)

I have a few projects in the works while I still have access, by the way — just a matter of finding the time to put them together.

Lastly, I wanted to pimp out Brutall’s YouTube channel. Brutall is the guild master of Static (H) on US-Arthas and has some amazing videos up on his channel. You can also follow him on Twitter @brutallstatic. I highly recommend doing so. His Life of a Guild Leader series and Backseat Raid Leading series are great and he even wrote and sang a couple of songs. (The LFR one was HILARIOUS.) So check out Brutall. I found myself nodding and agreeing with him as I went through ALL his videos (seriously, all of them!) and he seems to be someone who really understands stuff. I spent 358 pages in my GM guide covering a lot of stuff that he covers, but he does it in short videos that are probably easier to digest, unless you’re a fan of my long-windedness.

Hope everyone is having an awesome holiday season! :) I shall doubtlessly have more to say soon…

Retirement Reasons and Reminiscing Part 4

Kurn / / facepalm, general, raiding, ramblings

Over the last week or so, I’ve been discussing my reasons for my retirement from raiding and, thus, my departure from World of Warcraft. I’m not trying to tell anyone else to quit as that remains a very personal decision and it’s not one anyone can make for you. I’m just trying to share my reasons and help myself (and anyone else, I guess) gain a better understanding of why, exactly, after seven years of playing this game, I’m pretty much done.

As always, please do respect the comment policy. :)

Reason 4: Not being excited by the new expansion and new changes.

I wasn’t thrilled when, while watching the live Blizzcon stream, I discovered that the new expansion was Mists of Pandaria. PANDAS? Really? I wasn’t thrilled. Nor was I thrilled with the new talent system. Nor did I particularly like the idea of not really having one “big bad”. I didn’t like that it was “only” another five-level expansion (although I had expected it). So my initial impression was disappointment and that certainly coloured my views going forward.

So let’s talk a little bit about each of those things.

1) The Pandaren (and monks). Wasn’t thrilled. Still am not thrilled. I think the Pandaren seem fairly goofy. I do, however, love that they can be either Horde OR Alliance. That is pretty great. As to monks, I gave monks a lot of thought. I compared them to death knights in my head, remembering the introduction of the DKs in Wrath of the Lich King. DKs were completely overpowered and unbalanced in virtually every single encounter, including Sartharion with three drakes. Hell, DKs were still OP even in heroic Dragon Soul content, if you ask me — both DPS and tanks, but particularly tanks. So I knew that, come this expansion, monks were going to be pretty powerful. I haven’t done a lot of reading about monks in general for Mists, but I had an idea that we’d see similarities between the power of DKs and the power of monks. What I’ve ascertained through reading various blogs is that mistweaver monks, the healers, are very OP. I think the tanks are doing well also. The issue appears to be with the windwalkers, the DPS spec, as apparently there’s a learning curve that many people are not quite grasping and, even if you’re great at it, they’re kind of middle of the pack in terms of damage. All of which is fine except that monk healers are dominating pretty much every other healer out there, which is problematic for a variety of reasons.

Having a new race is fine. New continent, new race, okay, I can deal with that.

Why did we need a new class? Did we really need a sixth healing spec and a fifth tanking spec and what is technically a 23rd DPS spec? Seriously, 11 classes, all with 3 (except druids who got guardian to separate it from feral which makes sense, I think) specs + guardian = 34 specs in the game, spread out over a total of 13 races? Good God. The combinations are getting pretty nuts, too, especially after old classes were able to be new races in Cataclysm (night elf mages, for example, or dwarf warlocks).

I don’t know why this bugs me, which is partly why I’m writing about it. I guess the monks are integral to Pandaria and the Pandaren or something, but with the dilution of 25-man raiding, is there really a huge need for a 5th tank, 6th healer and yet another DPS? I mean, even in 25-man raiding, you can’t support all five tank specs and it would be rare to support all six healing specs.

Maybe the introduction of a new class of healer and tank was in order to help reduce queue times for all random group content? It never hurts to have more tanks or more healers in the population. But if that’s the case, that hasn’t really worked out particularly well. My hunter still faces queue times anywhere from 20-30 minutes for any random heroic dungeon, just like in Cata.

Anyhow. I wasn’t thrilled with the Pandaren and the monks. I still remain unimpressed, although the fluid animation of the Pandaren models make me jealous as all get out.

2) The new talent system. The big complaint everyone had was “oh, it’s dumbed down” because we went from 41 points to spend to a grand total of… six. One every 15 levels. Which is a far cry from Vanilla. But no, it’s not dumbed down so much, because you are now expected to change your spec frequently. As well as your glyphs.

I admit that it was challenging for me to remember to change my glyphs around in Cataclysm. I would occasionally forget to swap glyphs and would inadvertently take more damage than I needed to for glyphing/not glyphing Divine Protection and the like. The glyphs didn’t seem to matter too much for me in 5-man content, but in raiding, I did have to occasionally change out glyphs and even had a second holy spec for pretty much the whole expansion so I could have a “standard” spec for most fights and whatever progression fight I was on would have its own custom spec, basically. (Like Chimaeron and Yor’sahj, for instance.)

But there was always so much going on in my raids, particularly for me as the raid leader, that it was really easy for me to forget to swap glyphs/specs/etc. So the idea of doing that but also with talents is, in a word, daunting. I’m very used to a “set it and forget it” type mentality when it comes to my talents. The game has taught me that over the last seven years. It’s a hard habit to break and while I’m sure I could do so, that’s not particularly engaging gameplay for me. “Oh, hold on, I need to swap that and that and dammit, hold on, let me reload my UI. And crap, does anyone have any Tomes?” The actual process of swapping things out is not engaging to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing something and going “man, this talent/glyph would be GREAT for that fight!” and I enjoy tailoring my abilities to a specific fight. I’ve been doing this on Kurn as I swap between dungeons, dailies, rares and such. But in a raid situation? When you can’t do the swaps in combat? When it’s just one other thing you have to remember to do in addition to your food buff, watching your flask timer, listening for or reading your assignments, trying to remember when to best use various cooldowns on this fight…? Ugh. If I could plan out a “by fight” plan for my toon, like “as soon as I see Morchok, unglyph Divine Protection” and “as soon as I see Yor’sahj or Zon’ozz, reglyph it” and it would DO it for me, that would be great. That would take the busywork out of the equation and just leave the planning in place. Which I really enjoy. But at the same time, pre-programming your spec and glyphs sort of automates stuff in the game and I know the devs don’t like that. Still, there must be a better way than manually opening your talents up and doing all that in the midst of prepping for a pull.

So while I don’t think the talent system is particularly dumb compared to the talent trees of old, I don’t think it’s particularly efficient, nor do I find it engaging at the mechanical level. A small complaint, perhaps, but that’s my two cents.

3) No “big bad”. The last time I raided without a “big bad” was in Vanilla. The big villain in Burning Crusade was Illidan and then, later, Kil’jaeden. In Wrath, it was Arthas — he was everywhere. He taunted you. Youwanted to kick his frozen ass. In Cata, it was Deathwing — this is the jackass who obliterated Auberdine, who fried us as we were out in the world, innocently doing our thing. Vengeance would be ours!

I don’t always need a reason to kill things. I’m not big into the lore. But it helps to engage with “the big bad” as you level up to encourage you to do what you can to get to That Fight, you know? Vanilla raiding, for me, was trying to clear ZG (done!), AQ20 (3/6), kill Onyxia (guild never did it) and Ragnaros (we spawned Domo, never got him or Rag down, as a guild). Why? BECAUSE IT WAS THERE.

It’s likely the same kind of attitude today (I haven’t read anything about the raids), but I feel a big bad sort of ties things together in a way that made things more cohesive and coherent in BC, Wrath and Cata than in Vanilla.

4) Five levels. Again. I hated the five level part of Cataclysm. I really did. Levelling was clumsy, gearing was awkward and the levels were insanely long with very little reward, it felt like. And it feels exactly the same way to me in Mists. I’ve got two 90s now, my hunter and my shaman, and while I used to really enjoy the levelling process in previous expansions, it felt like such a chore to do it this time around. Some of the quests are great. Some of the zones are amazing. But the levels are so long and again, there’s little to no reward for dinging. Grats on 86! You get… nothing. Grats on 87! You get one new skill. Grats on 88! 89! And you get nothing for that. At 90, you get your level 90 talent and the ability to fly and that’s great, but it’s like, what is the point of 86, 88 and 89? Now, more than ever, to me, the levelling process has felt like an artificial barrier before dinging max level.

Now, a 10-level jump would have brought us to 95, so I can understand why it was another 5-level expansion, but the levelling process in, say, BC, meant abilities every couple of levels and talents every other level and it was spread out over 10 levels with only the last one before max level was really particularly bad. Same for Wrath. But I felt it was a chore in Cata and even moreso in Mists. Which makes me sad. It took me 30 days (THIRTY DAYS) of /played time to get Kurn from 1-60. I took my time, I enjoyed things, I explored the world and I eventually got to 60. It was an accomplishment on its own. Now, max level is a pesky pre-requirement for all the “content” they’re putting out, I find.

So those were all things I was concerned about before the game even launched. Since the game has been out, there’s one more thing that has caused me to think that I’m making the right decision in quitting.

5) The devaluation of organized raiding. (While I’m a proponent of 25-man raids, I think what I’ll be discussing also affects 10-man raiders, for once!)

Mists of Pandara has a crapton of PVE things you can do at max level. I mean, a crapton.

– Dailies
– Scenarios (still haven’t done one since Theramore and I’m pretty pleased about that, to be honest)
– Dungeons
– Challenge mode dungeons
– LFR
– Organized raiding

There are more things, of course, but all those things give you Valor Points, which is basically the upper-tier PVE currency. The current VP cap is 1000 VP, with a hard cap of 3000 VP.

The ways in which you can get Valor Points is pretty crazy, with all kinds of “bonus” VP for the first time you do a certain task. Here, Wowhead has you covered.

It says that the first LFR of the week that is completed gives you 90 VP. Assuming that’s, say, the first half of Mogu’shan Vaults (3 bosses), that’s approximately 30 VP per boss.

That is more VP than in 10/25 normal/heroic modes, which only garners you 25 VP per boss.

That is only the first LFR of the week, though, true, but a daily Challenge mode is 60 VP, plus other amounts if it’s your first gold/silver/bronze of the week.

Scenarios net you 60 for the first, 20 for the second every day.

And don’t forget the dailies where you get 5 VP for each daily, up to 48 dailies a day.

Valor Points are needed (along with reputation with various factions) to gain some of the top PVE gear available, particularly in the early stages of the expansion. Previously, you could cap (or come close to it, at least) by doing dungeons or raiding or a combination of the two.

Now, you cannot VP cap by killing 18 bosses at 25 VP apiece. That’s only 450. In order for raiders to get another 550 VP, what should they be doing? Well, that’s where we run into problems with time and effort and the like. Right now, there are “only” three LFRs open, as I understand it: Mogu’shan Vaults 1 and 2 and HoF 1. So, if you full-clear MV and HoF, which is the entirety of the raid content right now, that’s 12 bosses at 25 VP per for 300 VP. Then if you do all three LFRs successfully, you get 90 + 45 + 45 = 180, so that’s a total of 480.

But what if you kill all 18 raid bosses and then all FIVE LFRs?

18 raid bosses = 450 VP
LFR x5 = 90 + 45×4 = 270

Total Valor Points available through only raiding: 720.

Well, gone are the days when you could even come close to capping out VP by solely doing raid content.

In Blizzard’s desire to make things accessible and give people choices, they have (perhaps inadvertently) forced people to do content they don’t want to do in order to get the rewards they want to better equip themselves.

Let’s say you want something pretty from, oh, the Shado-Pan. Let’s say you want a helm, like Six Pool’s Open Helm. It requires Revered with Shado-Pan and 2250 VP.

In order to get Shado-Pan rep, you have to open up their faction and I believe that means first getting to Revered with the Golden Lotus.

So you have to do the Golden Lotus dailies until you’ve gotten all the way through honored (which is, frankly, when I gave up). Then you have to do Shado-Pan dailies until you get to revered with these guys. And then, you have to make sure you have 2250 VP. If you’re capping, that won’t take too long, but in order to cap, you will probably default to doing the dailies which you have to do ANYWAY in order to get the rep. (Plus, DPS players don’t have to wait 30 minutes in queue for dailies, so it’s something you can do more quickly and perhaps more efficiently than waiting in queue for a dungeon, unless you do dailies while you queue. Anyhow.)

And then when you’re exalted with everything and a new bunch of VP gear comes out with the next tier, then what? Are you still going to be unable to cap while solely raiding?

Sure looks like it judging by this tier.

Let’s be clear, Valor Points are the successors to “badges”. Back in Burning Crusade, the developers realized among other things that there existed a huge gap in gear. You often had a bunch of people who were geared from Karazhan (T4 gear) and a bunch of people who were geared from Mount Hyjal, Black Temple and, later, Sunwell (T6 gear) with few people in between. Many guilds and raiders who tried T5 content simply broke up or gave up. This led to a major problem for guilds in T6 content — they couldn’t recruit anyone and expect them to keep up with healing or DPS or even threat/survivability for tanks.

I’m not saying this was the sole reason for the introduction of badge gear, but that’s when badge gear was introduced. You could take your Badges of Justice and go purchase gear with this currency that dropped in ALL the raids. You could farm the crap out of Kara with its 12 bosses or whatever and use that to buy near-T6 equivalent gear. Voila, people pushing T6 content could now recruit people with halfway decent gear without keeping T5 instances on their raid schedule specifically to gear up the recruits.

That’s the start of the Valor Points we use today. It was used to allow raiders — raiders! — an opportunity to gear up for the current content without having gone through the previous tier. That was new, it was ground-breaking and it was probably a really good thing.

But nowadays, everyone can get VP gear and raiders no longer can get capped exclusively through raiding.

For me, this is indicative that there is less value being placed on raiding. The way I’ve always seen raiding has been the pinnacle of PVE content, where you see the most challenging encounters, requiring the most people. It’s changed, obviously, because now you can raid in LFR with 24 people you don’t know OR you can spend 10 hours a day raiding heroic modes trying to get world firsts. Either way, however, by trying to make sure raiding is accessible and trying to give people “more things to do”, they have, perhaps mistakenly, removed some of the incentive to raid in an organized group.

If you want to see the content, do LFR.

If you want to cap VP and get VP gear, do LFR and dailies and dungeons and scenarios, whatever.

If you want to raid, you can pick your kind of group (10 or 25) and difficulty (normals or normals and THEN heroics) and raid.

People used to raid for a lot of reasons — to see the content, because normal raids were the only way to do it (pre-heroic raids, of course) or to get gear (because you didn’t used to get badges from dungeons or anything except raiding) or to work together as a team.

Now, you can see the content elsewhere, you can get gear/VP elsewhere… and all that’s left is the “working together as a team to defeat encounters” aspect. Don’t get me wrong — that’s why I raided. But I was always aware that people raided for other reasons as well.

By giving us so many choices, did Blizzard shoot themselves in the foot? Did they give us too many methods to cap out VP without thinking about how that will affect raiding populations?

I guess my point here is that, due to the variety of issues I’ve already outlined, I don’t trust that Blizzard has thought this stuff through adequately. I don’t trust them. At all. They’ve eroded it over the years and now it’s just gone. While I don’t know that people will stop organized raiding, I think it’s a possibility. I think the amount of stuff to do out there devalues what I always felt was the pinnacle of PVE content, was always the end goal of any PVE-oriented person.

Along with the nerfs, this kind of lack of respect for raiding and raiders really underlines why my decision to quit is the right decision for me.

The next, and likely last, post in this series will discuss the fact that I feel fairly well-accomplished and how I feel as though I’ve met most of my goals that I set out to achieve in this game, leading to an overall lack of incentive to continue playing.

Retirement Reasons and Reminiscing Part 3

Kurn / / facepalm, raiding, ramblings

My subscription runs out on Saturday, November 10th, just a few short days away. So I’ve been writing this series about the reasons why I’m retiring. Part 1 talked about raiding nerfs and how I feel the developers and I don’t see eye to eye on a number of issues to do with raiding content. Part 2 talked about how I don’t feel as though I have many of the same views as the majority of the playerbase, in terms of researching my classes and basically learning how to play. My last post, while not a full-fledged part of this series, demonstrates pretty clearly that not only do the vast majority of players of the game and I have little in common in terms of how we approach our play, but in terms of their social skills and abilities to not be total jackasses, we also tend to differ. As always, I’m not trying to convince anyone to quit. Play or don’t play, that’s your choice. It’s your $15 a month. I’m merely documenting my reasons why. And please do note that there is a comment policy in effect. Thanks. :)

Reason 3: The Bugs, oh God, the Bugs

Okay. I get it. I really do. World of Warcraft is an enormous game. I’m not a programmer of any kind, but I’ve done website coding for a living, so I understand how finicky even basic HTML/CSS code can be. I can only imagine how insanely complex the code within World of Warcraft is. As such, I am generally really, really forgiving of in-game bugs and issues. Not only that, but the devs are usually really good at hotfixing things once they recognize something is wrong.

Having said that, Cataclysm was the buggiest expansion I have ever seen. We’re talking brutally buggy in some cases. Let us examine some of the worst cases I experienced.

Tier 11 – Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, Throne of the Four Winds

The biggest issue we found in this tier of raiding was the “flexible raid lockout” system. We had a brutal night fighting with the raid lockout system last April when myself, Hestiah and Tikari were all saved to a different heroic ID than the other 25 people in the raid, despite no one killing any heroic bosses. Go ahead and read it. It’s a fun blog post. But it meant we were insanely careful about raid lockouts for the rest of the expansion, even going so far as to not swap specific people just so that we wouldn’t have to change who had the title of “raid leader” in the raid group, just in case another screw up like that happened.

In terms of specific fights where we encountered issues…

a) Heroic Magmaw: I have a video of this SOMEWHERE, but you’ll have to take my word for it because I can’t find it anywhere. On one of our progression attempts, Magmaw, instead of slumping FORWARD for a burn phase, instead bent over BACKWARDS. I wish I were kidding.

b) Conclave of Wind (both difficulties): Okay, this is less of a “bug” but is perhaps a technical limitation… We had to have people logging on every single platform in order to ensure we had a complete view of what the hell happened on this fight. Terrible design, that the combat log from one platform didn’t reach to the others.

c) Heroic Valiona & Theralion: Similarly, and we saw these issues through ICC and Ruby Sanctum as well, combat logs don’t work from one realm to another. This is still happening in current raid content with Gara’jal.

Okay, that’s not so bad, despite the raid lockout weirdness.

Tier 12 – Firelands

a) Rhyolith: I can’t point to a specific moment, but there were times when he was not moving the way he should have been. Honestly.

b) Alysrazor: Do not get me started on bugs with flying, bugs with tornadoes and other environmental stuff. People would fall out of the air despite having gotten their rings, people would die to a tornado and not actually be anywhere near one… The words “look at where I did! Just look!” were said in our raid more than once.

c) Heroic Baleroc: Touching people was always, well, touchy. Sometimes to pass on your debuff, you had to stand on top of someone, sometimes you only had to be a few yards away. Latency? Possibly, but unlikely when most people are standing still during these times…

Actually, again, not so bad, although adding this persistent issues to the Tier 11 frustrations.

Tier 13 – Dragon Soul

Here’s where the “fun” starts.

a) Zon’ozz (all difficulties): The Void of the Unmaking is buggy as fuck.

b) Hagara the Stormbinder: Two major issues here, but the first has to do with chaining the lightning. The second is that, and yes, I opened tickets about this and posted bug reports about this, if you cast Hand of Sacrifice on the person about to take the Focused Assault BEFORE the Focused Assault starts, then it fades prematurely, before transferring 100% of your maximum health or lasting the full 12 seconds. This happened to me on two separate holy paladins, in two separate raid groups, on a variety of different tanks.

c) Warmaster Blackhorn (heroic): Deck Fire. Do I REALLY need to say more?

d) Spine of Deathwing (all difficulties): Cut scene disconnects, getting stuck on the boat and having to relog, Grasping Tendrils not actually holding you in place.

e) Madness of Deathwing (all difficulties): Thrall drops people. This From Draenor with Love comic is perfect.

All of these bugs from Dragon Soul are either commonly experienced (Madness, Spine) or are easily visible in some videos I posted in this post about bugs in Dragon Soul or in this first Heroic Blackhorn kill video of ours: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwllU3Kqce8. Look at all that delicious Deck Fire when Goriona is on the ship. Terrible.

There are, doubtlessly, other bugs, including things like previously-mentioned logging issues (figuring out who pre-potted on Ultraxion when you ditched into the twilight realm to do a healer-only heroism? Nightmarish.). As an example, there’s a “bug” (or perhaps it’s working as intended, I have no confirmation) where right now, the Holy Avenger talent doesn’t work right for holy paladins, where it grants 3 holy power when you drop a Flash of Light or Divine Light on a beacon target, but those heals aren’t boosted by the 30%. It’s like, it listens to the tooltip for some of the spells, but not all the spells. And I’ve opened tickets, posted bug reports, even tweeted Ghostcrawler, all to no avail.

Anyhow, the game is immensely complex. I get that. But many of these issues are repeatable. They are problematic. They are broken. The broken Hagara chaining mechanic was ludicrous. Why not fix problems in current raid content when it’s current? Those fights were out from November 29th, 2011 until the launch of Mists of Pandaria on September 25th, 2012. That’s 10 months. Are you seriously telling me they couldn’t fix Deck Fire issues, lightning issues, Thrall DROPPING people in ten months?

The lack of quality control has been problematic for a while. All you really need to do is ask rogues about vanish, right? ;) But it really made its mark on me during Dragon Soul. I’d previously seen things that weren’t that dire or were eventually fixed. They even fixed the old demon, Klinfran the Crazed, in the Burning Steppes, to work with the “new” Scorpid Sting not too long after they revamped Scorpid Sting entirely.

But you don’t really see that kind of attention anymore. Yes, you see hotfixes, bug fixes, tooltip fixes, but not a single one of my Dragon Soul issues were fixed. Why not? It’s just gotten worse, from my perspective. I hear there are some painful phasing issues to do with some dailies these days too. These issues are ongoing, so that’s one more reason I’m not interested in renewing my subscription.

The next part of the series will address my lack of enthusiasm for the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

A Comment that Helps my Arguments

Kurn / / facepalm, ramblings

So someone didn’t read (or read and didn’t care about) my comment policy after reading an old post I linked in yesterday’s Retirement Reasons and Reminiscing Part 2 post. He left a comment on the old post (we’re talking April of 2010 here). The posting of this comment actually helps to add to my point from yesterday’s post about not thinking like most other players. I won’t approve the comment, but I screenshotted it and thought I would take a moment to rebut it.

First of all, despite the fact I blurred out the poster’s email address and IP address, let’s be clear — I know exactly who the poster is. He plays a warrior named Daxia on Turalyon. (In addition to this and, obviously, his email address and IP address, I have the guy’s name and a variety of other bits of information that I am too kind to share here, all gathered in the span of about ten minutes.)

So now that we’ve determined who this guy is, let’s look at his comments.

a) According to this dude, I am a whiny, whiny baby. Well, given that I’m in my 30s, I would have to disagree with this point. Do I whine? Sure, on occasion, as does everyone. Do I bitch? A lot, probably more than most. But “baby”? Nope, don’t think so. Yay hyperbole?

b) Someone who used to raid with me linked him to the blog. Well, based on the roster of his guild on Turalyon, this comes down to one of two people. The first is the current GM of his guild, who stepped down from raiding with Apotheosis in early November of 2011. The second is a friend of that individual, who raided with us also until about early November of 2011. We kicked that second individual’s ass out of Apotheosis in early December of 2011, after finally receiving enough complaints that were severe enough to warrant it, in the officers’ estimation. I would presume that the commenter is just a wee bit biased by the individual who had the “honour” of being the first person to be removed from Apotheosis due to behavioural issues. (The GM of the guild in question actually tweeted me a couple of weeks ago to say: “I didn’t appreciate it before, but your style of raid leadership made me a better player and I thank you. Cheers to you Kurn” so I’m guessing it was the second individual who attempted to get the poster to rile me up.)

c) I had another post berating my old guildies. Well, if you look at the other posts around April of 2010, why yes, yes I did. But I wasn’t in Apotheosis back then. That was in Wrath, when I was burning out so hard that six weeks later, I was posting about how I was completely burnt out and hated 90% of the people in that guild.

d) He claims my old guildies, the ones I was apparently berating, are now pushing heroic content with him in his guild. Hm. Ignoring the fact that the only people in that guild who ever raided with me in Apotheosis are the two I mentioned above… The armory says 6/6 normal Mogu’shan Vaults and 1/6 normal Heart of Fear. Hm. According to the World of Logs reports for the guild (corroborated by the armory), they have one Will of the Emperor kill. The logs don’t have any record of them “pushing heroic content” — literally, they have 0 recorded wipes on any heroic bosses. (Hey, fun fact, Apotheosis is actually 2/6 normal HoF, so technically, they’re ahead of them in progression. Funny, that.)

e) This blog is horrible. Well, you know, that’s a personal opinion. He’s entitled to it, sure. I’ll grant him that. No skin off my nose.

f) This might be my favourite part: “gearscore!=skill”. I’m talking about Halls of Stone, an instance from two expansions ago. And using old gearscore numbers. And this guy thinks the post is remotely relevant to current content? Oh, man. I laughed.

g) “many tanks do this” (use non-tanking gear, I presume) “because the DPS players with them are so shit that without good tank dps the instance will take 2 hours”. Hang on, wait, I’m sorry — did you just prove the point I was making in yesterday’s post about people not putting effort into how they play? Why yes, yes, I think you did.

h) “I also top the meters and clear any Mists heroic in under 20 minutes”. Well, I can’t prove or disprove this, but hey, if you can do that, great for you, although I would wager your healer is generally either raid-geared, a guildmate or cursing your name but not wanting to wait for another tank in the queue. Just my two cents on that. I could be wrong.

i) “Die in a fire.” Lovely! Thanks so much for closing with such utterly… inspirational words?

You may be wondering why give this guy the attention he obviously so desperately craves. The reality of the situation is that he inadvertently proved the point I was making in yesterday’s post and brought up a new point that I wanted to briefly address. Not only do I have very little in common with the vast majority of the playerbase in terms of how they approach their character and their play, but the vitriol displayed in his comment, especially his parting words, just reinforces to me that the vast majority of players out there aren’t people with whom I care to associate. Apotheosis has a strong set of policies about language and such and all you have to do is sit in Trade for 10 minutes on any medium to large server to see just about all of them smashed by various players (not my guildies, obviously).

So I’m tired of the playerbase in general; their continued laziness and incompetence as well as their “social skills”. I mean, really, why is it so common to see racist slurs in Trade? Why is it so common to see homophobic language? I’ve spent seven years reporting people for what I feel is inexcusable language and offensive names and I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of the “make me a sammich” jokes, I’m tired of the fact that so many people use “rape” to indicate total domination over an enemy in a video game, I’m tired of wading through the crap from trolls and jackasses.

I’m just tired of it.

Obviously, there are more people out there than the mouthbreathers such as the commenter I responded to above. This guy is not necessarily representative of everyone, clearly. But finding the people who aren’t like this guy? That’s difficult. It’s tiring. It’s draining. And it’s something I’m done with.

(Also, inflammatory comments will not be approved and will, possibly, be picked apart and mocked by me in this space. Remember the comment policy! :))

Retirement Reasons and Reminiscing Part 2

Kurn / / facepalm, raiding, ramblings

The other day, I wrote part one of this series in which I discussed how raiding has evolved over the years and how the devs’ ideas had similarly evolved. The major issue is that my own ideas don’t match up with what the devs are doing and planning and, as such, throughout Cataclysm’s many, varied nerfs to raid content, I became less and less excited about Mists of Pandaria.

I ended with a segue into how other people’s thinking is different from my own and how that’s another reason that I’m choosing to quit.

Again, play or don’t play, that’s your choice. I’m merely documenting my choices here and you’re free to read it or not. As always, please recall that there is a comment policy. Thanks.

Reason 2: I don’t think the same way as most of the players do.

What, exactly, do I mean by that?

Here. Let me show you.

 I don’t know why I’m still surprised…

OMG

Yet another fail “tank”

My blog is RESPLENDENT with examples of players being dumb, stupid, lazy and overall bad.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I was once terrible. Seven years ago, when I started this game, I didn’t understand the concept of filling out one entire spec of the talent tree to get the 31 point talent first. It had to be explained to me. I didn’t get the idea of ranks of spells for my pet, gained, back then, by taming other pets, learning those skills, then training my older pet with those new skills. I used to dual-wield daggers as my melee weapons, and at least one of them had an on-hit proc.

By the time I was 60, I had learned how not to be a total scrub. That doesn’t mean I didn’t keep learning, but it does mean that I continued to put in all the efforts I could into learning how to play appropriately.

I don’t bring Kurn into content that my hunter is incapable of helping out with. I make sure I’m hit-capped. I make sure I’m buffed appropriately. I even often ask what pet my group would prefer I use.

On my paladin, not that she has done ANYTHING in Mists, it’s about making the most of my character so I’m not a drag on the group. In 5-man content, that means keeping people alive, although not necessarily through their own stupidity.

These are standards I hold myself to.

Part of the reason I have them is because I started out, as I mentioned in my previous post, as someone who wanted to be a raider. I knew that I’d have to play better and learn more and work for my gear in order to get to be a raider.

People no longer have that reason to improve, because anyone can be a “raider”. There’s LFR, there’s 10-man normals, there’s 25-man normals, then there’s 10 and 25-man heroics. That about covers the entire spectrum of raiding, no? LFR people who can’t hit a button on Ultraxion and who (I am told) fall through the floor on Elegon. Normal raid teams who spend a night a week progressing until the nerf catches up to them. Heroic raid teams who power through normals and clear heroic modes before the nerfs or the next tier show up.

And all you really need to be a “raider” is to be at level cap and have a certain item level of gear.

You don’t need any of the dedication or knowledge to be a LFR-type “raider”.

You don’t need a huge time commitment to be a normal-mode raider and, let’s face it, normal-mode raiders can afford to be poorer players than heroic mode players, because the mechanics generally are nowhere near as punishing as on heroic mode.

You do need knowledge and some form of time commitment to do some of the “necessary” things as a heroic raider, but then again, I have been a heroic raider. This is the category in which I would place myself over Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. So my beef isn’t really with my peers, exactly, it’s with the people like those I wrote those earlier blog posts about. People who don’t put in the effort. People who don’t take the time to learn. People who flat-out don’t want to learn.

Apotheosis has been fortunate in that many, many of our applicants have been of a high quality, but we’ve had our fair share of /facepalm apps. It’s those people I don’t want to play with any longer. And with the number of 25-man guilds continuing to decline, it’s getting hard to recruit for 25-man content. It was downright brutal at the end of Firelands last expansion. Sometimes, you have to trial someone just to give them a chance IN CASE they are secretly a great player and their logs or application didn’t show it, just because having a body in the raid, or available to raid, is better than calling a raid. Sometimes you have to try to teach the applicants rather than decline them off the bat because, well, it MIGHT turn out.

Oftentimes, it doesn’t work, which is why we generally only took “iffy” apps who were already on our server, so no one was wasting money if they were declined, as they were likely to be. But the sheer number of questionable applicants is downright overwhelming at times.

I don’t want to raid with people like that and I would be not only naïve but downright stupid if I thought that a raid roster was going to remain exactly the same throughout an entire expansion. Out of the 24 people I had listed in my very first Apotheosis 2.0 roster (created September 23, 2010) a grand total of THREE of those people (Majik, Dayden and myself) were still around at the end of Dragon Soul. And Dayden had taken a long hiatus. Of those 24, ten of them didn’t even complete a trial period.

In short, the one thing you can count on in a raiding guild is turnover. Looking around, there don’t seem to be a lot of quality, like-minded individuals out there: people who do their research, read strats, watch videos, understand how to play their classes at a high level. We’ve seen applicants fail to respond to our feedback in raids over and over again. “Dot all the things,” I remember telling a shadow priest app, in the hopes of helping them get their DPS up. Open up World of Logs, look at the uptimes, all the dot uptimes are below 60%.

“Always be casting,” you tell a random DPS, and you look at the logs and over and over again, the active time is reflective of their damage, which is below the tanks.

I can’t deal with it anymore. The changing approach to raiding and raids and all this “accessibility” by the developers has led, in my mind, to lazy players. Lazy players who are just, quite honestly, bad players. If that’s the kind of player that Blizzard is creating these days (and while there are certainly exceptions, it seems, more and more, as though these are the players that Wrath and Cata have spawned), I don’t want to have anything to do with them, nor do I want to be hunting high and low for quality replacements for those in my own guild. Searching for replacements is common for any guild, but I suspect it’s just going to get even more difficult given the overall quality of players out there.

So I choose to remove myself from Blizzard’s environment. I don’t agree with their raid philosophies any longer and I certainly don’t have much, if anything, in common with the average WoW player.

The next part of this series will focus on the quality control (or lack thereof) with regards to World of Warcraft.

(As always, please remember there is a comment policy in place. Thanks!)

(Edited to add: Here’s a sort of follow-up post, based on a comment I received but did not approve.)

Retirement Reasons and Reminiscing Part 1

Kurn / / apotheosis, facepalm, raiding, ramblings, T11, T12, T13

It’s official. In eleven days, my World of Warcraft account subscription will expire and, for the first time in years, I will not be renewing it. This, I imagine, is not news to anyone who’s read this blog more than a couple of times in the last several months, or listened to Blessing of Frost since, oh, Firelands was nerfed.

I haven’t actually clicked the “cancel” button yet, but the last time I renewed my sub, I used a game time card so that even if I forgot to cancel, they couldn’t bill me again. Once I do hit that button, I plan to use these forthcoming posts to help describe my reasons for leaving the game. (There’s no way 500 characters or something like that would ever even put a dent into my reasons and feelings about the game.)

Anyhow, I’m not out to convince anyone to quit or that the game sucks or anything of the sort. Play or don’t play, that’s your choice and your choice alone. I feel compelled to document my decision and my reasons to better understand it all myself. I also want to blog about it because I’ve become more interested in the decision to game/raid/etc than the actual content of the game and so exploring my own reasons seems like a good place to start.

Reason 1: The Evolution of Raids/Accessibility of Raiding Content

Since I discovered what “raiding” was, back in Vanilla, I have wanted to raid. I wanted to be like that guy from my server, Thack (no, not Theck, Thack) who was in 9/9 Dreadnaught Armor (warrior T3) and who was a Scarab Lord. He would stand around Lagforge Ironforge on his bug mount, in his gear and would basically just look awesome.

I was fascinated by the idea of a team, a real team, of 40 people working together in concert to do stuff. So when I discovered what raiding was, courtesy of my brother who was killing Ragnaros with another guild, I went into research mode. I found out everything I needed to know about attunements and questlines and then I shared that info with my guildies. The old Fated Heroes guild had a significant problem in that people would join the guild, we’d work hard to help them get to 60 and then they’d hop over to a raiding guild on the server. So I approached the GM and asked him if he WANTED to raid. All the officers did, they just didn’t know how to retain the players. That’s where I came in. I helped to educate the players and helped to put into action these plans about raiding. I did attunement runs out the wazoo. I helped recruit people. It was a great team effort just to start raiding ZG, then AQ20 (to an extent) before finally hitting up MC and trying to down Onyxia.

Then, the guild kind of fell apart and we kind of went our own ways for the start of Burning Crusade, only we all regrouped in May and then formed Apotheosis on June 1st, 2007.

Here, I thought, was my chance to raid with some people whose company I really enjoyed and we’d do it better than we ever did back in Fated Heroes. We formed with the goal to kill Illidan. And, eventually, we did.

While we fell apart in Wrath of the Lich King, we reformed for “Apotheosis 2.0” for Cataclysm and we put the old Apotheosis to shame by doing 7/13 HM in T11, 6/7 HM and Glory of the Firelands raider in T12 and following it up with 8/8 HM in T13 Soul along with Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider. These were unprecedented levels of raiding success for our guild. So many people had grown with the guild and had come back to play with us and it was really amazing to see this mix of old and new together, working as a team and succeeding.

Having said all of that, I play the game to raid. I LOVED learning Lucifron in Molten Core. It was such an epic fight to me back then. I remember this one moment where I realized I was about to die, because I had Impending Doom on me. I had used my healthstone. My health potion was on cooldown. My bandages were on cooldown. In fact, here… Since I knew I was going to die, I took a screenshot of it. This was taken on July 22nd, 2006.

So I did die after that Impending Doom. And yet, that ended up being the winning attempt. Lucifron down! And I got the Tome of Tranquilizing Shot. Then we played with Gehennas a bit (Magmadar with just 1 Tranq Shot? HAH.) and called it a night.

I loved the teamwork we showed in this instance. I loved setting up my hunter rotations for Tranq Shot — there was me, Toga, Kaiu, Sharpbow and a few others over the course of the next few months. We never missed a single rotation. We nailed it. Because we worked together as a team.

Now, you may be wondering, Kurn, don’t you still have to work as a team to defeat raid encounters?

Yes. But only to an extent. Why only to an extent? Well, dear reader, if you wait long enough, Blizzard will nerf the encounters.

In their ongoing goal to make raid content “accessible”, their design choices have changed drastically from what they did in Vanilla to what they do now.

TO ENTER MOLTEN CORE IN VANILLA:

– Attunement quest at Level 55, requiring you to defeat most of the bosses in Blackrock Depths in order to get your core fragment. This often required you actually knowing how to play your class well enough to be part of a successful core attunement run. (Or for you to be carried by friends/guildies/etc. Or summoned by a warlock.)

TO ENTER DRAGON SOUL IN CATACLYSM:

– Ding 85.

It’s not exactly even. And don’t get me started on Onyxia attunement. (Dammit, Maj, I still cannot believe YOU DIED on Jailbreak, dude. ;))

Now, and this is where I think a lot of people misunderstand me, I want to make it clear that I don’t much like jumping through arbitrary hoops, despite my admiration of attunements. I think a lot of things they’ve changed about raiding through the years have been quality of life changes.

In Burning Crusade, they introduced the “1 flask or 1 Guardian elixir and 1 Battle elixir” rule. They also changed food buffs so you could only have one on you at a time.

Lots of people cried “NERF OMG” but I was one of many others who were like “oh thank God, I don’t need to have a flask, plus another 5 elixirs on me.” I mean, look up at that screenshot again — I don’t even have an Elixir of the Mongoose on. (Bad Kurn.)

The change made sense. It allowed the devs to assume everyone would have one flask OR two elixirs and one food buff and they would build the encounters with that in mind and it allowed people who wanted to raid to not, you know, farm for the 20 hours a day they didn’t raid. ;) I was a fan of this. (Less of a fan of them nerfing holy paladins and Illumination, but ANYWAY.)

Later in BC, Blizz lifted the attunement requirements to Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, The Battle for Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. While we didn’t do the attunements for SSC and TK in Apotheosis back then, we did do the Hyjal and BT attunements just by virtue of progressing through T5 and we also wanted the shadow resist necks for the Mother fight in BT, so we got just about everyone that attunement.

While I wasn’t, shall we say, thrilled by the change, my guild benefitted from it. So I can’t really complain too much. And we did the “important” attunements anyhow, getting most everyone Hand of A’dal and their BT necks.

One month before Wrath of the Lich King was to be released, Patch 3.0 dropped. With new talents and abilities and such came a 30% nerf to all raid bosses. Unchangeable, couldn’t turn it on or off. If you were raiding, you were dealing with a 30% nerf to everything. More, it was initially undocumented.

This was the first really big nerf that Blizzard implemented.

Again, my guild benefitted from it. We were 4/5 Hyjal and 5/9 BT at that point. We knew we would get Archimonde down without the nerf, but didn’t have the opportunity to prove it. Then again, without the nerf, we probably wouldn’t have gotten through the rest of BT and wouldn’t have achieved our goal of killing Illidan.

I never thought this would become a trend.

The next time we saw huge buffs/nerfs like that was in Icecrown Citadel, with a stacking “buff” to make players more powerful in increments of 5% all the way up to 30%. I first killed Heroic 25-man Sindragosa at the 15% buff and later, repeated 11/12 HM progression on 25-man mode (with another guild) at the 25-30% buff level. It was still difficult, because fights like Heroic Putricide and Heroic Sindragosa were more about coordination than raw power.

I was okay with the buff, for the most part. It got pretty silly by the 30% point, but I told myself it was just because the instance was going to be the last major one (please, who counts Ruby Sanctum? Screw you and your boots, Halion!) of the expansion and it was going to last a while. And it did last a while. It lasted a year. A YEAR.

Then Tier 11 showed up in Cataclysm and, well, chunks of it were really difficult. Apotheosis went 7/13 HM before Firelands came out and we were like “SEEYA” to Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight and Throne of the Four Winds.

They nerfed T11 normal modes when Firelands came out. They did not touch the heroic modes.

I felt that nerfing T11 normals was a bad plan. My guild’s alt run carried me through T11 normals on my hunter post-nerf and it was ridiculous. In a single night, Kurn got Defender of a Shattered World, a title that had taken Madrana several weeks (three months?) to earn.

Still, they hadn’t nerfed the heroics and we weren’t touching T11 content anyhow, so I thought, well, that’s fine. I guess.

And then came the Firelands nerf. This is where I became acutely aware that Blizzard’s ideas on raiding were now significantly different from mine.

What had previously been end-of-expansion nerfs or buffs, what had previously been “last tier of content” stuff, was now hitting my CURRENT normal and heroic raid content.

That’s when it stopped being okay for me.

“We want raids to be more accessible,” Blizzard told us.

Fine, okay, I get it. And then we got LFR. And I thought “hey, there might be a bright side here. ANYONE can see raids through LFR. Now they’ll leave our normals and heroics alone!”

But I was wrong. They continued to nerf the crap out of both normal and heroic Dragon Soul, ultimately reaching a 35% blanket nerf on all encounters.

This was basically my breaking point.

I had started raiding back when it was a pretty punishing hobby. I enjoy many of the quality of life changes we’ve seen since then (don’t get me started on how they’ve now removed cauldrons and made feasts inferior to 300 stat food) and have enjoyed how raiding has absolutely gotten more accessible. However, when I started, people worked and worked to get bosses down. There was nothing on the horizon that was coming soon to help you get over that hump. All you had to work with was your raid team and all you could do was keep bashing your head against the boss, until you suddenly had a breakthrough and got the boss down.

These are the epic moments I remember best. People didn’t rely on just waiting until they became more powerful or the boss became weaker due to some developer tweaks, they worked hard to improve themselves — farming gear, using consumables appropriately, researching their class. Gruul did not just fall over for us one day, he finally died because we realized we needed this thing called “hit rating”. Lady Vashj was over 100 pulls of over 35 different raiders and a variety of strats before we got her down.

That’s the challenge I like, knowing that I am stuck on this boss until I down it, knowing that the boss will behave in exactly the same fashion time and time again until such time as I work out what it is we’re doing wrong.

When Blizzard buffs the players or nerfs the encounters, that changes and it infuriates me. I feel like they’re saying “oh, you aren’t progressing fast enough, so here, let us help” and then they drag that finish line closer to us by about 10 meters. That ruins the kill for me.

Let’s look at when Apotheosis first killed Heroic Ultraxion, shall we?

It was Tuesday, February 28th. We had had a crushing 0% wipe on Heroic Ultraxion on Sunday, the 26th. We had spent pretty much all night on Ultraxion by that point, but because we wanted to clear the rest of the instance that night, we had decided that our last pull on Ultraxion would be around 11pm, leaving us an hour to finish up the rest of the instance on normal. The date is important. Why? Because on Tuesday, February 28th, the 10% nerf to Dragon Soul went into effect. This made a huge impact on our decision for Sunday’s raid. “Well,” we said to ourselves, “if we don’t get it tonight, at least we’ll get it on Tuesday with the nerf.”

That’s my problem. Even though I have serious issues with Blizzard nerfing the instances, I had to take it into account. What was more important to us? To kill Heroic Ultraxion and maybe miss out on Madness loot (which was still a bit new to us) or to ensure a full clear and know, with total certainty, that we would kill Ultraxion on the next reset?

Logistically, it made more sense for our raiders to get new trinkets and weapons from Spine and Madness, so that’s what we did. Had we not had the nerf incoming, I think I would have continued to work on Ultraxion until he died, because that kind of “he will die next reset” certainty wouldn’t have been there.

The very presence of the nerfs altered the way I ran my raid. That isn’t a concession I’m happy to make. I do miss the old days where if you were stuck on a boss, you were stuck on the boss and all you could do was farm previous bosses and improve your own performance to get through it. Now, you just wait for the nerf. Even my raid group did it, although I’m not pleased about it, because it made sense for us at the time.

Of course, not everyone misses those old days of being stuck on a boss for weeks, months at a time. That’s a great segue to my next point. My next post will discuss the disconnect between other people’s thinking and my own as a reason for my deciding to quit.

(As always, please remember there is a comment policy in place. Thanks!)

A Dramatic Day Without Red Haterade

Kurn / / apotheosis, facepalm, guild, mists of pandaria, ramblings

On Tuesday, August 21st, I participated in my third-to-last Apotheosis raid. I went to bed satisfied with the raid, happy with my guild and certain that the guild is well on the way to a wonderful future in Mists of Pandaria, even without me there. It’s gratifying to be at this stage of the expansion, with most of the “i”s dotted and most of the “t”s crossed. Plans are in place, officers are promoted and, soon, I’ll be a fond memory (or a tedious one, if people remember my speechifying and my lengthy forum posts).

I woke up on Wednesday to find the most dramatic thing to do with my guild in the last two years had been discovered while I had been asleep. I woke up to private messages from outraged guildies, to the officer forums exploding, to the general forum exploding, to tweets and DMs…

“Holy shit, who died?” was my first thought.

As it turns out, no one died and the drama was not related to any current raiding member of the guild. There was no issue with loot, no problems with our plans for the expansion, not a peep about our officers, new or old. So what caused this reaction?

For that, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to have to tell you a story. This story is somewhat lengthy and I am not feeling as kind as Jasyla was feeling when she wrote her post, so I’m going to name names.

Once upon a time, we had a kick-ass raider with us by the name of Huntertoga. Yes, he played a hunter. ;) Toga was an officer and a great guy and a great player. Unfortunately, Toga decided to step down. He was tired of the game, burnt out and gave us a ton of notice. So we went recruiting.

We got an application from someone by the name of Innersight, whose name changed to Innerbite, but everyone called him “Inner” and most (all?) of his alts’ names started with “Inner”. Inner was a good app, if a little undergeared, but his performance was pretty great. He had a couple of problems fitting in to the guild on a social level during his trial, so I wrote to him and asked him to tone it down and he did. He was promoted to Raider on February 23rd, 2012, after participating in the guild-first kills of Heroic Yor’sahj and Heroic Zon’ozz.

Inner was a very good player. He took on some of the crappy jobs that others either couldn’t or wouldn’t do, such as focusing the mana void on H Yor’sahj or making sure to break badly-timed grips on Heroic Spine. He made mistakes, just like anyone does, but for the most part, Inner was a solid player that you could count on.

Possibly the first indication that there was a problem with Inner (after his trial period) was when Diablo III came out. He was clearly tabbed out of WoW, playing Diablo III, during raids. I didn’t care if you tabbed out to play if you were on the bench, but not while you were in the raid group. I wrote to him about it, post-raid, and he blamed his inattention on his daughter (despite the fact that we could HEAR D3 fighting noises through Mumble!) and the like. Anyhow.

The next possible indication of “trouble” was that Inner was not remotely compromising about the fact he wanted to play a monk healer in the expansion. It looked as though Apotheosis might have too many healers on the roster at the start of Mists, so I wrote to the DPS who were looking to swap to healers with a private message that included this:

“If there aren’t enough healer slots to accomodate your swapping from DPS to healing, what would you play at that point?”

His response was firm:

“Because I am as set as I am to go back to healing I guess I would go on a bench/waiting list or find another place to raid…=/”

Due to my own plans to leave the raiding scene and the fact we’ll be losing another healer, we dropped this line of discussion because it would be fine if Inner were a healer in terms of group composition.

The next time I had some kind of concern about Inner came shortly after I announced my decision to step down from GM and RL, when we put out a call to the guild to see who might be interested in being an officer. Inner was one of the people who expressed interest. He expressed interest in being the raid leader and if that didn’t work, maybe the new healing lead (assuming Jasyla wouldn’t be retaining that position) and potentially lootmaster, though bank admin would be out for him, due to a lack of organization he felt he could bring to the position.

We thanked him for his interest (as we had with everyone who approached us) and we retired to the officer forums to discuss who we thought would make the strongest leadership team. That leadership team did not include Inner as an officer.

I again had concerns about Inner shortly after we announced the new officers, when Inner let me know that he needed to step down from raiding due to his new job which required a 2+ hour commute. He then changed his mind and said that he could be available for the first half of the raid (from 9pm-10:30pm or so) until he planned to move in early September, then should have full availability again. The officers discussed it and we accepted that, so long as he kept us up to date on the move and such. So Inner continued raiding with us, leaving around 10:30 or 11pm, since we were down to 1-night clears.

The next moment that included concerns about Inner came on Tuesday, July 31st, when Inner received the Heroic Vial of Shadows and was now 100% “best-in-slot”. I’m always a little uneasy whenever anyone gets their “best-in-slot” pieces completed because a lot of people’s motivation comes from loot. Still, nothing really happened at this point, but Inner was definitely excited about no longer needing anything from Heroic Dragon Soul.

The next time I had concerns, though, came a week later. Inner was now suddenly interested in running a GDKP run on Eldre’Thalas. He wanted permission to use the guild name/etc and basically have the support of the guild. We said sure and he sent me a really, really long document he’d written with rules/etc, but it read more like a pitch to our guild to participate, rather than rules of conduct for a GDKP run. I was concerned because I thought that Inner would start up this idea and then bail when he had no more interest in it, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths about our guild. Still, I was going to edit this document and give him advice/etc about how to organize it, but had a lot of time due to the fact that it would only be happening way after Mists of Pandaria had launched.

Finally, on Tuesday, August 14th, Inner had signed up for that night’s raid, but was a no-show. What we call a no-show is someone who signs up as “Accepted” on the guild calendar event for the raid, but then doesn’t show up at all, without letting us know via forums, PMs, twitter, email, text, etc. I kind of figured he was done (BiS and all, you know?) but I wrote to him anyhow:

“Hi Inner,

You missed the raid tonight, Tuesday, August 14th. Serrath had let me know that you had told him in Mumble that you would be available tonight, yet you never logged on, from what I saw.

You were last on the forums today at 5:10pm ET, which would have been plenty of time to let us know you were unable to make it. There were no PMs sent, nor any emails or anything of the sort that I am currently aware of (as of 12:15am ET on Wednesday).

While emergencies do happen, and I hope nothing of that nature has happened, it really needs to be underlined that we need to hear from you as soon as you know you can’t make it. While we certainly had enough people to sit virtually anyone we wanted, not showing up is not acceptable, as people are relying on you, a raider-ranked member of the team, to adhere to your commitments towards the team.

I’ve CCed Serrath (incoming raid leader) and Slout (incoming ranged lead) on this note. Please use the reply to all link to respond to all of us when you do so in order to let us all know what your circumstances were with regards to missing tonight’s raid.

Again, I hope everything is okay, but I also hope you recognize that you’re an important part of the team and we need to know ASAP if you’re going to be unable to make it.

Thanks,

Kurn”

This was his response on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 15th.

“Hey all,

My life has gone almost beyond control at this point.

Reason for missing raid without notification:
Last night on the way home I got rear ended (and might I add how amazingly this indiviual fit a driving stereotype…lol) and I made impact with 2 other vehicles… no one seriously injured but my car is totaled. I ended up with bumbs and scrapes….and needing new pants.

Unfortunately I am going to be stepping down as a raider from Apotheosis. If you need me to leave with my toons, I understand as well. Just a few reason below:
We just found out child #2 is now on his/her way into this world.
My job is starting to cost me nearly 80 hours a week and I simply cannot sustain.

I still am very interested in Mists… but will likely not be on any normal scheduled raiding team (hopefully this will change over time). I am going to try to contact some old work buddies and RL friends and see if they are still running one night a week raids back on blackhorn. If this is the case I may be leaving ET in pursuit of a 1 weekend night a week raid schedule.

I will await a response before posting anything publicly to the guild. I just want to make sure you don’t mind me posting. I would like to say my goodbyes and thanks.”

Serrath, our incoming raid leader for Mists, replied:

“Oh my gosh – first off – I’m glad that you’re ok! Secondly, congratulations on the incoming baby!!!

I understand that you will need to step down from your current raider position. Regarding Mists, I apologize, but we will not be able to accommodate an unreliable raid schedule. Once details are hammered out and you’re in a more comfortable situation we would love to have you back in the community.

If you’d like to say goodbyes in your own thread, you are welcome to do this. At some point in the coming days we will bump down your rank in the guild to Member where you’re welcome to stay. Please let me know if there’s any questions you have or if you need anything.

Thanks,

Serrath”

Literally half an hour later, Inner posted this on our guild forums:

“Hey all,

Unfortunately I am going to be stepping down from Raider in Apotheosis. My RL responsibilities are tipping the free time scales. Working nearly 80 hours a week now and we just found out baby #2 is on the way!!! =)

I do want to say that I have learned an amazing amount during my time in Apotheosis and I hope for nothing but the best for you all in the future. I have no doubts you will continue to be as successul as ever.

As for Mists… I will have to wait and see how things go in RL go. In the begining of Mists I will most likely be trying to find a 1 weekend night run as I cannot reliably commit any more than that (an old RL friend led an alt run on saturday nights…going to try there). I may or may not stay on server due to this…=/

All in all… a true thank you for everything you all have helped me achieve and bringing me into the Apotheosis team. I will still exist and am always willing to help with anything I can.

Thanks again… and I will most definitely miss all the fun and success that is Apotheosis raiding.”

Several people chimed in on his thread, wishing him the best of luck and congratulating him on his forthcoming second child. No one was upset, no one was angry. We genuinely wished him well.

Exceedingly short and simplistic form of above: Inner was never the most reliable of raiders, though he was a great player. Still, a lot of us had felt strongly that he would flake out at some point. We certainly had a lot of reason to think he wouldn’t continue raiding us for the long haul, based on the variety of moments that I’ve touched on above.

So the history segment of this is now over.

Here’s what happened today…

I woke up to several private messages and a few forum posts, as  well as many tweets, all indicating something had happened with Inner.

Just hours after his post on Wednesday afternoon, he transferred off the server and Wowprogress notes his departure as of August 17th. That was fine, he had said he might go back to a 1-night weekend schedule. So what?

Turns out it was much more than that.

Inner is now the guild master of a guild named Mercury on Greymane (although, for reasons that will become clear very shortly, better names might have been “Acopyosis”, “Bpotheosis” and “Uranus” — thanks to Rades, Ash and Jasyla for those suggestions).

Inner being the GM of Mercury is not a problem. You don’t want to be part of Apotheosis, that’s fine. He stepped down. He took off. That’s okay. Good luck to you in whatever you do, no skin off my nose.

What presents a problem is the fact that Inner ripped off just about all of Apotheosis’ policies, as well as our application, our raid requirements for Mists and, as if that weren’t bad enough, our recruitment post. You doubt this? Check out this screenshot that still has the Apotheosis guild name in it (first sentence, last paragraph).

As Jasyla said in her post, just about all of our policies, including our application form, were taken just about word-for-word. I’d encourage you to go read Jasyla’s post now if you haven’t already.

Even though this guy has ripped off my words, Jasyla’s words and Serrath’s words, this is not actually what I’m most upset about. I’m not even all that upset by this gem of plagiarism…

I’m angry about the plagiarism, don’t get me wrong, but I think what’s really gotten me wound up is the entire package.

1) Inner tells us he has to step down; work is 80 hours a week, his wife is pregnant, cannot sustain 3 nights a week.

2) Inner leaves, returns to his former guild, becomes GM, aims to start raiding as a 25-man guild in Mists of Pandaria.

3) New version of Mercury has the exact same application and almost the same policies as Apotheosis, most of them taken word-for-word.

4) New version of Mercury has the exact same raid nights and times as Apotheosis — Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday from 9pm ET until 12am ET, with invites at 8:45pm.

5) New version of Mercury even has the exact same recruitment post and is, obviously, searching for every class.

6) As such, our recruitment officer (hi Sara!) can’t very well post right after Inner has in a prospective applicant’s thread — it’s the same post! Much re-writing needs to occur before posting in someone’s thread.

We were all pretty outraged by at least one of these happenings. (People reacted differently to the separate issues.)

On the one hand, the plagiarism is a compliment: We (primarily me, Jasyla, Serrath and Sara) wrote good posts and good policies, good enough for someone to steal. On the other hand, what the fuck, dude? He’s going to continue to raid 3 nights a week in a guild he’s going to run, based on how our guild is run. Why not just stay in Apotheosis? Psycho.

Hence, the suggested names of “Acopyosis” and “Bpotheosis”. (And “Uranus” comes from Jasyla’s post because she’s nice, but picked a planet that basically indicates Inner is an ass. I laughed.)

He had the nerve to come slithering back to our forums and was met with, well,  not the best reception:

Meanwhile, I was asleep. I woke up, found out all this was happening, posted a courtesy post in the officer forum saying “so, yeah, I’m gonna kick his remaining toons and lock him out of the forums, okay?” (to which the responses were a resounding DO IT DO IT DO IT) and did just that. Threw his remaining toons out and banned him from the forums.

Sadly, I had an appointment this afternoon, so I wasn’t able to really get my hate and anger on before I left… and by the time I started composing this monster of a post, things had settled down a bit. Why? Mercury’s website is now gone. The whole domain has been deleted.

I’m almost disappointed.

That said, the recruitment posts are still littered throughout the official recruitment forums. 63 of them. Sara’s going to see if she can’t get a GM to go delete them all before she continues our recruitment efforts, but I’m not optimistic.

They have, however, edited their “main” recruitment post to remove all the plagiarized stuff. Some people posted amusing things in the thread.

Overall, I think the biggest thing here is the “why”? Why would someone say that their schedule no longer permits them to raid, then go head up a raiding guild that plans to raid on that exact same schedule? Why would someone use the exact same application form and policies (except, of course, the important parts about the use of various words that we don’t appreciate in our guild community)? Is it just extraordinary laziness? Stupidity? Insanity?

Of course, finding out “why” would mean talking to Inner. That’s not something I’m prepared to do. He’s dead to me, as many people who have left my guild on bad terms have been, over many years. We’ve blacklisted him in our forums, meaning that even if Apotheosis is still around in ten years and new officers have taken over who have no idea who Inner is, he will never again be a part of Apotheosis.

I think the best thing that came out of this, though, was that it’s a bonding experience for the guild. “Remember that jackass who left and then became GM of his own guild and COPIED EVERYTHING WE HAD?” That’ll be remembered for years, by the Friends, the Initiates, the Members, the Raiders and Officers alike. So much outrage, so much /facepalming and so much disgust.

It’s nice to see that kind of loyalty from the guild. It shows me that the last two years have meant something to others, too, that our community is important to others in our guild.

To the members of Apotheosis: you rock. <3

And to those who have left us… you don’t know what you’re missing. :)

(If you’re interested in joining Apotheosis, as we are recruiting for Mists of Pandaria, head over to our guild website: http://www.apotheosis-now.com/main)

(PS: We could use a great holy paladin app!)

Bugs in Dragon Soul

Kurn / / dragon soul, facepalm, raiding, ramblings

Something that has contributed in my decision to stop playing World of Warcraft after Mists of Pandaria comes out is the buggy nature of the fights in current content. It seems to me (and I could be wrong) that Dragon Soul was released with a ridiculous amount of bugs, many of which mean that if such a bug occurs, it will be nearly impossible for most raid groups to complete the encounter. The bugs do not, of course, have a 100% chance to occur, but if they do…

Warlord Zon’ozz

The Void of the Unmaking’s bouncing mechanic is totally screwy, at least on heroic mode. Ignoring the fact that it often caroms off unpredictably (which, I will grant, may be part of the challenge), sometimes it just never moves at all after a bounce.

Seriously. What is up with that?

Hagara the Stormbinder

Not only is Focused Assault screwy as hell (it will eat a Hand of Sacrifice in the span of 2 seconds if you place it on the tank before Focused Assault starts casting, despite Hand of Sacrifice not absorbing the amount of damage it should) but the lightning mechanic is effed up. Seriously. It chains to pets and totems and is generally spazzy. While you may not notice it normally, that shit is buggy when you try to do the achievement. We tried to do the achievement on 25-man normal (no pets or totems!) and failed something like four or five times. This was the defining reason why: the lightning was selectively jumping to people.

In this clip, you see lightning going through and not going from the bear (Jaymz) to the shadow priest (Srsbusiness). It’s as though the lightning is sentient and is thinking “Pfft, I don’t FEEL like connecting with that individual.” On the PREVIOUS attempt, we’d had them in opposite spots and Jay had to run up to Srs to “pick up” the lightning, but not even that worked here. You also see the lightning stay on a death knight (Division/Chronis) even after he backs out of the 10y range where it was skipping to him directly. We ended up doing the achievement on 10-man, which is ridiculous when you’re a 25-man raiding guild.

Warmaster Blackhorn

On Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn, you have a new mechanic. It’s called Deck Fire. Deck Fire is everywhere. Except, that’s not exactly how the encounter is supposed to go. The fire is not supposed to continue to spawn into Phase 2 and it’s not supposed to cover the entire deck of the ship. While we were learning this fight, we didn’t know that. We thought it was just RNG that determined fire mechanics and crap like that. But no.

If you launch the ship from the top of Wyrmrest, then swap it to normal, then wait five minutes, then swap it back to heroic (there is a 5m timer on difficulty changes), you no longer have insane amounts of fire. Fire acts the way it is supposed to. It despawns when it gets water poured on it. It doesn’t spawn into phase 2. It actually makes the transition to phase 2 really, really easy if you don’t have to deal with crazy fire.

The important part of the “fix” is to make sure you launch the boat FIRST. Do not reset the difficulty before launching the boat. You’ll end up with fire all over the damn deck again. You do only need to do this once per night of attempts (and not before every attempt) at least. And at least there’s a way to fix this fire! But it’s ridiculous that one has to do this “reset” in the first place in order to make sure the encounter goes as it should.

Spine of Deathwing

There are three issues with the Spine encounter that I’ve seen. The first two have to do with the cut scene at the start.

1) Sometimes while the cut scene is loading, people will disconnect. This is similar to the cut scene in Throne of the Tides where people will sometimes randomly disconnect. Usually, the Spine one is limited to the first attempt (so basically, the game will crash while the cut scene is loading). I believe that your toon will parachute down on to Spine as normal and you will be there when you log back in.

2) Also related to the cut scene, if you hit Escape to skip the cut scene too quickly (before it actually has begun to load), guess what? You’re stuck on the boat, unable to move. How do you solve this? You relog. Once you relog, you will land on Spine and will be able to continue the fight as normal.

3) The other major issue I’ve seen on Spine is people not being secured to the spine via Grasping Tendrils and flying off Deathwing’s back. DBM will usually tell you if someone’s missing their Grasping Tendrils buff, but I’ve seen many people get flung off the back while their name is not in that list. This could be a problem with DBM and other mods or it could be a problem with fitting 25 people + various pets in one teeny, tiny spot on Deathwing’s back. I’ve never been unexpectedly thrown off (except that time when we killed a Corruption and a new one popped up in the hole in which we were standing) so I’m unsure, but the number of people I’ve seen thrown off who don’t NORMALLY get thrown off indicates to me that there’s a potential problem with the mechanic.

If you could battle rez people who were thrown off, this wouldn’t be as huge of an issue, but to my knowledge, you can’t.

Madness of Deathwing

Do I even really need to say it?

Thrall, stop dropping people. This has happened to damn near everyone I know, in LFR, on normal and, yes, on heroic. (And no, they can’t get battle-rezzed, either.)

The From Draenor with Love comic kind of says it all: http://fromdraenor.com/?p=233

Surprisingly, I can’t think of any major issues I’ve encountered on Morchok, Yor’sahj or Ultraxion, but five of the eight encounters in Dragon Soul have some awfully buggy mechanics. Lose someone because Thrall dropped them? Yeah, too bad, you’re going to 24-man (or 9-man) Madness. ENJOY! Did the lightning skitter awkwardly through your raid group and kill someone because of an errant pet? There goes a battle rez. Hey, did that Void of the Unmaking carom strangely or, better, not at all? BOOM.

While bugs do happen to even the best coders, the fact that these bugs have not yet been addressed in the seven months since Dragon Soul has been out is, frankly, a shame, and it has absolutely contributed to my fatigue and frustration with the game.

How have these bugs affected you? Have you even seen them? Have you seen any others?

A Prime Example of Blizzard's Failure

Kurn / / facepalm, ramblings

I promise, I am not going to bash Blizzard much more than I did before I decided to quit the game after this expansion and I promise that I will not try to convince anyone that the game is terrible or that Blizzard is the greatest evil we’ve ever seen. I am still passionate about WoW topics and this is one of them.

An opportunity arose tonight for me to discuss a prime example of how Blizzard has failed its userbase.

My guild, Apotheosis, perhaps like many, is recruiting and part of that recruitment effort is having a “posting” available for people on our realm in the Guild Finder tool. We never accept applicants from this alone — if there’s a potentially good candidate, I funnel them to the guild website and they apply for real over there. I always, always take the time to respond to these people before declining them, though, even if it’s just a short “Thanks for your interest, but we’re full on your class at the moment. Thanks again for thinking of us and best of luck to you!”. (Note to self: add that to the list of stuff either a recruitment officer/person or GM should do.)

Tonight, I checked the Guild Finder tool and saw a mage candidate. I promptly went to his armory.

At first, I laughed. Then I facepalmed. And then I asked Twitter if they had any decent mage resources, like BEGINNER mage resources, to help this poor guy.

I imported him into chardev. Here’s the link:

http://chardev.org/profile/403339-fail-mage.html

Let’s look at this character real quick, shall we?

Missing enchants on: helm (though is revered with Hyjal), shoulders (hated by Therazane, is not a scribe), chest, gloves, belt (that is, no belt buckle), boots, weapon, offhand

Missing gems on: helm, shoulders, chest, belt, boots

Questionable gems: 2, 1 Quick Amberjewel (40 haste) and 1 Rigid Deepholm Iolite (50 hit)

Gear worn that is not meant for a mage: helm (spirit), shoulders (spirit), bracers (spirit), boots (spirit), ring #2 (agility), trinket #2 (melee attack proc), offhand (spirit)

Other weird stats: 13.32% hit

Surprisingly, the spec isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen and the glyphs are decent (at least he has all his glyphs and the primes are what he should have for an arcane mage).

This individual reached 85 on April 22nd, so this is a very new character. Whether or not it’s a new player is uncertain.

I feel that this player (and countless more like him — or her) has been done a grave disservice by Blizzard. In fact, many of us, myself included, probably have experienced the same thing. Blizzard has done little, if anything, to educate its playerbase.

When’s the last time you looked at the class pages on the official WoW site? Here’s the mage one.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/class/mage

No mention of stats that are useful. No mention of that thing called “hit rating”. No hints as to which abilities which spec should use.

They do, to their credit, link to Wowhead and Wowpedia, but even the Wowhead article isn’t all that useful and the Wowpedia one is bogged down with lore and such before it gets to what will make someone play their class much more closely to how it was intended to be played.

I think it was Cory Stockton, the lead content designer, who said at BlizzCon that a fury warrior who chooses not to take Raging Blow, I think it was, wasn’t being a “unique” fury warrior; they were being a “bad” fury warrior, which is one reason they decided to give out so many passives to the classes in Mists and leave talents as those sort of “depends on the fight or your playstyle” tools. Removing the ability to make a “bad” choice is, in my opinion, a mistake. I think that players who actually care about their characters might want to play with those choices and LEARN from their mistakes. I know I did, back when I was a wee hunter, and throughout various tiers as my holy paladin. I’ve experimented with and without Tower of Radiance and Light of Dawn, I’ve played with and without Improved Judgements and Protector of the Innocent, I’ve used Sacred Cleansing and I’ve not specced for it and such.

I think the graver mistake is not having information available to new players. The learning curve in World of Warcraft is huge. Think about it, you have to:

– pick a class
– choose a spec
– learn what abilities do what and which you probably don’t need to use often
– figure out what stats are most beneficial to your class and spec
– learn to cooperate with others, whether in PVE or PVP

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the language in WoW, by which I mean the ability to translate something like:

“LF1M Tank, DM Trib, g2g, PST!” into “Our group that is attempting to do a run in the northern Dire Maul instance, in which we do not kill the special guards, is looking for a someone who is able to hold the creatures’ attention from us as we deal damage to them. Once we have found such an individual, we can start the run immediately. Please let me know if you’re interested by sending me a tell/whisper.”

Or, perhaps you’d prefer a more recent example:

“Need 1 heals, 2 DPS, 1 tank for DS, want to go 2/8 heroic & clear, ilvl 385+ PST” which means “Our group is looking for one healer, two damage-dealers and one tank for the Dragon Soul raid instance. We would like for the group to do two of the eight bosses on the heroic mode, plus finish the rest of the raid instance. Your item level should be at least 385. Please let me know if you’re interested by sending me a tell/whisper.”

(Language in WoW is a whole OTHER post.)

So you have this gargantuan learning curve and you have zero real support from within the game. Instead of spending resources to teach people the basics of their classes (stat priorities, things like hit rating, maybe rotations), they’re spending resources attempting to make things seem less difficult for the average player.

This may be all well and good. Maybe the average player doesn’t care. Maybe the average player will only ever do LFGs and LFRs and get kicked frequently for their performance because they don’t really get what they’re doing. And maybe Blizzard doesn’t care because this guy who expressed interest in joining my guild earlier tonight still pays $15, the same as I do, and that guy who doesn’t know how to gear his mage is almost certainly giving Blizzard less of a headache than I am. ;)

One of the major issues I’ve had with the game, which has become rapidly apparent to me throughout this expansion, is that people who know how to play their characters are not abundant. We are a dying breed. Sure, there are raiding guilds and you still have people like the vodkas, Methods, Blood Legions who know how to play their characters better than anyone else in the world, but the middle class, so to speak, of the playerbase is shrinking. We’re the people who aren’t getting world firsts, but understand (and care!) enough about our classes to write blog posts and confer with guildies. We’re the ones who’ll talk and debate for hours about the use of a particular talent spec or point, or whether reforging to this stat is better in this particular encounter and the like. Or maybe we’re the ones who are interested in picking up a new class and ask Twitter or our guildies for help and advice.

Meanwhile, the playerbase grows (or shrinks) and the people who don’t know much better or don’t CARE to know much better just keep multiplying. I’ve talked about having DK “tanks” who wear intellect plate and I’ve talked about people not wearing their maximum armor level before and this poor mage is just one more of those unfortunate individuals who sign up for group content, inflicting themselves on others, who don’t know what they’re doing. They’re everywhere. Go inspect a random character on your server. Go log in right now and look at some random, max-level (likely unguilded) person and you’ll see. Hell, inspect people on your next LFG or LFR.

They have made all aspects of the game a lot more accessible than they previously did, they’ve grown their userbase an insane amount since when I first started playing and they’ve done some great things with the game. Just the changes in PVE content alone, where you have boss fights that are so different from the tank and spank encounters or the single-debuff encounters like Lucifron in Molten Core, are astonishing. Imagine back in the day, could you have seen yourself fighting a boss like Alysrazor? What about Atramedes or Al’Akir? How about Rag 2.0 or Spine of Deathwing? I may not always like the encounters, but we have come a long, LONG way from the old days where you just had to dispell people appropriately and bring down adds before killing a boss.

However, while they’ve done this, refined the game and the classes, added new classes and races, changed PVE and PVP and built up their userbase, they have not done a good job in going about TEACHING people how to play. I’ve done some of the new starting zone quests and they don’t do a lot to teach you how to play. It’s great that they notify you that new abilities are available when you ding, but I feel strongly that if Blizzard was going to go in the direction of opening up their game to more than just the theorycrafting nerds (and I use that as a term of endearment) or the people who actually ENJOY farming up stuff, then they needed to throw something at those new players.

Blizzard seems to think that free gear is the answer or nerfs to current raid content are the answer. It’s certainly easier, but what I don’t get — and may never “get”, to be honest — is why they don’t care to help players improve to the point where nerfs aren’t as “needed” as Blizzard thinks they are. In the “Cataclysm Post Mortem“, with Scott “Daelo” Mercer, he said:

Q. What didn’t work out as planned or expected?

Initially, we started off the Heroic dungeons at too high of a difficulty. The difficulty level rather abruptly changed when compared to the Heroics players experienced at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. This major change caught many players off guard, and frustrated some of them. The difficulty also increased the effective amount of time required to complete a dungeon to a longer experience than we wanted.

To which I say, are you frigging kidding me? Yes, if you’re undergeared or don’t know what you’re doing, they were hard. It took some time to learn some of the fights. Heroic Deadmines, Heroic Stonecore, Heroic Shadowfang Keep all took some doing, but Heroic Vortex Pinnacle was easy. I still don’t understand how people fail at regular Corla in Blackrock Caverns, but they do, so I assume people still fail at it on Heroic as well. But all of that is solved with gear, which is laughably easy to get these days. The point is, these dungeons weren’t all that difficult for a group of players who knew how to play. They WERE impossible if your group was not geared enough or knowledgeable enough. (And maybe they have a point about being on the long side, but at the end of Wrath, Maj, my brother and I could tank/heal/DPS our way through Heroic Gundrak, extra boss included, with 2 completely moronic or AFK DPS, in 13 minutes. I think that’s a little ridiculous.)

I still don’t understand the apparent unwillingness of Blizzard to give even basic info to players to improve the overall skill and knowledge of the players.

I don’t play League of Legends, but looking at their website, they have a Learning Center. Look at this, there’s a whole page about Champion Statistics as in what stats do what.

Even Star Wars: The Old Republic (a game a played in the open beta long enough to get a lightsaber before I lost interest) has a new player guide and look here, halfway down the second page, it tells you all about tanks, healers and DPS.

Our poor mage friend, whose sad, sad armory started this two-thousand word post, might not be such a tragic, ignorant soul, if only Blizzard had bothered to tell him that he doesn’t need spirit. Yet, they don’t tell him that. They don’t even tell him he needs hit rating (although the hit chance/miss chance table is certainly a step in the right direction). This is, I believe, one of Blizzard’s great failures over the years and this poor mage is but one example of the millions of people who don’t know (and perhaps, admittedly, don’t care to know) how to play their class.

A Sigh of Resignation

Kurn / / apotheosis, dragon soul, facepalm, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings, T11, T12, T13

When the expansion was announced at BlizzCon, I wasn’t thrilled. My reaction was something along the lines of: Mists of Pandaria? We’re going to have PANDAS running around? SERIOUSLY?

I decided I could probably deal with that, despite not being thrilled with pandas, to the point where I now no longer say “sad panda”, but rather “sad moose”. However, that, combined with the changing talent trees and abilities and such left me doubtful that I would really enjoy very much at all in Mists of Pandaria.

Still, I said, I would wait to see if things were as bad as I thought they would be, by checking out the Beta. I signed up for the annual pass so I’d get guaranteed Mists of Pandaria Beta access and a free digital copy of Diablo III. People who have noted my overall unhappiness with the announced details of the expansion have asked me if I plan to continue playing.

To them, I have said “right now, the plan is to keep playing and keep raiding, unless something significant changes or Beta is terrible.”

So I have basically told people that my viewpoint was that everything would continue barring huge changes/proof that said changes are terrible in Beta.

And then, on Wednesday evening, Blizzard announced incoming nerfs to Dragon Soul, both normal and heroic.

I sighed. And then I resigned myself to the fact that, unless the Mists of Pandaria Beta absolutely blows my mind in terms of PVE play (especially raiding), this is my last expansion of World of Warcraft where I will be anything more than a casual player.

Let me be very clear — I am dedicated to my guild and our raid group. I will continue to raid, continue to lead the guild, up to when Mists of Pandaria is released. But after that? I’m really not so sure what’s going to happen. Until release, I’ll stick around and continue to be a source of holy paladin knowledge, will still do a podcast with Majik, will still lead Apotheosis and will still raid with Choice on my off-nights. Beyond that, well, I’m not thinking I want to be a part of the upcoming expansion, which is a shift from just twelve hours ago. Earlier today, my thinking was optimistic: “Hey, unless things in Beta really suck, I’ll probably keep playing.” Now, it’s more pessimistic: “Hey, unless things in Beta are really AWESOME, I’m probably going to quit.”

The reason is the ongoing nerfing of current content.

For those of you who are brave, the complete rant is below, but that’s the short answer.

Continue reading “A Sigh of Resignation”