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!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
---
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.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
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.
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.
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