Special Assignments

DPS is, well, it's not a BORING way to play WoW. We have our recount meter e-peen wars, and our gear spreadsheets won its inventors the Fields Medal, but it's all very static. All us DPS have our rotation (a word that is getting increasingly outdated with more priority systems arising) that we cling to preciously, and most fight mechanics are simply attempts to disrupt that rotation. Switch targets, run around, get out of fire, that kind of thing. But every now and again, we noble DPS, who toil in obscurity, seldom recognized for leading us to either great victory or defeat, get a Special Assignment. Let's look at Special Assignments, and how they enrich the DPS'ers life.

If you do only 5-mans, you don't really get to taste the sweet nectar of being put on SA duty. 5-mans need to be relatively simple, with obvious mechanics or mild punishments to assure a PuG can expect to do well without prior training in the intricacies of the fight. Oculus is the only dungeon to do anything close to this with the drakes, but that's a vehicle fight; everyone's doing something different (and horrible, in Oc's case).

My favorite Special Assignment to this day is staying in the back for Four Horsemen. For those who didn't do Naxx, there are four horsemen in four corners, and if any one of them has no target within 40-ish yards, they start wiping the raid, so two dudes must stay near the two weak-ass spellcasters while the other two are tanked like normal. I got to stand in the back because I am crazy awesome rad, and have skills to pay ALL the bills. Also, I can heal myself.

When the raid leader picks you for a Special Assignment, he is saying "You. You are more than your numbers, impossibly huge though yours may be. You are clever and adaptable, so you can be TRUSTED with this". DPS are never trusted; they are the shady mercenaries in the cheap bar to any raid leader, whose loyalty is bought with the promise of loot, which leads to higher numbers. Being trusted is one of the two greatest honor a DPS can receive (the other is Vigilance).

I hunger for these encounters, where instead of "this fight is a tank-and-spank except for this, that, those, and these" it comes out "us 6/7/8 guys just do our job like normal, but YOU chosen ones need a special briefing. Report to spec-ops". Saurfang is case in point; men chosen not for their crazyrad deeps, but their kiting skill. It brings in mechanics we as DPS never otherwise touch, changing our experience up drastically. So here's to Blood Beasts, to Brain Rooms, to Arial Command Units. I hope ICC has more of the unexpected in store for us.

Halls of Reflection is Stupid

Finally got a chance to run through all three of the new dungeons, see all the plot and stuff, and first let me say the premise, and the first two dungeons are totally fine and pretty cool. I especially like the suppression room in Pit of Saron, how the ice crashing gives a sense of urgency and all that. But the Halls of Reflection is bed-wettingly stupid.

Firstly, we're brought in to it with a mountain of dialogue from the ghost of Uther, about how the last refuges of humanity in Arthas are holding back the LK from facerolling all of Azeroth. What? In his whole character progression, for three goddamned games nonetheless, Arthas never once acted even hesitant to throw away his humanity, and now you're telling us he isn't completely corrupt? What about Tyrion's quest where he blatantly states with his magical paladin powers that there is no "Arthas" left in the Lich King? My theory: some nine-year-old kid from the Make-A-Wish foundation won the prize, and his wish was to write HoR dialogue for Blizzard.

Secondly, doing the dungeon is like pulling especially boring teeth. When doing the first part, the waves of adds, you have to LoS them in a corner, making my camera cry. What, so half of the most epic and climactic battle in 5-man WotLK takes place in a walk-in closet? The bosses are fine, if same-y in theme and appearance. I would complain about how HoR has no interesting mechanics, and is really just a gear check, but when it comes to something that will be pug'd a lot, I guess simple is better.

Now, the final fight, the other suppression room (notice how the whole dungeon is just 2 suppression rooms stapled together with bad storytelling?) is you running away from the big bad spooky LK. Surprisingly, I am OK with that in theory, but theories are strange creatures that often fall apart like wet cardboard when implemented. His very slow gait is ponderous; is that Sylvanas/Jaina slowing him down with majickz, or is he just that lazy? The real problem is the ice walls; they're so clearly scripted to break right as the pull ends, it breaks a sense of causality. Which went on extended vacation the second Sylvanas started shooting arrows at an ice wall to break it, but I digress. They should break at a certain time, or maybe if you finish a pull early you can help break them down. That would make for a much more real sense of immediacy.

My final complaint: you don't kill the Lich King at the end. Really, he should have died right there. What if, instead of Arthas getting shot at by the airship and running back to his couch, you got IN the airship, and battled him with cannons in a glorious vehicle combat extravaganza, blowing Arthas to kingdom come. But who is the final boss of ICC, you ask? Ner'zhul, duh. Arthas might die from acute cannon-in-chest syndrome, but the real spirit of the Lich King must be re-bound to the Frozen Throne or some such. Hell yes, son!.

Blizzard seems to be allergic to the unexpected; Ulduar aside, this has been an extremely by-the-numbers expansion in terms of theme and plot. Nothing really surprising has happened, unless you count Arthas being surprisingly pussy. I pray to all-powerful Atheismo that there's SOME twist deep in ICC to save WotLK from amounting to more than an amateur's first Dungeons and Dragons plot.

The New LFG Order

I just got a chance tonight to try the new 3.3 LFG system. Of course, it was plagued with sluggishness getting into instances with the servers taxed as they were. With that in mind, here's my early impressions. Disclaimer: I didn't do any of the new dungeons, by random chance, so expect something on that later in the week.

- The new UI is delicious eye candy, and looks very slick. It also follows the BG queue interface closely, which helps the game feel more like an integrated whole.

- The tank can raid mark even if he's not the leader. Fucking. Finally.

- Voting to kick players has been a smooth and elegant system in online FPSs since 2000-ish, it shocks me it didn't make it into WoW sooner. The new procedural group making probably helps make that less personal approach socially acceptable.

- Speaking of which, getting into a group is smooth, stress-free, and fast if you're not just DPS. I'd expect some people to pick up healing or tanking to get into groups faster in the near future.

- Deserting a dungeon imposes severe penalties on those who flake on instances, and make it easy to find replacements mid way through a run. It would be lame to come into a dungeon that's already half done, but better than dooming those in the dungeon to SOL status. No rational, self-interested person will drop from anything but the most atrocious groups.

- The rewards are delicious, and make chain heroics feasible, rewarding, and fast. Perfect for the end of an x-pac, where gearing up needs to be fast for someone to get into ICC by this point.

- Oculus nerf was brilliant and needed, but riding dragons still fundamentally sucks and is boring. Now we just need a way to start CoS faster and not make VH wipes so putative and we'd be in instance bliss!

I was incredibly skeptical of this new system, but it's intuitive and very smart. Top-notch job, I never realized how frustrating pugging a group was, even before the first pull, until now. Long live the new order!

Hooray for Limited Attempts

Next in a series on things that I actually LIKE about WoW, is the way they're introducing Icecrown. Not the story or themes, I haven't looked much at those, I mean the implementation. There's two things that stand out: limited attempts on certain bosses, and a gradual phase-in of the kind done in ToC.

These are good things, people, even if it's not obvious. And it isn't, cause I know what you're thinking, cause I thought it at first too. "WTF, my guild is so uber leet that we can faceroll Arthas day 1 yo. Well, no, that's a lie, but we should at least get the chance!" And indeed, for that illustrious top 5% of guilds, they probably could blow through ICC in the first week, and get crackin' on hard modes. But think of the rest of the guilds, the ones who will wipe and have the terrible birthing pangs of learning a new raid. If Arthas were there from week 1, taunting guilds ever so temptingly with his sexy exposed loot tables, guilds would push headlong into ICC, grinding fights out, maybe extending raid locks. And once Arthas was down, they'd have to grind for several more lockouts.

Face it, most people require some serious practice before many boss mechanics become natural to them. ICC would consume our raid schedules, we'd spend every raid minute pushing through it without stopping to learn the earlier fights more or gear up more as the earlier stuff becomes more farmable. Now that raid lockouts can be extended, this brutal dystopian future was very close to reality, but Blizz wisely intervened. Now ICC will be small, it will not dominate our lives, and as we learn and master earlier fights, the later ones open up for more progression. Limited boss attempts saves us the frustration of wiping 10 times on a single boss, but feeling as though we must continue for progression's sake.

I always thought of limited boss attempts as a way to reward elite raids who don't die with extra Amani War Bears, and phase-in raids a way to slow down these same guilds. I never thought of using them to socially engineer a less stressful and demanding raid culture in the majority of guilds. Kudos.

p.s. it was super gay in ToC because there were only 5 goddamned bosses to phase in, and they were all super easy. It's only a good idea now.

Casual vs Hardcore Guilds

There are no terms used to describe guilds more vague than 'casual' and 'hardcore'. Really, these are not two opposing categories, and guilds are not simply one or the other. It's a continuum, based on how aggressively a guild aims to progress. To the extent a guild's policies reflect a desire to down bosses quickly, get gear faster, and complete hard modes and their achievements, they're that much hardcore.

But there's more to it than that. It's not even a single standard; a guild might be very casual in one aspect, while be hardcore in another (I'm beginning to hate these terms, but I told myself I'd work with them, so soldier on). Think about all the different things a guild regulates: guild ranks, bank privileges, recruitment, raid comp, loot system, raid schedule, and on and on.

Let's imagine two guilds called, say, Hocturne and Honviction. Hocturne uses suicide kings for a loot system, raids 3 times a week, 3 hours at a time, and recruits mainly friends of members. Honviction recruits by application, raids 3 times a week 4 hours at a time, and use DKP. Is Honviction more hardcore? Maybe, but what if Hocturne frequently attempted hard modes, and raid comp was based on performance. While Honviction only does normal modes and raid comps based on gearing up people? That muddles the issue a great deal, doesn't it?

The point is, casual versus hardcore as labels only work when a guild is very, VERY casual or hardcore. Most guilds are not one or the other, and find some mix between the two that works for the memebers' skill and ambition. One might even say that the concessions necessary for raiding makes ANY raiding guild non-casual to an extent. At any rate, we need to be careful not to use these terms like there's some clear line between the two, or that there is something inherently wrong about 'hardcore' guild policies. It's just a question of what works for whom.

Of course, you can also talk about casual or hardcore players, but I'll leave that for another day.

Arthas is Stupid

Patch 3.3 will probably be around next week, so before we all march on Arthas' domain and nerd-rage over limited boss attempts, it behooves us all to look back on the lead up to ICC. In which, we learn that Arthas is stupid.

I admit, I was very excited when WotLK was announced; Deathwing and Sargaras aside, I could not imagine a more climactic or deadly final boss than the Lich King. I was further excited by announcements that Arthas won't hide behind the couch like Illidan. Well, to be fair, Illidan hid behind his massive fortress and army of demons, but whatever. So Arthas will be involved in leveling and dungeons, he'll get in my grill; OK, I can dig it.

Well, turns out, Arthas DOES hide behind his couch, aside for the occasional celebrity guest appearance, usually right before or after I faceroll some minion of his that was completely ineffectual. Oh, that works a few times; Sorrowgrave in UP was done right. I dug killing the Vry'kul much more; knowing that they were Arthas' minions was good enough to forge a connection. Tyrion punching him right in the childhood was priceless, if a little curious. Just saying, if Arthas doesn't open with that kill-everyone move in any dungeon he's in, he'll just look dumb.

The problem is not what Arthas does, but what he fails to do: succeed. Rarely is Arthas ever proactive; most of the time he's just hanging around as you unearth and systematically dismantle his allies and support network. Drakuru is a rare example of the LK actually doing something aggressive or expansionist, and it was cool until the end where he shows up to laser Failkuru and high-five you "4 teh lulz". What kind of ineffectual Saturday-morning trainwreck lets the architect of his failure in Zul'Drak live, cause it was hella funny? That's embarassing characterization, and there's no excuse.

Arthas needs to be threatening. In 3.3, they need to (but won't) have the LK gain ground in Icecrown, instead of just hiding behind his couch waiting patiently for raiders to rock his face. Perhaps he re-takes the Shadow Vault, and the Ebon Blade has to fall back. That'd shake up the status-quo (a rare, and consequently powerful move in an MMO), and make Arthas seem half-way competent. And Blizz needs to learn we don't need to see Arthas to feel his presence; he is a villain defined by his minions. Less is sometimes more, but in this case, Blizz will have to take some strong steps to re-establish Arthas as a threat now, when in the ENTIRE EXPANSION he's done nothing but fail. The first time I repelled the Lich King's machenations single-handedly, it was cool and exciting. The tenth time it was routine.

There's a disconnect here, between what Blizz tells us Arthas is, and what they show us he is. They say he's a terrifying badass with a nigh-unstoppable army. They show us an incompetent who never wins a battle and is constantly losing ground. For the climactic battle to work, we need to see the Arthas we've heard about, rather than the one we know.

A Bounty of Thanks

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and so too goes Pilgrim's Bounty. Firstly, the cooking stuff was awesome. Just straight awesome; I got Taraz (my DK) from zero cooking to 352 in about an hour and a half. Sweet Jesus yes; I want it to stay all year round. That more than anything made the 5-year anniversary special for me.

When I go to the Alliance cities as Horde, I feel a great sense of awe and wonder I don't get in my own cities, except maybe a small tinge at Silvermoon, quickly squashed by the knowledge that inside untold carnal acts are constantly taking place between deviant Tauren sexchiefs and their wispy Elven consorts. Where was I? Oh yes, awe. Viewing Ironforge from the outside, a mighty city-fortress jutting out of the cold rock and snow evokes strong themes, themes of Dwarven resilience and pride. Then I run in just long enough to put my dirty troll feet over everything and I'm out.

Long story short, I love achievements where I go to alliance cities for harassment, because the long motorcycle cross country tour serves as a buildup to amazing architecture and rare sights of (shock!) well designed cities, Darnassus aside. The rest of the year, I slum around in that pile of twigs and poo called Org. I was glad to see one more of these roadtrips, even if the guards' aggro made hopping in chairs frustrating at times.

Onto the bad now; oh god Turkinator. When will Blizzard learn to stop adding achievements that are easy in proportion to how god awful late you are willing to stay up? I actually had some fun with this one, but that's because I can afford to stay up til 3 or 4 the night before Thanksgiving to get it done. To the rest of sane, working people playing wow it's kinda a dickslap.

Finding the 8 rogues is irritating as hell, because /who won't find anyone of the opposite faction. Camping Dalaran for hours looking for a Dwarf rogue, just to give up and cajole someone into making a quick alt and driving 30 minutes to high-five them and hearth is not time well-spent, and really burns my taint. These achievements are clunky and inherently flawed, to a degree. As an added serving of suck, if you miss even once with the Turkey Gun, perhaps accidentally hitting an already-turkey'd rogue, it increases the number of dailies needed for the holiday from 10 to 11, adding an extra day onto things. Harsh.

Overall, I'm happy to see a new holiday without any heavy grinding or camping (Noble's Garden) or heart-rending RNG aspects (Love is in the Air). It can be completed in 2 days, which is appropriate given that many people's Thursdays, and possibly Wednesdays and Fridays are lost to celebration, at least in the States. And while there was no LOL TANKARD epics, a 2-hour cooking raiser is welfare enough for even the neediest noob. What I really want to know is what the hell are the Pilgrims in WoW lore; what's the tie-in? The closest thing are the Orcs, who sailed to a new world to escape persecution, but then what the hell is the Alliance celebrating? I don't think they quite thought that angle out. But who cares? 1- 350 Cooking, and that's all you need to know!

Quick Thoughts

Arg, so your girlfriend being bed-ridden for weeks because of a broken leg isn't great for post numbers. I can't think well right now, so here's some quick stuff

---
So Blizz recently said the 10/25 reward disparities were a result of fine-tuning and learning in Wrath. I quote, "Most of our lessons learned are in the realm of what differences there should be between 10- and 25-player itemization...". Oh Blizzard, how expert you are at dashing my hopes and dreams of a world without this tomfoolery.
---
Heroic Violet Hold is horrible for pugs; I tanked it today on my DK alt and wiped twice, on the 16th and 17th portal. Solution: instead of running the WHOLE DUNGEON again, you should just pick up from the last boss you did, do the 5 trash pulls, then the new boss. You get a whole lot less AIDS if you get a bad pug group. I hope they don't repeat this style of dungeon for Cataclysm (unlikely).
---
WoW is a weird game, because it's essentially three games in one: there's the game where you level, the end-game PVE game and the end-game PVP game. Which is all well and good, except the first game is boring and repetitive and LOOOOONG and a requirement to "unlock" the other two. One might say that the length is so people are comfortable with their classes abilities once they're into the end-game stuff, and that's true to an extent, but takes anywhere from 7-10 days of playtime to level your first character to 80; that's over 200 hours. That is a problem.
---
I recently got my DK to 80, and got 2 Tankards O' Terror for DPS. Those things are murderous mugs; no other BoE comes close and it's so awesome to pull 3k two days after my last ding. Something similar should be offered for other specs, methinks; getting a good weapon is so critical, it isn't something that should be left to the vagaries of H-ToC.
---
Why can a warrior only be reckless every 3 minutes? And how come hitting a guy makes you angry, but hitting him heroically makes you less angry? Warriors are so strange.

Impeccable class balance

I was going to write a post about how I hate Arthas as a character so goddamned much and how Blizzard has subverted all the excitement I once had regarding killing the Lich King. Which is still the case, but I realized I've never said anything nice about WoW; a game I ostensibly like given how much I play and talk about it. So let's take a hate-break and talk about something really great about WoW: near-perfect PVEclass balance.

To look at major WoW forums (mmo-champ, wow official forums, etc) you'd suspect every single class was terrible at everything it does, except for DKs who are broken monsters. And that was, while hyperbole, reflective more or less of the early wrath days, when DK tanks were just better flat out than other tanks, their DPS soared like the mighty eagle (or briefly, like the feral druid). Even then, other classes weren't BAD, just overshadowed, but that's close enough to bad to be interchangeable when talking about balance and composition. But how are things these days?

In PVE, it's amazingly good. In ye olde days of WoW, if you rolled the wrong class, then you ran a serious risk of not getting to see content, regardless of skill. More than that, if you wanted to fill a specific role, your class options were severely restricted (ret DPS? shammy heals? NO). Nowadays, no matter what class you rolled, you can get a raid slot. What's more, you can fill any role your class can do on any encounter without having the raid suffer. What's even MORE, even the pure DPS classes have at least 2 spec each that are viable, providing a wider class appeal and a more diverse play environment.

The really great thing here is Blizzard's somewhat newfound commitment to making every class and spec fit well into PVE. While this dream might never be fully attained (Subtlety, looking at you), the simple fact that they're trying constantly to keep every class distinct while balanced, and what's more, succeeding at it, is enough to put WoW heads and tails over any other MMO on the market. There are no bad choices to make when rolling a class; that is what I mean by perfect class balance.

10-man Shanty Town

10-man raiding is being ghettofied more and more, and it's causing problems for both raiders and Blizzard. Let's break it down.

Firstly, Icewell Radiance was created because of an excessive growth of gear: they had to make 4 levels of gear per-tier: 10, 25, heroic 10, and heroic 25. That's 16 levels of gear all together. Meaning, there was a gross inflation of stats as WotLK went on, and so at the end, Blizz had few options. Either A: every ICC boss hits like two trucks tapped together with liquid hate, B: lower avoidance in ICC, or C: ICC bosses aren't threatening to tanks. I can see why they picked B at this stage in the game, and there's no lost love over THAT, but they painted themselves into this corner.

Now, look at 10-man raiding. When the new 10/25 system was announced, I thought the gear to be found in each would be equivalent, if not identical, and thus the choice came down to preference (or do both for 2x loot drops). Now it's clear Blizz is worried people will stop 25 man raiding if that was the case, so they shower the big kid raid format with a thousand perks, including tokens to get gear only available to 10-man groups if they do hard modes. Let there be no doubt, 10-hard is MUCH harder than 25-normal, and yet the rewards are the same? No wonder so many serious players opt for 25-man guilds.

It didn't need to be this way: allow me to illustrate the raiding utopia WotLK could have been. Firstly, all bosses in normal modes, whether 10 or 25, should have the SAME loot tables. Secondly, 10-hard bosses should have better items than the normals, and 25-hard should have better items than the 10-hard. Reason being, hard modes, at least the cutting edge ones, require almost the whole raid to be golden-club inner-circle quality, and it's definitely harder to get 25 bad dudes than 10.

Instead of the 10/25 dichotomy in progression, there would be a normal/hard dichotomy. Hard-mode guilds fight harder dungeons for greater rewards than their normal counterparts, who still have the thrill of new loot and content be accessible. There might be a drop in the number of 25-man guilds, but that's not a failure; that would be a triumph of the 10/25 system! 25 man guilds would still be the standard for the xhardcorex crowd because of the extra rewarding hard modes and 2x chances at loot every week, and the rest of us would have more latitude in our preferred raiding format.

Bottom line, Blizzard is rewarding 25 guilds more for clearing equally challenging (perhaps less challenging) content, and that is hurting everyone. Hopefully in Cataclysm the clouds will part, the sun will shine down, and gear will be given in accordance with true raid tier difficulty.

Black Box

A black box is any thing that is defined solely by its input/output relations. Input A go in, Output 1 come out. The processes involved might be unknown, unknowable, or just irrelevant. In WoW, players are black boxes.

I know some people who run with no macros or add-ons at all; this strikes me as utter crazy talk, but they consider that playing without them is a more challenging or pure experience. That may be me putting words in mouths, but whatever it is, they find something noble in not using any of these things. They intentionally make the game more difficult, thinking perhaps that they are better players than the cheap players that use these aids.

Let me be clear: you are not a better player simply because you don't use any add-ons or macros. Players are black boxes; we are defined by what outputs we give for given inputs. Inputs being what we see, and outputs being what our characters do. If macros improve performance, you are a WORSE player for choosing to lower your performance. I was a worse DPS before Quartz let me account for lag. There was nothing noble or good about guessing when to cast the next spell. The same goes for macros; if DKs benefit from Rune Strike macros, I say do it! Don't hesitate to improve your output, because that alone is what makes you a better player.

Never be afraid to use all the tools at your disposal to be the best that you can be. These things are in the game for a reason: if Blizz didn't want macros to be part of WoW, they wouldn't be there. Same for add-ons, so go script up a /castsequence macro, load up Clique and DBM, and never look back. We're all better for it.

Garrosh is Stupid

Warcraft doesn't have a story, it has "lore".

This is perhaps its biggest failing as a game; while it is interactive, it misses out on the biggest promise of gaming: telling a story through a new medium. Really good games integrate the story and gameplay into a coherent whole, with the two reinforcing each other. Bioshock, Silent Hill 2, and Portal all do this marvelously, and we rightly remember them as real gems. WoW needs to get a clue.

Take Garrosh, the new poster boy of the Horde. In BC, he was a whinny pansy who we all knew and hated for said whining. Now he's a balls-to-the-wall warrior and general. That's a fair character transition, and good growth fundamentally, but as players we saw NONE OF IT. It just happened, as if 3.0 patch notes included a 50% Garrosh ballsiness buff, with a 40% chance to proc retarded. In their rush to characterize Garrosh, they made him an idiot, not being able to see past RAWR ALLIANCE SUX, even when it's pointed out to him directly. So we went from a wimp (albeit well characterized through quests) to a parody of the Horde. Sweet.

Nessingwary is one of the coolest characters in WoW, by contrast, because he was developed as a character in WoW. With his strange, tongue-in-cheak big game hunting lust and now the excellently done DHETA quests, he is a playerbase favorite, maybe a bit like Barney in Half Life. Yet Blizzard only seems willing to develop characters like this if they're totally ancillary. The big movers and shakers, by and large, get their character development through novels, comic books, or aren't even developed at all besides totally un-spoken changes. Apparently Garrosh is badass now, OK, whatever. Show me how that happened, don't just say it did in a blue post and leave it there.

God I hate Garrosh now; I can only hope his crazy tyranny over the Horde that's coming in Cataclysm doesn't all take place in the hour I download patch 4.0.

Dropping Group Snobbery

Let me paint a picture. A few days ago, I did Horseman on my 75 DK, along with a fury warrior, a tree, a 'lock and an SPriest. Our tank was the fury warrior; some of you may gasp at the thought of that until you remember it's just horseman. Our PuG'd healer is fuming and always makes a comment about needing a real tank after each HH kill. After the priest died on the third (successful) engagement due to pulling aggro and not getting heals or hitting fade for 6 seconds, she hearthed and forsook us. After seeing the loot drop, of course. At first I thought she was cheating us by saving her summon and getting another pug group, but later surveys revealed she had used hers already. If greed wasn't the motive for the group drop, what was?

This is an especially pronounced reaction to something we all do; not running with less-than-ideal groups. I hate pugging, but if I have a tank I know and I'm healing, I know the fail can be minimized and we'll get through it. But the seasonal bosses introduce a new kind of easy beyond even the melted-butter-hardness of heroics, and so they're an opportunity for normally insane compositions. 1 tank 4 dps, 1 healer 4 dps, that kind of thing; it's awesome and rugged manly.

Horseman is supposed to be easy, even for 5 fresh 80s, but the healer snubbed us, just as a food critic might snub a burger, when he usually eats steak. It's not the best, it's not what you'd have chosen, and damned if another bite of this "beneath you" food is going in your mouth, even though this is your lunch hour and you don't get another one until you go home. That was a labored analogy, but the point is, if putting up with wacky composition that takes the fight into the realm of marginal difficulty gets you loot, it's idiotic to snub it. Especially when you can't get into a new group easily.

If it works, it works; don't sit on your laurels and hold everyone (often everyone but yourself) up to high standards. Horseman sure doesn't.

The On Cooldown Mentality

This is a blog about World of Warcraft. Not that a million other people haven't done the same thing, so that in itself isn't impressive. But this is a different kind of blog, or is at least trying to be, so bear with me and I think you'll find continued readership to bear great fruit.

There's a lot of resources out there for how to play a class, talent builds, how to gear/gem, and all the mathematical parts of playing the game; I can't compete with big communities like EJ or WowWiki, you can go there if you want that kinda thing. The same goes for making money; there are spectacular blogs written by people much, MUCH better and more experienced at the AH game and farming spots than I am, so they can keep doing that, and I am grateful. There are also a lot of blogs that detail personal experiences in WoW, and I'll probably dabble in that, but for rhetorical or illustrative purposes, rather than narrative.

On Cooldown will look at this game as no one else seems to: WoW as a video game. No one really approaches WoW like any other game, deconstructing the atmosphere, pacing, difficulty curve, player mentality, flow, and other less concrete parts of the game.

There's also been precious little written about the social aspects beyond stories of weird pugs or frustrating raids or hilarious AH morons. I want to take those things, how people play and how guilds run, and look at them closer, look to their advantages and disadvantages and underlying motivations. And I want to get the reader thinking too, about why he does things, or why his guild run certain ways.

Lastly, On Cooldown is about mentality. The mentality that if you, the player, try very hard, you can be a great WoW player. That great players are not born, but forged as products of their own ambition and effort. And that we all have something to learn left.

May all your fires be fought, friends.
- Zarat