Heroics Roundup

Well, it's been a while? What have I been doing, besides breaking hearts and promises, you ask? Actually enjoying WoW. See, the Cataclysm expansion should have come with a note like "New Game Feature: Actual Immersion!", because the Cata zones have so much more of it than before. And immersion is fun, but to write these posts I deconstruct, and nothing breaks immersion faster than deconstructing something. So I had to choose between by loyal fan's (both of them!) and enjoying myself. I choose wisely.

Anyway, getting back to things, here's a list of all heroics, the best and the worst and why.

AVERAGE - Lost City of the Tol'vir

Yeah, bleh. Bosses are all right, especially the first one, pacing is good, but I dunno, it just seems so mundane. And why the fuck is it called lost? It looks damn well found to be, bustling with an oddly disproportionate number of necromancers to normal civilians, but maybe cat people just roll that way. It hits all the points on the checklist, but feels flat and dull, like Japanese engineering.

UNDER AVERAGE - The Deadmines

Let's get one thing straight: I like the final dream sequence. It's fun and new and you don't lose progress on a wipe so it's hard to get really frustrated. The lightning sticks should probably two-shot instead of one-shot, but whatever. No, the bosses are fun and interesting, although Ripsnarl seems a little, I don't want to say buggy so... sketchy. No, my problem is the damned thing is just way too long! And for what? Cookie's a pushover and so is Vanessa herself. It's a shaggy dog of a dungeon, takes forever and goes no where.

ABOVE AVERAGE - Blackrock Caverns

Now shit is starting to take off. All of the bosses are tough, and give a real challenge, the atmosphere is nicely dark, and you even get a cool NPC that occasionally murders packs for you. Fun! On the downside it's a bit over-tuned, and especially considering Beauty and the adds on Obsidius make this dungeon more composition-dependent that a 5-man really should be. I absolutely love Corla (beams bosses) for bringing back just a bit of Kara night to all the young'uns. It's a little bland visually (RED ROCKS DARK IRON) but that's better than being implausible, and the bosses are nicely designed.

BAD - Throne of Tides

There's a lot interesting about Throne. It's great to look at, though a little gaudy; I guess Naga are underwater Persians or something. Horrible Cthulhoid monsters are the antagonists for most of the dungeon, with Giblins and Naga making odd showings here and there. It's all a little schizophrenic, and I would have liked Naga and Dark One bosses to be more mixed, to reflect their alliance shown in a particularly amazing quest chain in Vashj'ir. My main beef is various bitchy, annoying mechanics, like the suppression room, the mind control squid popping one's cooldowns making them at times impossible to kill, tornadoes being bigger than they are, and basically all of Neptulon. Void zone boss is cool though.

GOOD - Shadowfang Keep

Now THIS was a dungeon to bring back! It's shorter, sweeter, and now with fun NPC sub-plot. There are multiple paths, interesting trash, and it really feels like a real place in the world, both geometrically and narratively. Too many instances exist only in weird TARDIS dimensions. I know it's easier, but it's so much cooler to fly over aplace and actually believe the dungeon there exists. It would probably be higher, but all the bosses with the exception of Springvale are too easy, with Ashbury being the only other credible threat (and crybabies stop crying, he's damned easy if you have a brain and a interrupt. Can't believe he's getting nerfed). Most of the bosses here are laughably easy, and for that, third place.

WORSE - Vortex Pinnacle

Why the fuck does anyone care about this place? I totally missed that, who built a magical floating city in the clouds (not Titans, their architecture is totally different). And why is there a dickbutt dragon living here? And what are they threatening? Apart from these story problems, VP is the worst-balanced heroic of the bunch, with the first and third bosses being novelty punching bags and the second WOULD be fun and tough if not for the chain-tornado-to-instant-kill-ring-out. Seriously, ring outs have never been a cool mechanic in any game, ever. Invisible wall that shit and get back to me. At least it looks cool.

BETTER - The Stonecore

Now we're talking. Great visuals, fun bosses, with a good story (did you notice the gnome in the beginning is from a Deepholme quest chain? So good!). I don't think Corborus is all that tough once you get the fight down, but again it's difficulty varies too much by group comp (only ranged good at AoE need apply). After that the rest is pretty cake, with Ozruk pretty much just irritating the shit out of melee with near-constant running and ranged with stuns galore, even if you dot yourself correctly. The second and last bosses do seem too easy, but their fights are interesting enough, so it's a wash for me. Maybe Slabhide should have a tail whip or something to spice that fight up. Overall though very entertaining and original.

WORST - Halls of Origination

This expansion's "Halls" dungeon tops my no 1 shit counter, because of sheer boredom. First of all the magical Egypt theme is an abrupt tonal shift from the robo-Scandinavia of Ulduar, also built by the Titans, so it already feels weird to me, like Hitchcock directing a romantic comedy. I was enthused about the high boss count, but every boss feels utterly dull and unfinished, like they had five bosses worth of mechanics, but damnit, they promised seven! Nothing feels dangerous or complex or sometimes necessary (the camels serve what real point exactly?). Still 100 times better than the last "Halls of X" though.

BEST - Grim Batol

FUCK YES. Everything about this dungeon is awesome. Tough bosses, check. No abusive mechanics, check. Dwarven architecture, check. Unique fun-yet-non-critical mechanic, check. I basically see the dragons in here as making up for that Malygos horseshit they pulled two years back. Here you have injured, captured dragons who lend a hand before needing to bounce to tend their wounds. And if you do the dragon segment well, dungeon goes super quick with free rep. If it goes poorly, you're fine, you just need to take longer. My one gripe would be the general lack of CC for dragonkin and elementals given the number of them here means some pulls might substitute cooldowns for CC, but I guess they're all doable, so it's not a huge deal. Oh, and dragon kills should give you rep; right now you're punished in opportunity cost for being really good at dragons. That is, I think, against the spirit of things. But yeah, really really good stuff, I'm sad to see it nerfed.

There you go then! I am biased of course, I like the harder bosses (bosses should at least SEEM like they're trying their best to kill you), and a dungeon being interesting is worth slightly more to me than encounter balance. I'd rather do something spectacular and janky over bland and functional. As should you too; we all too often get concerned more with easy gear and points, and forget the true purpose of WoW: to entertain. And I'd take an entertaining wipe-a-thon over a dull success any day.

Zone Review: Ashenvale (H)

OK so yes, I didn't post yesterday. Very busy day, close friend got married, blah blah. As penance, I'm writing two posts today, one of which will hit the moment Cata launches. I'm sure you'll ALL come to read that right away. Anywho.

Ashenvale was a pretty strong zone in the classic days, so I feared it would be left relatively unmolested. Not true! Quest hubs have been added, a very fun introductory chain has been added in, and while the green and purple forest is mostly the same visually, there is a large volcanic lava flow mixing it up in the middle.

The zone seems like a sort of tribute to the Ashenvale of old, in ways. Veterans will likely recognize several locales, like the Dor'Danil Barrow Den, Grom Hellscream's gravesite and the surrounding demons, and Zoram'Gar Outpost, are largely the same. Though the latter got a facelift by the Orcish TV show "This Old Hub", hosted by Bob "Warsong Hold" Villa. Not the most dramatic zone change by far, but don't fix what ain't broke.

Don't think that this is your Guild Master's Ashenvale though; fresh questing abounds with the signature better flow and varied mechanics. The quests mostly take you to familiar places, but for new reasons or with renewed purpose. The premise behind Felfire Hill is not to kill demons just because, well, fuck them, but to gain a dubious source of fuel in the form of green flames. I was saddened this didn't end with me riding in a demolisher spreading Legion Flames among the NPCs (for a change!) but maybe that's asking too much.

I do have to get something off my chest, if we can speak under the Seal of the Confessional for a moment. I didn't finish Ashenvale. Not even close; I did all the quests coming out of Splintertree, and my next stop were the breadcrumbs into Stonetalon. I tried to complete Zoram'Gar, oh I really did. But I was 24 already, and the beefiest quests they had were 22. And I had skipped an entire other quest hub on the way there! The one flaw I can see with Ashenvale is that it might be too big for its own good. Even without heirloom gear I would have easily breezed through it too fast to see much of the western side of things.

Maybe this is just MY design philosophy, but the ideal flow for leveling isn't hard to figure out. If someone with no heirlooms does every quest in the zone, having come in at the appropriate level, they should gain precisely enough XP, including required kills, to get 5 levels and go to the next zone (or whatever the next zone assumes). Naturally, things like rest state, dungeoning, and non-required kills will get the player farther than this, or give them the option of skipping a few quests without breaking flow, but you get the idea.

It's then a little bit of a bummer that Ashenvale was so filled with content that will get passed up in the natural course of leveling. Maybe it should have been made five levels higher, or maybe it should have been split in two like the barrens. But this isn't really a complaint; it's always better to leave food at the table than leave the table hungry. It's not elegant, but it's fun, a little dangerous, and leads into Stonetalon Mountains (more on that later!)

Dungeon Review: Deadmines and Ragefire Chasm

Before they nerfed dungeon XP, it was very easy to get a level or more in even a short run, so I ended up kinda out-leveling the Northern Barrens. I'm not complaining, NB was a fairly bland zone with not enough changed for me to really be gripped by it. Now that dungeon xp has been nerfed to garbage, there's even less reason to subject one's sanity to the rampant bigotry and impatience that comprise the vocal minority of the LfG system. Still, if you have a premade group, or are desperate for human contact, however abrasive, here's some words on the two lowbie dungeons.

Deadmines has the same layout, but totally retooled bosses and mechanics. It actually felt like a real instance, with bosses actually having distinct mechanics and interesting flavor. It also uses the new ability for quests to resolve in the field, which I quite like. It also works a Worgen in as the penultimate boss encounter, incorporating their existence into the early lore and helping to make them feel like a proper part of the world. Something the last Alliance race could have used, to be sure.

RFC is by contrast largely unchanged. The same bosses, same trash, and even the same end spot for the LFG tool, one boss short. The mobs have been moved around a bit, and in some places thinned, but every encounter is more or less a tank and spank. Though Oggleflint's cleave served a rude introduction to THAT particular mechanic for all DPS involved in my run.

I want to stop and say a brief word about group pulls in these early dungeons. To DPS, please realize that tanks don't have all their abilities to generate AoE threat yet, and if a skull gets put over something, it's probably for good reason. That said, holy shit druid is fucked up in this regard. These two dungeons both have unavoidable three and four mob pulls, and while Paladins get Avenger's Shield for being prot and warriors have had Thunder Clap for a good six levels, druids have NOTHING to generate AoE threat at all until swipe at 36. Thirty freaking six! How are we supposed to keep four mobs off a healer? Demoralizing Roar? I know mobs deal little enough damage at this level that one can go stray and it's no big, but it's profoundly frustrating as someone who's tanked big kid content to have a half-empty toolbox for doing this low level shit.

SO ANYWAY, both dungeons are fine, with a nod to Deadmines for interesting boss fights. Well, as interesting as level 15 can get anyway. The dungeon XP nerf went way overboard and now dungeoning is vastly inferior to soloing, so I can't really recommend doing any dungeon more than once. It's very disappointing that Blizzard effectively eliminated dungeoning as a viable alternative to questing in this way; even with a premade, it would be faster (and far less repetitive) to do solo quests. I know Blizzard wants to show off the new zones and quest flow, but come on, the option would have been nice.

Zone Review: Durotar (H)

Aah Durotar, so long the butt of collective jokes. Historically the worst place for a beginning hordie to level up, it featured very dull quests, a huge number of beast killing quests, and lead into the equally-bereft Barrens. How times have changed.

First of all, the troll starting zone in fantastic fun. Early quests get players acquainted with their basic abilities before even facing off against a single mob, then against neutral animals, then against aggressive and differentiated enemies. You even get a side kick for a quest, to show the power of grouping and to help the uninitiated with accidental huge pulls. Orc starting zone is a comparatively blah, resembling more strongly the Durotar of old. Still, the quests are proficient, mobs are more populous, and the fan favorite whack-a-peon is still around.

Razor Hill also brings some fun quests, the crowning jewel of which is the flooded area in the west. You climb a guard tower, survey the land for Horde citizens in need of aid, and are given a large meta-quest to complete all their quests. It almost feels like Assassin's Creed: ascending to a perch, seeing the people in need, and then aiding them for fun and profit.

Other high points include an old favorite target of Durotar levelers having drowned in the flood, slaying several champion warriors, and acting out a play. An old shaman tells you a parable complete with anthropomorphic metaphors and a wise moral at the end, with you controlling a wolf and acting out the protagonist's part. It's totally out of left field, and totally awesome. It also introduces the concept of vehicles (the idea that you control something other than your character in WoW) without any stress or time limit. Perfect for beginners!

I haven't played the other starting areas (I hear undead have a lot of good shit going down) but you couldn't go wrong with Durotar. It also connects you to Orgrimmar, the central city of the Horde. I suspect, and I never thought I'd say this, that Blood Elves will be running from Eversong to get the Troll starting experience. How delightfully ridiculous!

Prolegomena to Any Future Altoholics

I find myself in an odd circumstance. I haven't posted in the last month, as an astute reader can probably figure out by the lack of a 'November' under 2010 at the right. Which isn't entirely unjustified; I've been on WoW vacation after beating the Lich King and becoming Buffslayer Supreme of Nocturne. Combine that with a utter lack of anything to do in WoW besides hardmode ICC (if I never see Marrowgar again it will be too soon) and my last GOOD post was in September, and it sent me into a spiral of not-giving-a-damn.

So I haven't written in a while, mainly because of a lack of things to do or get motivated to talk about; suddenly, 4.0.3a comes in like a masked hero to a burning building (analogy not perfect: fire is exciting) and I'm spoiled for choice. Do I talk about the re-vamped dungeons? The new quest flow? Preparations for Cataclysm? WHAT DO I DO??????

Breath. Count to 10. Yes, there is a lot to do and see. Too much to sum up in two or three articles, even ones as long winded and pedagogic as those found on this site. So here's my pledge: EVERY DAY until Cataclysm, and at some slower, regular pace after that, I will be posting a review of a zone, dungeon, or other piece of new content, with the review slanted toward a veteran player. Everything is like some weird episode of the Twilight Zone, where a lone man staggers sweatily though a familiar but foreign landscape, every sight recognizable but strange. It will be short and sweet, and hopefully lead to most excellent memories for all involved.

But as a prologue to all that, here are some recommendations specifically to us veterans. Whether you remember when Dire Maul was new, or a time when you had to walk in Outland, or even when you could forget to receive your Badges from not looting, here's some tips to make your re-discovery of Azeroth a good one.

You are not leveling too fast. Even without heirloom gear, it's not hard to out-level zones. That's a good thing; a year from now, when a certain mouthy Dragon Aspect lies 'neath your mighty boot, you'll need something to entertain you with. You'll be glad you didn't need to use up every quest in the land rushing poor Rofldotsjr to 60.

Do not do everything at once. Don't sweat it even: you are under no obligation to see every single piece of content ever on a single toon in the two weeks before Cata officially hits. Ask yourself, am I enjoying this quest line/dungeon/gameplay purely for its lore and execution? If not, hearth to Org and go where Hellscream tells you. You can get to 60 on a SINGLE CONTINENT. Meaning there's enough content to level two characters to Outland and never do a single overlapping quest. Rejoice.

Play an alt. A lot of the tuning, especially to dungeons, will be lost because everything in LBRS still dies to a single crit of Shadowmourne's mighty blade. Other small details, like a swim speed boost, is huge to a lowbie while irrelevant to your main with a turtle mount. Flying and archaeology are such amazingly good reasons to see the changes over time on a main, all the better to wait and adopt a set of fresh eyes for the quests and dungeons.

Enjoy the journey. This is the Golden Rule of Leveling to me. WoW, or any MMO, or even any game, is not a race to max level to start grinding heroics. Stop and read quest text. Do some green quests to see the end of a chain (a fair number of quests now have really impressive endings). That might sound contradictory to previous statements, but leveling is all about flow. Getting lost in the game world. So don't worry about far away goals or catching up to some arbitrary number or hitting all the "must see" quests; focus on seeing what's over that next hill. I guarantee you'll have more fun.

More Content, Not New Content

So, full disclosure, I never raided until patch 2.4, late into TBC's lifespan. Hell, I didn't even get to 60 in vanilla before quitting. Mainly I quit because I saw how horrific the raiding cabals were: 40mans were such a chore to organize, guilds set their raid times and let their members work around them, because it is literally impossible to pick 40-odd random people and get the same gaps in their schedules. Can't raid on Mondays or Wednesday? Find a different guild. That, coupled with a deeply inferior questing experience, lead me to quit WoW for years.

Now, I started TBC to play lowbie dungeons with my closest of bros. It was hard going with only 4 of us, but between trade chat goofballs and manly gumption we got to 70 (with me lagging behind, because more than two hours of questing made my brain turn to goo). Getting to the party so late, I only ever did Kara, ZA, a single Mag, a single SSC, and half of TK. I liked the 10mans a lot more; they had a much stronger feeling of camaraderie and we developed an eccentric (read: mind-blowingly crass) rapport that I never got in the professional business-time 25 mans. That might have been my guild, but whatever. Anywho, because the 25s were bustling with already geared elite soldiers, there was no way for me to rise to the top ranks of Tier 6, so at the bottom I stayed.

Across Wrath, I rejoiced; not only was the leveling experience aided by superior Northrend quests and later the dungeon finder, but all the raids fit in my beloved 10 man format. There would be no glass ceiling for Zarat, only the ground floor (which is where he got on) and the sky (being the approximate location of The Limit). And while I got to experience the full of the raiding content, from being the only DPS consistently unmolested by Heigan's Dance to playing Santa with the Frozen Throne, I saw a problem in the youth. The youth are the traditional place to see problems in, but even still, they were entitled, uncultured, and lazy. They had not endured the hardships of waiting five minutes to fight KT. They had not learned the terror of Yogg-Saron's mind link, nor of the not-it game for frost orb duty on Anub'Arak. They lived in a world where you finish heroics and go right to ICC, the pinnacle of progression. The imputence!

But consider the world of the young (sometimes called noobs). The problem is, to a new 80, there are only heroics and ICC. The old raids give such inferior rewards, there's no reason to visit them; best to bang our heads against the only raid of any worth. I remember, when Blizzard made Wrath, they cited a major problem of TBC as not enough new players seeing the later raids because it was too hard to gear up. But now there is the opposite problem: no one who levels up now sees any earlier raid content! Wrath solved nothing here, it just flipped the problem around. Cataclysm needs to reverse this design to an extent, or all Blizzard will be really doing in content patches is replacing the old tier, rather than adding a new one.

For once I am somewhat at a loss for a perfect solution. Obviously it was too hard to get into top tier raids late in TBC, but going straight from heroics to ICC doesn't work either. The goal is to enforce a progression like this: dungeons -> h. dungeons -> Tier 11 -> Tier 12 -> Tier 13. And it must be enforced across the expansion. This is also necessary for creating a proper difficulty curve; each tier should be harder than the last, so those of us who played from the beginning get a good progression of challenge to go with our loot. It is the WORST for everyone if the Wrath philosophy of jumping new 80s right into top tier content is continued, because it creates a poor diff. curve, and from that, a sub-par experience. Take ICC: there are so many brick-wall jumps in difficulty it's hard to count.

I might have a solution in mind, but it's too formative to really commit to it right now (step one would be returning multi-tier tokens). What's really noteworthy is that Blizzard seems perfectly able to see their failings in other areas (poor quest design, gathering professions suck, etc) and they take action to correct them. They have said nothing negative about this major failing of game design (indeed, they sometimes reference it as a success), and that worries me. Sadly, I won't even get to see if any of this is true until 4.1. At least dungeons will be hard again, maybe that will instill some proper attitude in those youngsters.

EDIT: happy birthday to On Cooldown. Here's to another eleven months before graduate school hopefully devours all my life and sanity.

World of Modcraft

I've long been a vocal supporter of add-ons to improve one's performance and enjoyment in WoW. Some misguided purists believe this dilutes the experience, but on the contrary, it adds a whole new dimension to customizing and personalizing WoW. Think of add-ons as Bind on Account glyphs, and you get slots in proportion to your CPU cycles. Not using add-ons, especially in raids or rated PVP is like an Olympian refusing to use the super-high-tech aerodynamic polymer discus because the Greeks used one made of stone. So let's dig in with reckless abandon and make our screens look absurd. And as a disclaimer, I am biased towards lower-resource add-ons, 'cause my box is shit.

ESSENTIAL MODS - Get them, whoever you are.

1. Quartz: makes cast bars cleaner, bigger, and more informative. Includes lag as part of the bar, as well as lumping batch crafting into a single bar (handy when you're smelting 1000 saronite bars say). It's so goddamned delicious.

2. Deadly Boss Mods: timers for every boss ability, handy anouncements of events during the fight, and friendly beeps when an especially dangerous debuff or ground effect is thrown out. This is worth it JUST for adding an audio queue for standing in stuff; the more ways to realize you need to move, the better.

3. Recount: useful for more than checking out who has the biggest e-peen at the DPS urinal, it offers helpful breakdowns of rotations and is indispensable in increasing performance and analyzing wipes.

4. Auctioneer: it's a huge fat hog of a beast, but nothing else works as well as it. Keeping track of market trends and informing you of when X item is below it's normal value ON YOUR SERVER is without peer. And for lowbies, nothing makes easy gold like looking for items listed below vendor price.

POWERFUL MODS - Essential for some, depending on role.

1. Gatherer: keeps track of all nodes, and highly customizable. It can even record a route through a zone to later follow with a special HUD. Must have for anyone with a gathering profession, or who thinks they might roll one ever.

2. Need To Know: this would have once been essential, but with the integrated aura warnings, a lot of the critical buffs are tracked in-game now. It's still an excellent dot timer, as well as useful for tracking short-duration buffs and a few things the built-in system ignores (clearcasting, for instance).

3. Postal: I used MailGet in Wrath, but since it's been slow on the update, grab Postal. The only thing that's really powerful here is the button to take every item in your mailbox at once. Absolutely necessary for AH captains of industry, a helpful convenience otherwise.

4. DKi Runes: default rune UI is ass, DKi runes is far more visible, customizable, and nice to look at. It comes with a DK disease timer too, if you don't like N2K.

5. Clique: If you're a healer, you NEED clique. It literally will double your reaction speed by halving the number of clicks required to cast a heal. Less clicks=better UI. Also get a unit-frame add-on of some kind to preview healing done (Grid is the classic, I prefer SUF. )

There are a bunch of other mods that will serve various levels of practicality. Some (Dominos, Shadowed Unit Frames) will make your screen more minimalist, informative, and easier to understand. Others (OPie, ThreatPlates, OmniCC) will serve small, but helpful roles and are mostly a quality-of-life thing. And still more (DamnAchievements, SexyMap) are purely cosmetic options to pimp my WoW. So get off your ass, get on curse or wowace, and get to downloading; few things are as fun as personalizing a game you love to play.

Cataclysmic Lull

We all know about the slump WoW is in from pre-release blue balls; rather than sit around watching Total Biscuit videos (as worthy a pursuit that is), why not take some time to play some other video game? You know, branch out and try something new? Here's a list of the best games you missed because you were playing Wrath. In no particular order, because I don't play favorites.

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

Assassin. Loner. Otaku. Luchador. Virgin. These, among many other things, define Travis Touchdown, the lightsaber-wielding manchild protagonist of NMH2. It's a refinement on the first title, both in tone and gameplay, and integrates the Wii motion controls without abusing them (no remote flailing). It's a funny, irreverant, and bizarre game, and is utterly unique. Except for the first game, obviously.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade

A beat-em-up RPG from the makers of the woefully-underplayed Odin Sphere, Muramasa is the most beautiful goddamned game ever made. Set in mythological Japan, two tales of revenge and redemption stretch from the depths of Yomi to the heights of Mt. Fugi. The RPG elements are deep without bogging down the action (like Odin Sphere did at times) and it has a wealth of hidden challenges for completionists.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Joker takes over Arkham, starts releasing villains, Batman the only one who can stop him, you get the jist. Story isn't anything too special (voice acting is though), but the real star is Batman here and boy is it awesome. It's a hybrid between stealth, beat-em-up, and Metroidvania, and it pulls off each element so tightly you hardly even notice. Gadgets are numerous, but plausible (no anti-thing spray) and most have a use in combat, if you really want to get fancy. Only downside is your throat might get sore from growling "I AM BATMAN" every time you do anything.

Bayonetta

Witch with guns on every limb and magic hair killing angels BDSM style. There, now you know whether you want to play Bayonetta or not.

Blazblue: Continuum Shift/Super Street Fighter IV

2009 marked a surge of 2D fighting game interest, and the two giants here were SF4 and BB. 2010 brought the refined sequels you see above, both adding more content and balance tweaks. They're both great games with balanced rosters and tons of depth while being pretty newbie-friendly. If you can only get one, all else being equal, get BB: the netcode is far better, which makes online play more than an exercise in dropped inputs.

InFamous/Prototype/Assassin's Creed II

The scourge of gaming as of late has been open-world adventure games (I hate calling them sandbox games because you can't win at sandbox) but as overused and trendy as the feature is, some games get it right and properly need it. Of the three InFamous has the best combat and difficulty curve, ACII has the best freerunning and graphics, and Prototype has the best being-a-dick-catharsis factor. Word to the wise though, set the difficulty in ACII to hard. I played it on normal and guards literally were never threatening ever ever.

Dwarf Fortress

MOTHERFUCKING DWARF FORTRESS. Yes I know it came out in 2006, so maybe it shouldn't count. And yes it's ugly as sin and with a learning curve like a wall covered in deadly spiders. But recently the entire game got overhauled and turned 3D - not in graphics but in gameplay, which is enough of a difference for me to squeeze it in. It's a proper sandbox game with no way to win and oh-so many ways to lose, and a skull-crushing level of depth and complexity. Minecraft is for pussies, real men choose DF.

But It's My First Day

It's hard to say what makes a game good; one school of thought says the ideal games will be easy to learn and hard to master, revealing intricacies like the layers of an onion. WoW is just the opposite; hard to learn, easy to master. Imagine having no one to tell you about resources like elitist jerks, tankspot, and wowhead; it would take a long time to make an even decent talent spec, much less know the exact right way to use your abilities, and what to do on each encounter. But once you are armed with this information, it becomes easy to follow. There are very few challenging specs to play, and Cata aims to make most of them easier: e.g. slower rune generation and no dot clipping worries.

This means skill, or the accumulation thereof, is not what sets the bads apart from us good players (possible exception for Arena). It's knowledge; no other kind of game demands we keep learning like WoW does. One might keep learning in Starcraft, say, by fighting skilled opponents and seeing them use unconventional techniques, and in turn developing a counter-strategy. WoW keeps adding content, new bosses with unknown mechanics that we research how to defeat. They also change our classes in subtle ways, like buffing haste, or changing coefficients. A new player has no in-game way of ever finding any of this out, and ends up totally clueless, or drowned in the dense sea of information offered by EJ. We bring our game up largely by independent research, which is very unintuitive.

WoW does need to pick up the ball, and they are in Cata. They're making dungeons harder, which in turn makes players learn how to be clutch. They're also forcing players to invest solely in one tree before moving on, and taking out a great deal of the bad talents that just acted as traps to snare newbies. They're also implementing a difficulty curve to leveling itself, so the 80-85 experience is harder than Northrend. Difficulty curves are our friends, they make us perform better and make the game more entertaining.

As players, we aren't doing any favors either. As a symptom of overgearing everything and AoE-fest instances, we've become intolerant of ignorance, and the bads have become complacent, because they can still finish instances. For good players, it's too much of a hassle to explain what someone is doing wrong, because 90% of the time they'll insult you for trying to help. And why should they care; they still finish the dungeon and get all the same rewards that a good player gets. Players generally only get as good as they need to be to clear content, and plateau after that, so it's not surprising that 0/0/71 DK gemmed for spell pen can succeed in such an environment.

The upshot of this analysis is that we as players should start exercising our power to kick much more frequently. I've often tried to kick a bad, only to have everyone vote against me, saying we can still do it with him. Um, are you guys unaware that we get a new person nigh-instantly? Even a tank takes under a minute, why should we suffer through a willfully terrible player when we can change him out at no cost to us? It's also a bit of needed tough love for the bad player; if he can't finish groups because of terrible spec/gearing/playing, he will have to bring his game up, because he wants to get the rewards. See, everybody wins!

Addendum: remember, I'm talking about the willfully ignorant and bad, not the new. Anyone willing to learn and improve absolutely would not get my kick vote, all else being equal.

September Scattershot

Two posts in one week, from Zarat? One must wonder, has he finally been replaced with a robot brain, setting aside human emotions for cold efficiency? Maybe the Gjallarhorn has sounded, and as the Fenris Wolf breaks his bonds, one last post is written before the world is plunged into poison and fire. Or perhaps he is nursing a hangover from drinking too much Four Loko like a hipster douchebag, and cannot muster the manual dexterity to procrastinate on video games. There's some truth to all of these; whatever the cause, here's some Scattershot.

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Normal Weather Flying bitches, I've been waiting for them to announce that for months. I am shocked it's only 250g extra, which is a lot at level 60, and trivial at 78. All I can see it doing is fucking over people who want to level up their gathering professions before going to Outland. What I'm wondering is, what fate will Cold Weather Flying suffer? 1000g to use it for one level before rolling to the new content is a cold rip off, but how else will you get saronite and saronite-herb-equivalent when all the zones that have it assume flying mount? Tell you what Blizz, get rid of CWF, or at least nerf the cost, and I'll call that a wash.

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So I might well be rolling Disc as my healing spec in Cata. Not because of PW:Barrier, or any interesting mechanic like that; to the contrary, I fucking love Chakra so much more than the boring shit Disc uses. Penance, yeah, that's a dynamic spell. No no, I would go Disc because when I heal, I want to H-E-A-L. Not DPS, as apparently everyone else wants to do, and Disc allows me to ignore those talents without just wasting points. I'm a horrible min-maxer in every game I play; casting some shitty Smite to feel like I'm involved by coming in just below the tanks is not my idea of fun. It's wasted talent points during a pinch, because you'll be casting heals every global. So it comes into play only when it doesn't matter anyway. Healers should heal; if you want to spam roll a mage.

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Let's do a quick overview of Goblins as a people. They're all about making money, have lax ethical standards, are short, unattractive, with large noses, and did I mention money? Oh, and they have a Jewish accent-WOAH THERE! I mean, we all knew the joke was there to be made, but I never thought Blizzard would be the one to make it. To be fair, the male sounds more like a generic New Yorker, but the female voice is blatantly Jewy, all but complaining about her overbearing mother and gushing about lox. I really gotta wonder if once gobbos are on live, if they won't take a little heat from some anti-defamation league.

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You have no idea how much I love archaeology. Holy fucking monkey balls I love it. An optional ongoing side project that gives players backstory in bite sized pieces, and is incentivized by vanity items, BoE epics, and a small bit of raid utility. Plus it boasts ungankable nodes, extra progress on an item "rolls over" when completed, AND it's an organic and productive way to explore all the zone changes. Sploosh. My largest complaint about WoW has always been it doesn't tell it's story through the game proper, and I think that may be a whine of the past soon. I'm almost tempted to forgo leveling and max out Archaeology when Cata comes to town.

Life After Lich King

This was originally going to be shorter, but I felt it deserved an entire post.

Nocturne did a second Lich King kill, officially crowning my main Zarat the Buffslayer. It took a long time because our glorious leader and DK tank supreme Kim Jong-Chad was violently raped by a hippopotamus on one of his oddly-frequent trips to the zoo, and so cannot WoW it up for the time being. I always told him he leaned too much on the railing. At least that's what I think happened; I'm fuzzy on the exact details.

It's very interesting to see the camaraderie of a guild in action; people banding together to get me my flashy title and achievement. I know hardcore raiders probably go through similar moments, replacing "title" with "drake", but I wonder how similar it is. 10-man raiding is such a more intimate format with tighter bonds and more familiar faces, I have to wonder how many larger guilds would have actively worked pass the loss of a tank to make me feel accomplished. I maintain 10-man raiding is the superior format, for this and other reasons, and will gladly continue on into Cataclysm.

But now, what do we do? Nocturne was founded to complete all raids as a pure 10-man guild, and we have done just that. We really have to wait on Chad to start hardmode ICC, so what is there to do? Right now we're knocking out Ulduar hardmodes for a sweet robo drake and the Algalon fight, but that just delays the problem. What do we spend potentially four months doing?

I'm no officer man, but here's a list of shit I would sign on to do and are worthwhile. ToC hardmodes, killing KT again for people's Champions title, retro raids, especially Ahn'Qiraj, Zul'Gurub, and Sunwell, and more 25 man madness with other 10-man guilds. I feel a bit like the soviets post-democratization: I know I am more free, and my quality of life is increased, but I miss the old certainty, the old purpose. But I know we must rise to the challenge, and rather than fall victim to apathy and nostalgia, forge our own purpose anew.

Regardless of what we do next, my unending thanks goes out to all the people who stuck around and punched LK in his crotch a second time. Special thanks goes to Zindo for putting up with tanking, and Tywren for his pro heals and pro strats. Come back to us, Ty! Come back and stay forever!

What Blizzard Can Learn From Arc System Works

Like everyone with a passion for the vidja games, I have a few go-to titles and series that I hold up as paragons of X, Y, or Z. Among this prodigious list is Earthbound, Silent Hill 2, Devil May Cry (obvious exception of 2), Civilization, and Blazblue. This is coming back to World of Warcraft, I promise.

Blazblue, for those who haven't tasted it's sweet fruits, is a very Japanese 2-D fighter with over-the-top gameplay and character designs. To writ, one character is a half-vampire half-antichrist cyborg wizard outlaw anarchist armed with a perpetual motion machine. No, for reals.

Anyway, one of their strengths besides having a unique style are the character mechanics. Every character is vastly different in play style and approach, while still being balanced enough for virtually any character to win a match or tourney. That is a tremendous accomplishment of design; balance is easier to do the more parity there is between player options. It's harder, but far more rewarding in terms of game depth and flow, when some characters are easier to use than others, yet neither one dominates.

The point I'm getting at is WoW comes close to having this kind of balance, yet it falls flat in pursuit of broad-spectrum appeal. Classes are moving into greater balance and viability in Cataclysm, but what's sad is the various classes and specs are moving closer not just in balance, but in difficulty curve as well. Paladins are getting a fancy new resource, while dot classes don't need to worry about clipping and DKs are getting more leeway on their runes. Instead of having a spread of classes, some straightforward and easy, others tricky and subtle, Blizz is pushing the margins in. Which in turn makes classes and specs more homogeneous and less unique.

The concept of flow is that a player is maximally engaged and satisfied with gameplay when the level of difficulty is challenging without being overwhelming. It's also called "the zone" or just that sigh of satisfaction at beating a tight segment. Now, the best flow comes about when a video game adjusts difficulty organically, rather than through a menu. In Blazblue, this is done through the character select menu. Some characters are simple rushdown, others require tricks and mind games to win, and still others use zoning to shore up weak defenses. One of the most intricate characters, Carl Clover, controls two characters at once. And yet, he does as well as a simple rushdown character like Ragna, despite the more complex strategies and execution involved.

That works because some players WANT complexity, and others want simplicity. Blazblue has a spectrum of difficulty in its characters, and WoW needs that too, or it will be boring to some while hectic and stressful to others. The three roles are a good start; they cater to different skill sets, and thus, to different types of players. But in homogenizing the difficulty of the classes, Blizzard is losing an opportunity to provide an organic flow, one of the best experiences pure gameplay can provide. They ought to be an "easy" healer and a "hard" healer (maybe "tricky" healer is better), and yes, it is a good thing that one or two DPSers can faceroll their rotation to success. Some people just like that I guess.

I imagine the majority of paladin players, and warlock players, and so on will like the changes; by definition Blizzard is trying to move the flow of each class to the top of that bell curve. But what would be far more ingenious is to make all specs balanced with the greater raiding environment, yet ensure each class has some say, via their spec choice, on how hard the game is to play. That way, each class had something to offer the outliers on the flow curve: affliction for players who need a challenge to be engaged, destruction for people who just want to press buttons and see high crits, and demonology for those in between. That is a better world, for everyone involved. Including Blizzard.

How Reforging Could Have Saved Loot

So, quick, what's the one thing that sucks about loot drops? Loot no one wants, of course! Sometimes this is because something's on farm, or because of eccentric group comp, but mostly, it's because some item was bizarrely itemized to favor a single class, or worse, spec. This could be TOTALLY FIXED in Cataclysm; not by talent trees, but with four reforging options.

1. Healing plate is an abomination to Crom, mighty god of the mountain, keeper of the riddle of steel, and patron of all melee DPS. To him cries of lamentation are offered whenever some bullshit spellpower is seen on a proper man's armor. SOLUTION: make a Str -> Int reforging that turns all the strength into intellegence. BOOM! Now all DPS plate is also healing plate.

2. How will paladins get their spirit on then? And what of the caster/healer plight, who snub hit gear from time to time due to being at the cap/needing none of it? SOLUTION: Hit -> Spirit reforging, that takes all the Hit and turns it into Spirit, though still less than would be otherwise expected at that iLevel. This keeps hit pieces from being BiS for healers, while expanding their appeal. Paladins could (and do) have extra mana regen abilities to make up for lesser spirit, since all of it would come from here.

3. Fair's fair, so what about the healing piece, whose spirit ruins otherwise perfect DPS itemization? SOLUTION: Spirit -> Hit reforging, to also expand the healing piece to be more appealing to the DPS, but again, not BiS. Balance and Elemental could have good Hit boosting talents, thus making all leather and mail casting gear equally appealing to all appropriate specs.

4. Finally, strength one handers. They're only used by two specs, and both of them have the option to use two handers anyway. What a waste! SOLUTION: Agi -> Str reforging for one handed weapons. This means ALL the weapons could be for ALL the people who use one handers, with no waste! You could even go one step further and stop making one handers with tanking stats, further widening the appeal.

This simple addition to the reforging system would ensure every item on the loot tables would be appealing to some extent for a variety of specs; the worst being spell leather/mail being desirable for only two specs each. My solution would be to condense the armor types down to three, and make hunters and shamans wear leather, but that's a touch drastic. Also, rogue poisons and energy gain need to be normalized for weapon speed, so the tyranny of fast DPS one handers may be gone forever.

Tank Your Way To The Top

I've been leveling Dorf, my now 72 Dwarf paly; he's all set with a Prot spec and a shit-ton of crafted Cobalt gear, so I started chaining dungeons. No one really talks about this as a bread-and-butter way to level, so let's talk for a minute.

The first thing I noticed was that A: it gets better as you level up, and B: it is very fast with rest state. At first, especially in Outland or Northrend, the dungeon queue is populated with utter fuckbends: prot warriors queueing as DPS to level their weapon skills, ele shamans pulling without end or pause, and healers who afk without a warning. After a bit though, once people have a decent set of the new gear and have done the initial dungeon quests, things get much better. Many more people are familiar with doing dungeons and runs become smoother and more consistent (though locks can never seem to NOT Drain Life).

As for experience, here's an example. At 72, I get about 10-12% of a level from doing AN, which takes 15 minutes (no heirlooms). A full level at that pace takes about 3 hours, assuming a shit group or two. That is crazy hot. The only problem is, all that XP comes from mob killing, which takes your rest state down fast compared to questing. Without rest, it takes about 6 hours, the same as quests, but substantially less profitable.

There's another casualty here, besides rest. It's the zones themselves. There are tons of awesome quest lines, like Wrathgate, Sons of Hodir, D.E.H.T.A., Drakuru, and more that get tossed aside for the speed of dungeon leveling. It's more than awesome when you're still stuck in the shit Old World, but in Northrend, you're missing out on a lot if you get dungeon tunnel vision.

So here's the upshot, from where I'm sitting: pure dungeon leveling is advisable only under three conditions. One, you are a tank or healer. Two, you only play a few hours a week (for rest to come back). And three, you've already ding'd 80, having seen a lot of the content. Even with that said, there's a few quest lines that you simply shouldn't skip, like the one that unlocks the Shadowvault. And dungeon quests, natch. And anything that jumps your rep up dramatically, like the initial Mag'har line. And of course, anything to do with poo.

Scattershot

Here's another installment of "Multiple One-Paragraph Ideas From Zarat Theatre".

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I've gotten really stressed over raiding lately, and so I'm taking some impromptu mental health leave. I wish it hadn't come right as Nocturne was so close to Kingslayer, but I feel like if I go raiding one more time I'ma go on a Falling Down-esque murderous rampage. Man that was a good movie.

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Blizzard should make their announcements about future developments somehow knowable in-game. I remember people being really upset when things are taken out of the game (black proto, for instance) without having a chance to get them, to which Blizzard oft replies, "Tough tits, we said as much in a blue post a month ago". I think it's a little weak to expect, nay, demand players visit mmo-champion or compulsively check the forums to see what game-altering shit is on the horizon. And no, the launcher doesn't count.

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I don't want to harp too much on how the LK fight is disappointing from a story perspective, but here's how I would have done it. Beginning starts much the same, sans terrible dialogue we have to hear every goddamned time, but it gets different at the end. When you get him down to 10%, Ner'zhul's ghost rips out of Arthas' body, leaving him bloody and tattered. Everyone's all like, shit, only the Legion knows how to bind him without a human body. The king of all necromancers CCs everyone in place and casts his instant death spell, but before everyone dies, they are protected by all getting mysteriously frozen.

Then the GUARDIANS OF ULDUAR ride in on a helicopter, saving your asses. The Guardians are all about binding shit; it's what they do best. So you beat Ner'zhul up with them, and seal him back in the Frozen Throne with their help. Head back to Dalaran for debriefing and cocktails. Shit. Yes.

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When will cross-realm mail get implemented? I hate leveling my ally alts knowing that I could be leveling 20% faster.

Ghandi Was Right

Now, I'm no fan of Mahatma Ghandi; after all, who is? But I can't deny the effectiveness of non-violent resistance to enact real change. But I was never really aware of it until today.

See, when you sign up for the random dungeon, you're there to kill the final boss, very efficient and business-like. But occasionally, you'll be assailed by some fool who wants achievements, and I'm not there to do achievements. If they happen, cool, but I'm not going out of my way, or worse, slowing things down to get them. So imagine my shock when I go to tank AN for the daily, only to discover that three members of the team are DEMANDING I do the Watch Him Die achievement.

They greet me by announcing they kicked their last tank "cause he was a n00b" (never a good sign in a pug) and they want me to do this super-easy achievement. Well, judging by the pile of corpses, I am none to enthused, and I've died many times on that very achievement before, so I say sorry, but that ain't my bag. They say nothing, and let me die on the first pull.

Wow, what classy gentlemen. They insist I drop group if I don't help them; I tell them to kick me (reasoning that I won't get the 15 min debuff that way), but they can't, since they kicked the last guy too. So here are the choices I'm staring down: A - leave and eat a 15 debuff for the benefit of some douchers who let me die, or B - stage a sit-in. I stayed in the group, refusing to tank. After 10 minutes, a train set, and some light trolling, they quit in frustration.

So not only do I shave 5 minutes off my waiting for group time, but I also get to run one of the shortest dungeons available. I experienced unmitigated victory over my fellow man; my will was done and theirs was thwarted. I fought the law, and I won. All thanks to Ghandi's teachings of passive non-violent protests.

By the way, can someone answer me why whenever someone leaves a group they think they're screwing you, as if you don't get put in front of the queue?

Guild Spotlight: Raid Attendance

I originally intended to talk about different ways to run guilds here, but oh how the time flies. Anyway, let's kick off a new feature with talking about raid attendance.

I've often been annoyed to log on 15 minutes before raid time, wait around, only to discover that I'm not going at all that night, tough breaks, but you've been to the last two weeks', so give someone else a turn. Which is fine, I understand in a 10-man guild with more than 10 raiders, there's some inevitable rotation. What I don't like is logging on, forsaking an evening's schedule, to then not raid at all.

The system I came up with (read: shamelessly stole from other, more successful guilds) was a pre-determined attendance roster. Basically it works in two steps: raiding times are posted at least a week in advance, and raiders sign up.Then, a few days before that week's adventures, sign ups are closed and the officer(s) in charge hammer out who goes and who sits.

There's still going to be times when someone can't come; that's the pitfall of over recruiting. But at least people know where they stand, and can plan their time accordingly. My guild used this system in T9 content and it worked swimmingly; we've gotten lazy now, and it's a real shame.

But, a challenger appears! I call it the Golden Ten, or Twenty Five, if you're an asshole, system. Basically, there are two kinds of raiders in this guild: the Golden Ten, and the schlubs. The Golden Ten are the ten best raiders, and will be taken over anyone else; the logic is that with the same ten going every week, progression will be speedier, gear more concentrated, etc. If one or more of the Ten do not make it to raid on time, however, their spots are filled that night with schlubs. Guild leadership can change up the Golden Ten roster once a month, for any number of reasons (lack of attendance, poor performance, drama queen elimination).

Now, you'd expect me to defend the attendance roster system rabidly and be shaken with the elitism of the GT system, but I'm not. Nocturne has always been a good-natured guild, centered on fairness, low drama, and a friendly tone. For a guild more centered around progression and performance, GT is ideal. It is unfriendly to newcomers, true, but all the schlub needs is their "big break" and they can be assured a golden ticket as long as they keep their game in top form. They only thing GT requires to work is a core of people with very good attendance (one of AR's strengths is handling complex scheduling difficulties) and an impartial guild leadership. GT and loot council seem like good bedfellows, since they both need responsible leaders to make them work.

At any rate, those are two of my ideas on handling the common guild question, "Who comes to raid tonight?" Hope you enjoyed it.

Ulduar is Stupid

First off, Ulduar is my favorite raid instance in WotLK, maybe ever. It had originality, some surprises, a bombastic vehicle segment, and a boss whose corpse you used as a bridge. But Blizzard has their panties in a knot over the idea of telling an overarching story with their expansion through raiding, and to that end, Ulduar is stupid.

In Lord of the Rings (THE archtypical fantasy story) did Aragorn take a few days off from aiding the men of Rohan deal with their shit to go handle a recently discovered Balrog? No, and do you know why? Because that would be tangential, arbitrary, and totally pointless within the overall narrative. In a book with Tom Bombadill, that's saying a lot.

Shit like that was fine in Old World because there was no grand narrative. Every zone was, more or less, it's own self-contained story, so C'Thun's sudden and unheralded arrival wasn't interrupting any larger story than Silithus itself. In that world, shit like Ulduar is totally legit and awesome.

In Burning Crusade, they tried having a central story, and it worked for the most part, with Zul'Aman being the notable exception. Come to think of it, what's with all the awesome raids being unrelated to the story? Anyway, even the tangential dungeons like Karazahn and Mt. Hyjal had a relation to the Burning Legion, and were generally on topic, if not advancing anything forward.

Now Wrath: Sartherion, Malygos, and Ulduar all had pretty much fuck-all to do with anything remotely to do with the big ol' LK or his bidness. That would be fine if they were just trying to make NORTHREND: LAND OF MANY ADVENTURES AND DANGERS! But no, the story is clearly about the Lich King, and you can't just ignore him, especially in the middle of shit in 3.1.

This is not to say you can't have varied or unexpected raid dungeons, just that they have to be somehow tied to the larger narrative at work. Imagine in 4.2 (let's just say), Deathwing's right around the corner, but we got one more major patch to go. The new raid is... wait for it...

RETURN TO KARAZAHN - A.K.A. KARAZAHN 2: KARA HARDER

Thrall went to Karazahn upon becoming the new Guardian of Tirisfal, but has not been heard from since. The Alliance/Horde's list of allies runs thin, and they need the new Guardian's help to fight Deathwing, so they can wait no longer. Adventures journey through the flying-mount only entrance to a previously unseen part of the tower, to discover Thrall was unable to control his newfound demons. You punk new (NO MORE REHASHES, BLIZZARD) bosses, culminating in a fight with a possessed Thrall, and, finally, the ghost of Medivh himself. Shade of Aran even returns, this time as an ally in the final fight, to give his mad son a final rest.

OK, I am totally stoked on shit like that. It comes out of left field, uses previous canon as groundwork for new content, breaks up the expected enemies of the expansion, and still manages to relate to the fight against Deathwing. Plus it would actually give us a chance to get revenge on Medivh for that time he cheated at chess.

Jumble of Thoughts

Blearg, another month with no posts here. I feel bad, but I've been playing so little WoW, between my other social obligations and moving this week, I just haven't had the time. I tried forcing myself to post in the past, and that results in terrible garbage prose that shames me deeply. I can't really think of anything to go on at length about, so here's a shotgun approach instead.

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There's some debate over hunter pets; one side wants them to be identical except for cosmetics so they're free to pick whatever and still be min-maxed, and the other side wants every breed of tiger to be it's own special snowflake. This is perhaps the biggest false dichotomy I've ever seen outside of Glen Beck's show. Appearance has to be tied to functionality for PVP reasons, but there's no reason there shouldn't be some standardization.

Instead of making a bajillion pets, there should be archtypes that a creature fits into. So there's the "max DPS pet", the "ranged DPS pet", the "tanking pet, the "hamstring pet", and so on. So imagine mammoths, gorillas, and rhinos were all tanks, and functioned IDENTICALLY, but you could decide which is coolest for yourself. Problem: solved.

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I'm ambivalent about AVR going away. On one hand, it was like a cool cyberpunk battle where your deck pointed out cover positions and whatnot, but it was a whole new level of holding the player by the hand. My computer is too ghetto to run such a beefy add-on anyway, so beh. Also, I've seen people die to positioning errors even with AVR, so it's far from idiot-proofing raiding even then. We are not poorer for it's loss.

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One thing WoW could really use is mid-boss checkpoints. A lot of civilized, upstanding games with long bosses use these, especially for between phase transitions. No More Heroes 2, God of War, Bayonetta, all mercifully made sure when we had chipped away 90% of a bosses' health over 10 minutes only to get sneezed on, robbing us of our last sliver of health, all that effort wasn't a total waste.

We spent about 4 or 5 hours mastering Sindragosa, and most of that was managing her crazy ice block bullshit in phase 2 (or phase 3, if you're a dick). The first two-thirds of the fight became akin to the Kel-Thuzzad 5 minute trash pull hell; we've utterly mastered this part, yet we are shackled to this eternal nightmare. There has to be a better way.

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Cataclysm continues to look pleasing, especially the changes to all the old zones. I'm glad they're finally realizing that variety within a zone is a good thing. Look at any Outland zone, they're all one color and texture copy/pasted forever. Except Blade's Edge, that place is cool.

Professions look to continue being a pretty ancillary part of your character, but that's fine in a way; the alternative is re-speccing from patch to patch cause JC is now BiS over Enchanting for SPriests, or whatever. It should be noted, however, that some professions are WAAAAY easier to level than others (Blacksmithing, Engineering, and Enchanting), so I should hope since all professions provide roughly equal benefit, they'll make the tough ones easier to compensate.

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FUCKING TRIPLE SPEC JUST GIVE IT UP ALREADY.

Class Preview Hoedown pt. 3: LETS DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN

I intended to get this out the moment Paladin hit, but I'm a busy man.

HUNTER

So Beast Mastery now gets a signature replacement for Steady Shot; big whop. It looks like they're trying to really prop up this tree, which was the red-headed step child of Wrath DPS. See my comments on Subtlety for my predictions. Mastery is exactly what I would come up with given 2 seconds to think one up. Have fun ressing pets guys.

Marksman and Survival look pretty unchanged, aside from the UTTER UPHEAVAL caused by Focus instead of Mana. I like the change, now Rogues won't feel so special and I always welcome that. Both of their masteries look bleh, but it's worth noting that Marksman Mastery's relative worth will increase as your gear gets better, so keep those spreadsheets handy guys!

I'm interested in the cost/cooldown of Camouflage, and I wonder if it will see use in DPS rotations, since it gives you a damage boost for using it. I also wonder if you can use it on a mount; if not, it'll probably be rubbish most of the time, since it will preclude attacking and moving fast. There's a lot of quality of life improvements for hunters, between no more ammo and more pets, which is nice.

DRUID

It is very lame for Druids that their big lvl 85 ability will only be used by Balance. Well, lame for not-Balance druids, I guess. It could be a lot of fun to play Balance provided all you do isn't starfire/wrath/starfire/wrath, with Nature's Torment thrown around as applicable. If there's like, a proc to, say, fire off two mega-powerful wraths, which you naturally follow up with beefcake starfires. The Mastery by itself just enforces alternating.

Feral looks to be getting much love, with a situational utility move and an extra move for bears, plus a Pummel-like move, AND cat rotation is getting a little easier? That's nice. I wish Stampeding Roar wasn't on such a long cooldown, since it's hard to tell when extra movement speed is needed until Taladrim has already killed everyone. Mastery is fine, but notice how there's two of them, one for cat and one for bear? Methinks they could have used this for DKs, to keep blood DPS alive if nothing else.

TREE OF LIFE ROAAAAR! A lot of Druids seem to think Blizzard won't buff their baseline healing, or the tree's effects, and that's pretty outrageous. I like the idea of one class with a Metamorphosis-like button for healing. Restoration gets basically nothing else from the preview, but that doesn't mean the same thing as they aren't changing; seems like they're just re-tooling their spells. The Mastery bonus is rad, but I kinda wished it had played into the new Tree mechanic more, like Demonology.

MAGE

Arcane looks like the spec everyone will be dipping into if nothing else, since now all mages use Missiles. Arcane Focus returns mana whenever you miss, which seems goddamned useless once you get hit capped. Although, since their Mastery rewards staying at high mana (a bizarre mechanic) maybe at high levels arcane mages will forsake hit gear to get mana back. What a brave new world.

Fire mages, whom I have a soft spot for, cause Pyroblast is awesome, look fairly unchanged aside from minor tweaks, but that's fine I guess. They had the most involved of the mage rotations anyway (not saying much). Their Mastery looks all right, but I have to wonder, with no dot clipping, will Ignite be one dot that refreshes and resets its damage based on the last spell, or will they all pile on top of each other, like Impale?

Frost Mages don't seem to get much initially, but with the Arcane Missile change, plus their Mastery encouraging not-Frostbolt, it looks like they'll become a more interesting spec. Not much to say here.

TIME WARP LOL. Take that Shamans; now you'll have to be GOOD to go on raids.

PALADIN (yay!)

Holy Paladins finally get a raid heal ability, as well as a SUPERBEEF heal to match up with the Cata design. I like that Paly raid healing radiates from the paladin; it makes them unique, and still somewhat limited compared to a lot of others. The mastery is a nice way to keep the traditional desire for +crit going, though it might only come out at high enough gear levels.

Prot's getting distinct rotations for single and multi mob tanking WOOOOAH! I don't think it's really necessary to aim to do this, but if they're nerfing Prot's AoE threat in general, it would have probably fallen out that you don't, say, consecrate a single guy. Mastery is bleh; it does mean Paladins will take consistently less damage, compared to a warrior spiking megablocks.

Ret gains Crusader Strike from level one; that's quite cool. From the end-game perspective, though, no concrete changes for ret, aside from making their rotation tougher. No more smashing 12345 to get mad deeps I guess. Their Mastery is all right, though I fear it turning to a crazy bullshit stat akin to Armor Pen.

Guardian of Ancient Kings is totally shithouse awesome and is exactly what I expect from a lvl 85 ability. Useful to all specs, visually interesting, and very useful. Paladins make out like bandits in this respect.

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There, done! In retrospect, this was kinda a bad idea. It ended up being long winded and forced me to comment on classes I know relatively little about (e.g. rogues). Oh well, it was an experiment, and the point of experiments is that sometimes they don't work. See you next time.