What Is This Place?

It seems like I picked a bad time to start a blog when I did back in December. I was active at that time but then came the Holidays and January had me pretty much AFK. A few years back I wouldn’t have taken a break from the game (if I had been playing it anyway) but now I was feeling the burnout and had to get away.

Ideally, I would’ve played other games extensively. But that was not the case as my gaming system is much less than ideal. Apart from some time in Portal 2 co-op I was away from gaming. My PC is a laptop which I pretty much use for everything. I carry it from home to work and work to home every day. It’s been like this for almost 3 years now so I have to ask myself: How had this not happened sooner?

Despite the lack of comfort I feel while I play, I came back this week to play. The Guild is different. There are people that didn’t come back after the Holidays at all and there’s some other that are the new de-facto active players of the guild (not that we need to get to level 25 anymore, since we got that with the New Year).

When I left, 4.3 was all the rage and I was excited about DS. I was a bit skeptical about playing again, both due to the heat problems and my burn out issues but so far so good. I’m a bit discouraged that some of my friends are not playing as frequent as they used to and that we no longer have enough people to raid. The place is not a ghost town and I’m looking at this as a chance to grow (or rather regrow) the guild. I’m fairly optimistic at this point. Seems like we have 6 months until Mists drops and I want the guild to have a constant group of enthusiastic casual raiders by that time.

Before I forget: Updated Mists of Pandaria talent trees! I didn’t have a chance to look at them thoroughly but currently there are no level 90 talents for shaman. I’ll get around to this new iteration of the talents.

No Blizzcon

I’ve been silent these last weeks. Game time has been cut a lot, raid time is zero. Some guildies simply stopped showing up after the holidays, and I can say I’ve been partly guilty of this. But I don’t want to talk about how’s my game time or my guild today. I want to talk about the big news: No Blizzcon 2012. Is it truly the end of the world?

I don’t think so. It’s been a long time since I have been so enthusiastic about something that Blizzard has said. I remember the time when they said that 2010 would have only two new games coming out, and one of them was not Diablo III, and I remember the time when they shelved Starcraft: Ghost. Both were real disappointments to me. What is it so different this time? Well, for instance, is not something I won’t get to play but rather an event I won’t get to see (because I can only dream of going to a Blizzcon ever). It is also the wording they used:

We’re excited to be showcasing Blizzard eSports on a truly global stage this year. We’re also heavily focused on getting Diablo III, Mists of Pandaria, and Heart of the Swarm into players’ hands as soon as possible. In light of our jam-packed schedule, we’ve decided to hold the next BlizzCon in 2013.

I mean, wow. They have awakened the dormant fanboy I have in me. I now proceed to daydream, come along. In my dream, Diablo III is released in the first four months of the year, Mists of Pandaria in the next four months and Heart of the Swarm between September and December.

They said last year that DIII will be out by Q1 2012. Now, we have heard similar speeches in the past only to have them ditch the project or postpone its release. We know they just made some big changes to the game in the beta and that they need some more time to test those out. I honestly don’t know how this beta tests work:  what is the process of behind them to polish the final product. But who’s to say that they can’t do very extensive testing in two months (given that they just had another beta test key giveaway through Facebook/Twitter). It’s all up to the players and the kind of feedback they give Blizzard, but I’m optimistic about this (yes, I’m putting faith in the community. Send me LOLs in the comments if you want).

Mists of Pandaria is another story. They’ve been meaning to take less time to release games/expansions since as long as I can remember and they actually have the chance to start doing that with this expansion. Now, they don’t want DIII and MoP cannibalizing each other’s game time. It’s going to happen anyway, but they don’t want it to happen for too long, so that’s why I’m posting that MoP would be released between May and August (with July/August being the main candidates). Now, we don’t have the numbers of how many people took the Annual Pass, but the release would be mainly for those that didn’t and those that, one way or another, took it but then cancelled it. Oh, and this expansion has to be fantastic, and by fantastic I mean there has to be lots of stuff to do. I’m not sure they can pull on the “fantastic” front, but I do hope they can pull the mid-year release.

Finally, I have to be honest: I have no input about Heart of the Swarm. I just said that because I’m dreaming and if all of these happen Blizzard will get back some cred they have lost recently. Because I know everybody will be so happy/shocked if Blizzard Entertainment released three games in a year. Without the pressure of preparing a kickass event like Blizzcon this year, this goal becomes much more likely.

NOTE: I will be laughing at the end of the year when DIII has been canceled, Mists has been released around the time when Blizzcon should’ve happened and Heart of the Swarm is stated for Q1 2013. Also there’s some Mayan calendar thing. But I’ve only been good with football (or soccer, like some call it) predictions for the World Cup. If you take my predictions seriously (like I’m doing), take them at your own risk (hey, that’s what I’m doing).

New Years Resolutions

This year is coming to an end. It was a good on. Some of the stuff I managed to do include and are not limited to finding my guild, learn to raid, defeated some bosses in the process, got my Glory of the Cataclysm Hero, became an officer and, last but not least, started a blog. All of that without a plan. Just stuff I picked along in the year. I did good without a plan, but I wanna try something different this year, and I’ll be using my blog to follow my progress on it all. I’m making new year’s resolutions. And this is my list:

• Get a new PC: My old laptop is having trouble. I definitely must get a new computer if I want to play well in Mists of Pandaria. The most annyoing thing about my laptop now is that my WASD keys get so hot, I end burning the tip of my fingers. The tricky part about this goal is that I have to save money and I’ve never been good at that. Also, I will need a raise. So that gives me a second goal.
• Get a raise: No explanations here.
• Get 3 more characters to 85 before Mists: Kind of generic goal. I just want more options to play with in the next expansion. I’ll start with either my hunter (27) or my priest (37) and then I’ll decide which class is next. DK and paladin sound interesting. It all depends on when Blizzard releases the next expansion. If I get my priest and hunter to 85 by may, and Blizzard hasn’t yet announced the release date, I’ll go with paladin. If my time’s short, I’ll go with the DK.
• Get Loremaster: I work on this one on and off. Cataclysm and Northrend are done. I have Hellfire and Zangarmarsh from Outlands, half of Eastern Kingdoms and none on Kalimdor.
• Get my own blog hosting: I know I can do this. Sometime in the future.
• Get featured on WoW Insider’s The Daily Quest at least 3 times next year: I’m aiming high on with this one. I know one thing, my writing is a bit rusty. I haven’t written much since I was in school so I will have to point that as one of the reasons I am not doing as good as I would like to. Also, English is a foreign language to me. I live in South America, but I play on a North America server, while I get to practice it a lot, I could be better at it. I will try to be better a it.

Am I playing it safe or my goals are too high? Only time will tell.

Happy New Year!

What a Long, Strange, Patience Testing Trip It’s Been

I totally skipped a Christmas post. I shouldn’t have but I did because as everyone knows, it’s a crazy time of the year. Instead of being a calm time, every year ends with a bang (and in some cases family drama). It is a crazy time for me for one particular reason: its summer here and I see snowmen everywhere. What’s up with that? In any case, merry delayed stuff to you all. It’s a bit late, but I prefer Festivus myself.

Over the past year, WoW Holidays have wrecked both my nerves and patience. And all of this is because I want my achievement and I want my dragon. I know some of these achievements are very easy and some other are just time consuming, yet, my nerves and patience have still suffered. I have been working on them on my shaman for over a year now and with every new holiday that arrived the fear of not getting all the achievements that I need for the big, long one crept in. Is it a silly fear? I don’t think so. The idea of failing to get one of the little ones and that it would prevent me from getting it FOR A WHOLE YEAR is a very valid fear. From all of the achievements ever created, this is the only one that has a set time between when it’s started and when it’s finished.

PVP Achievements: The Sum of All Fears

I am not a PVPer. That’s the reason I went to a PVE server where I could just ignore the other faction altogether and play the way I wanted to when I wanted to. And I was discouraged a bit when I saw some of these achievements requirements. It wasn’t bad the first quarter of the year.  Lunar Festival, Love is in the Air and Noble Garden goes without PVP achievements and that’s just fabulous. Then, along came Children’s Week and the despised School of Hard Knocks.

Some of these were easy and some were very painful to get. Arathi Basin was easy. I ran into a group of generous horde in Alterac Valley who were capping one tower flag with the purpose of getting alliance players the requirement. I loved all of that. Eye of the Storm was a bit trickier and required several battles to get, since there is only one flag and you’re competing against the players in your team as well. In the end, the ability to heal myself and shifting into ghost wolf form served me well. Then I was left with Warsong Gulch, which I’m sure it’s actually one of the nine circles of hell. Grayeard camping? Your team is not functioning as one? Did you failed to click or were not at the range of the flag when it drops? These are all very common in WSG. In the end I got it, after several tries.

I noticed the high amount of players trying to get it while I was. At the expense of sanity, I then queued alongside a guildie for WSG so she could get it (mostly as moral support). It was the last day before the Holiday ended. I had to. The thought of people not getting it, even if it was their fifth character, makes me sad.

There are other PVP achievements of course, but none feels as hard as School of Hard Knocks. It seems to me like the achievements system should have more of these, the kind that feels rewarding as opposed to some others.

Other faction achievements: Why can’t we be friends?

This is the other side of the coin. Being on a PVE server, you never really get to interact with the other faction (the wrong one), unless you do Tol Barad a lot. But during the Holidays I would venture into Orgrimmar more than I wanted to. During this time I learned a few things:

• There is not many people ready to PVP on their own city
• Finding troll rogues is hard
• Finding tauren females is hard
• Finding troll females is even harder
• Trolls are either hiding or there’s not a lot of them

In the end, the greatest surprise I had didn’t happen during any of these Holidays but instead during Pilgrim’s Bounty, when I went to Orgrimmar and found a group of horde rogues, ready to aid any and all that needed Turkey Lurkey. Then I checked Stormwind and there was a group of alliance rogues as well. It was nice to see both factions collaborating with each other, at least on my server. Although, I can´t predict what will happen when I start working on Old Crafty.

Bosses

I think I need to say a little something here: Holidays bosses are OK right now. Ahune inside The Slave Pens is OK. The Headless Horseman inside Scarlet Monastery is also OK. But Omen and The Greench are OK in the open world too. As Fannon from Dwarven Battle Medic pointed out last week, we as players have grown to have a lot of self-entitlement, then they put the Greench on the open world instead of a dungeon (perhaps the first hallway of Utgarde Pinnacle would have worked, theme wise) and we get a bit of uncomfortable in our chairs. Just because it’s a game, doesn’t mean it has to be easy all the time. Fannon nails it in that post. He also mentions Mark Knopfler. That is noteworthy.

Achievement fun

I can’t say I didn’t have fun. Chocolate hunting for Chocoholic was fun. Down With The Dark Iron was fun, if only for getting smashed in the process. And all of the fly to X to do A achievements were great too. I got to see the world the way it is and I visited areas I didn’t saw before. Besides, having a reason to go outside (Azeroth or RL) is always fun. World Event achievements belong to those odds and ends every game needs, especially if it has such a great reward in the end. I feel rewarded. I feel like I did something that is not easy and it took me a long time. Also, not much grind here. Am I onto something here? Take a guess. But mine is that these kinds of activities in game are better left rare. I am currently just missing some of the Lunar Festival ones, so in a month from now, I’ll be done, finished. And that’s an exciting thought. I guess I’ll got for profession achievements after I finish these.

Enh or Ele?

I’m a good healer. It is a personal opinion and the opinion of others. At least for 5-mans and normal mode raids I manage to be the top healer, or a very close second in our raid group. I don’t want to keep this part of my post for much longer, but I’ll just say a PUG tank said I’m a pro once cause I managed to keep everyone alive in a trash pull gone bad in Heroic Shadowfang Keep. Yep, I’m PUG approved and there’s no better kind of approval in this World of Warcraft.

However, when it comes to DPSing, I do a lousy job. I barely do 13k DPS, I pull aggro off the tank because I’m not on his target then use Thunderstorm to get them off me and I need more heals tank the tank very often. I don’t even have the gear for it. I just use the same gear I have for Resto on my Ele spec. My guildies know that I don’t like to DPS so they don’t give me that job in 5-mans a lot, but I eventually have to do it if some other healer wants to step in. For guildies: yes. For PUGs: hell no.

I leveled as Resto (group)/Ele (solo) and stayed like that a while after I hit 85. Then I changed to for a short while to Enhancement, which was a lot of fun with the exception that I did even less DPS than what I did with Ele, but it was probably because I didn’t complete a full set of agility gear but rather kept wearing a few intellect pieces because I couldn’t get agility mail to drop. After that, I decided to go back to Ele since it was easier, I did better and I didn’t really needed 2 sets of gear. As bad as my excuses sound, they are what keep Ele as my offspec.

But then, I started leveling my warrior again a few weeeks ago. That’s when doubt began haunting me, yet again. I was Arms, then a bit as Fury, then Arms again and I gotta say I loved both specs and melee DPS in general. Questing and dungeoning like this felt very good. I felt engaged at all times. Having position the mob I was working on so I don’t pull more than I can handle and watching my health bar more than I actually do normally when I DPS on my shaman felt much more interesting than nuking things from a distance.

The thing is this: I’m not leveling my shaman anymore and I won’t be doing it for at least 8 to 12 months. Do I really need a spec to DPS right now? There are still dailies to do, but lately I’ve been hitting Northrend and Outlands more. I guess this a question all hybrids class players face at one time or another, being druid the closest to shaman when it comes to choices.

Since 4.3, and the little time I’ve spent on the new dungeons, I’ve seen a lot of agility mail drop and no spirit/intellect so far. Is the RNG giving me a sign? I’m still split between the two specs, one of them being easier to play and requiring less time to set up, while the other would feel more rewarding and potentially, more fun. In the meantime, I’ve rolled greed on the agility mail and kept the pieces I’ve been winning so far. I guess my mind is made up already, but this is not the end of my Enh vs. Ele dilemma. But is a fun and interesting dilemma I’m having every day.

A quick commentary on the LFR Drama

By now, we know what has happened with the LFR system and the loot exploit that top guilds in the world used to get gear from Dragon Soul. To keep it short, the exploit consisted on forming a full group for LFR and joining. When it was time to loot the boss everyone in the raid disconnected and one player on the raid logged back and had free loot without having to roll for it. This doens’t seem bad, but players were able to do it multiple times, therefore getting all the gear they wanted.

Obviously, things like this polarize the community. Some blaming Blizzard for their incapacity to fix a bug that was -allegedly- reported to them and the other siding with Blizzard for banning the players involved. There is no gray area here.

I’ve seen dozens of analogies on the internet so I’ll make my own. Is the Tour de France fair if the winner has consumed banned substances to have more resistance? No. Do we blame the companies that make this products available? No. Do we blame the physicians that administer this drugs to the cyclist? No. We all blame the one that had the active participation in the race. Those “athletes” are the ones that get a suspension from competition and rightfully so. Now, this exploit is very elaborate to just be accidental.

I don’t care if Blizzard has not banned in the past for exploits (well I do care, actually), but if they are starting to enforce some rules on the race to world’s first from now on that is a change in policy that I welcome and embrace. People in high places get away with it too often in this world, it’s nice to see we can start to get some justice, at least in a game. Will this affect the outcome of the World’s First Madness of Deathwing? It’s too early to tell, but I’m hoping it does.

My 4.3 Post

Patch 4.3 has been with us for a week now and, I must say that it brought a lot of surprises to me. It’s one thing seeing all of those changes in the patch notes and another to have them with me. Riptide buff is gooooood. On the offspec side of things I’ll just say this: Elemental is now the King of AoE. I might have to move Chain Lightning to 1 and Earthquake to 2. The one thing that bothered me about Elemental has disappeared.

On the other hand, the change I mostly regret missing (for now) is the decrease in the experience to level 70 to 80. It is a very much welcome change but I sadly, with the WoW Anniversary and the added 7% experience, leveled my warrior who was sitting at 74 all the way to 78 and a half without the patch even dropping. I feel kinda bummed that I missed that this time around. A few queues on LFD with the dungeon quests (yay Blizzard for putting the quest givers inside the dungeons!) and a few more quests did the trick and now my beloved draenei warrior is sitting at 82, halfway through Hyjal. Needless to say, I find warriors a lot of fun. I thought Arms was fun then I moved to Fury and OH BOY. Then I got Colossus Smash and things are going to sleep much earlier now. It won’t be long until my guild has their first 85 draenei warrior.

I couldn’t experience the new 5-mans until Wednesday and the FLR and the new raid in normal mode until Friday. These are the highlights of this any patch so I’ll get down to business.

New Dungeons

I’m going to be as honest as I can be with this one: I already hate the new dungeons. They are far too easy. I am not by a long shot a very experienced player but I think I’m good at what I do and that is keeping people from dying. The only fights I can think of that are actually challenging for me are Queen Azshara (or should I say, Queen Azshara’s Minions) and the second boss on the third one (names fail me now) on which I spent most of the time silenced cause I don’t understand the mechanics in it (yet). My guild is great and they can avoid Mannoroth’s fire and the likes but I seem to be idle most of the time when I’m there. I do reckon though that the first dungeons that came out with Cataclysm were hard, the trolls were brutal so they had to make tier easy, at least. Also, these bosses seem to hate me because I can’t seem to see anything other than agility mail dropping.

From a lore loving guy’s perspective, I love them. I don’t even have to tell you why. They even added an achievement called That’s Not Canon in which you have to wait until another NPC kills Mannoroth. I LOVE IT. But aside from that I find the dialog poor (“strike in an area”) and the voices strange (guess who). I just want to get the loot, get the achievements and get outta there. They are fast, so that helps too.

LFR

I actually lied. I experienced LFR for the time on Tuesday (patch day!) but only until the second boss before I had to go. My first time there and people are already getting impatient since I landed on a mostly guild run. This are a few lines that happened before trash pull:

Tank: “pass the leadership to me we are a guild group and we are in vent”

Random PUG1: “can you give vent info?”

Random PUG2: “lol we don’t need vent this is a glorified dungeon”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the remark, which overall is true. LFR is a Baradin Hold/VoA level of raid except it is always there for you to go and down bosses. The run went smoothly to be honest. Few people dropped group, we one-shoted both bosses and it was fun doing new content overall. I died one time on to the void on Morchok but I quickly ankhed and learnt from my mistake.

My second time there was as smooth as the first one. I got a group that obviously had more experience with the raid and a bossy raid leader. I did manage to die a second on the last boss and stayed that way for most of the encounter (I ankhed but died as fast as I got in my two feet).

No loot for me on the first week here so far.

I feel like this is the one feature that when it was announced made the community go “OH GOD NO, OH GOD NO” but now that is here with us we have embraced it. In retrospective, I don’t know what is it what we feared the most. Was it getting a group of randoms for a large and concerted effort? We’ve been queuing for large battlegrounds for ages now and those take as much group effort (or more) to pull off as a raid. Kudos to Blizzard for this one. You’ve done very well.

Dragon Soul

I feel like I should let you know a bit more on my guild at this point.

My guild is a casual guild. When I joined 8-9 months ago I was promised raids and a friendly environment. They took a while to deliver on the former, but delivered instantly on the latter. We started raiding Tier 11 when Tier 12 has already been out for months. Needless to say, we finished Normal mode and moved to Tier 12. We still haven’t defeated Ragnaros a guild (we hit a wall there, gearwise), but some of us have in PUGs. We haven´t spent much time inside Firelands and we weren’t at the point where we could say “OK, that was the last piece of gear any of us needed. GG”. To be honest, we only did less than 12 hours of Firelands raiding on my guild, and that was throughout all of November.

What I am trying to say is that we didn’t do well on our DS night. I mean we had our moments but overall it wasn’t our best night. We did Morchok with 9 people cause our boomkin was running late and we one shoted him. We were very confident at that point, morale was up. Then we decided to go to Zon’ozz and things started to not go well. It was a mix of people dying to the debuff he applies to healers and DPS because they weren’t at appropriate health level to be dispelled and tank dying to Psychic Drain. I think us healers were not gear accordingly and it showed. We wiped like 6 times and then our poor Raid Leader just said “Any ideas? Cause I have no clue.” We stopped trying and instead went to Yor’sahj which turned out to be a high point for us. We wiped to the Berserk timer the first attempt and managed to kill him 2 seconds before the Berserk timer finished the second time. The day later our raid leader told us he was really happy with our group because we wiped at 10% on our first attempt, so that made means we had 10% more DPS on the second attempt even though we got pretty bad Globule combinations on the fight.

My Dragon Soul impressions are incomplete, to say the least. I like to look at it like the top guild’s see it: the real work start on the second week.

In a nutshell

I like the patch. I can’t help it. Between transmogrification and the new, unexplored raid it seems like there’s a lot to do for me still. I can’t help to wonder what the possibilities for my guild are. We might even go to past Tiers and try heroic modes. Not now, hell no, but sometime in the coming months. And I think that is something most guilds should look at as a possibility. Unless Blizzard surprises us with one more patch before Mists. But that is wishful thinking. Or a topic for another time.