Tag Archives: Cataclysm

That’s why they are called “heroic”

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The great race began at midnight, then barreled on into Tuesday morning. Camping spawns, blitzing from zone to zone, barely reading quest text. All in the hope to be 85 as soon as possible. Of course, it isn’t just getting to 85, it’s all about the epics. Those lovely purple items that make a character so powerful and makes them truly feel like a Hero. This means getting what gear is available and running dungeons until the player’s eyes bleed. In true Blizzard fashion, dungeons come in two flavors, Regular and Heroic. Heroics drop better gear and points which can be exchanged for gear.

In Wrath, many players complained that Blizzard went too far into the “welfare” epics. Implying that by having an epic item drop off the last boss of a heroic instance, allowing players to buy epics with badges dropped from heroics, and having “major patch” dungeons drop the mid level of epic, they had made epics less awesome and amazing.

First off, the belief that something in the game is “rare” or “special” is a fallacy. Nothing is difficult to get, provided sufficient time and persistence. Want all ICC 25 gear? Join a guild that has ICC 25 on farm and show up every run. Want Kingslayer? It was sold on many servers for less than 10k gold. Also rarity in this game is completely relative. Take the Celestial Steed and Rivendare’s Deathcharger for instance. The Celestial Steed is obtained from the Blizzard Pet store for $25. Rivendare’s Deathcharger is a notoriously low drop rate mount from Stratholm. The average number of Stratholm runs to get the mount is 100. Most players give up after about 20, especially since it is not a guaranteed drop after 100 runs. Pinecone of Echo Isles will point to his 242 runs to acquire this mount as proof of the vileness of the RNG. (Random Number Generator.) Logic dictates that the Celestial Steed then would be more common, thus less rare than the Deathcharger’s Reins. Over the entirety of the game, this is likely true.

However, the player base is split across four regions, hundreds of servers, and two factions. So in reality, the rarity of something in relation to a player is really only drawing from a few thousand players at most. In Booze Hounds, of Echo Isles, the Celestial Steed was dubbed “too expensive” for many of the adult players with children. To that end, only 4 of the guild members had the purchasable mount. In contrast, many of these same players were completely willing to spend downtime in the game farming Stratholm, and as a result there were no less than 8 of Rivendare’s coveted mount. In this small sample the Celestial Steed was more rare than the Deathcharger, despite the ease of acquiring it. In the end, when playing WoW, it doesn’t matter what the entirety of the game has, it matters what you, as a player has and the people you play with (generally your guild). The rarity is relative. Was Kingslayer rare? Not in BH, where nearly everyone, including a few alts had the title.

Now, having explained this odd view of rarity, back to the epics.

In Cataclysm, Blizzard returned to the “older” way of thinking. Epics no longer drop in Dungeons, Heroic or otherwise. Epics can no longer be purchased with badges (though likely this will change when the second raid tier is implemented). And Heroics are… frustratingly difficult. The key word is frustrating. Something can be difficult or challenging, but not be frustrating. In the Lich King fight, Defiles made the battle difficult, as the players have to spread out at just the right time, in the proper fashion to prevent chaining the effect. A challenge, with 10 people, but if the effect did chain, everyone knew why. It was obvious.

Heroic Deadmines presents a boss, Admiral Ripsnarl, who spawns adds after he reaches 75% health. These adds have 60k health and must be killed within a few seconds or they double in size and health. If they double 3 times, they explode, wiping the group. Logically, the dps roles all turn and burn these adds down as quickly as possible. When attempting this with my dungeon group we repeatedly failed miserably. In an attempt to understand what was happening, I looked at the various people in our group. Every single member was over the 329 item level required to queue for heroics. Most members were even up in the 340 item level range, in addition to 3 people having the achievement for Cataclysmic Superiority, meaning all of their gear is the blue level to start this expansion. We were a full guild group, with vent, and understood the mechanics of the fight, but it was very clearly beyond our ability. It’s possible we needed more burst dps (with 2 warlocks, we were in the killing things slowly but surely) but hasn’t Blizzard’s motto been “Bring the Player not the Class”? Our tank was well geared, even gemmed and enchanted. Our healer was well geared and healing efficiently. All our dps was doing 10k+. It felt absurd that we couldn’t take this boss down.

The frustration of this fight ruined the night. There was no explanation for why we failed. Everyone was geared at the level the game said we should be. Everyone was playing efficiently, avoiding damage, and fulling their role. This lead me to one conclusion. Either the gear requirements were “off” or the boss was. The boss needed a nerf, or the item level required to queue for the dungeon needed to be higher. With a well coordinated group, on vent, well balanced, we should have been able to succeed with minimal wipes. According to Wowhead, Ripsnarl is a gear check. Does your group have the gear needed to succeed. Blizzard said yes, the boss said no. The inconsistency needs to be addressed.

I don’t think heroics should be easy, I do think they need to be doable, with an understanding of why you fail. I do think that the gear required needs to be clear. In Wrath, a stair stepped gear requirement for harder instances was implemented and understood. Perhaps they need to revisit it for Cataclysm. The worst part was, when someone pointed out that we were wiping more than we had in Heroic Raids in Wrath. And even so, we weren’t fighting for Epics, we were fighting for blues… The group almost immediately fell apart due to the morale dive bomb. Say what you will about Wrath welfare epics… At least the game was fun and I didn’t go to bed more bummed than when I started playing that night.

WTS Level 25 Guild, 250k, PST.

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Guilds have always been a huge deal in World of Warcraft. As a long time player, both in and out of guilds, I can vouch for the fact that a good guild makes *all* the difference when playing. WoW is an interesting game, but is a great game when playing with other people. Of course the reverse is also true, other people can make this game terrible, but I want to focus on guilds.

Want to run a dungeon? Sure, it can be pugged through the Dungeon Finder, but having a guild run serves multiple purposes. First, you are playing with people you know. No drama over who pulled. No drama over who’s fault a wipe is. Also, you tend to work better as a team. Second, loot is so much easier to deal with. Players who will fight tooth and nail over the smallest upgrade in a pug will gladly hand over that same piece to a guildy. Not to mention that if all the people in the run are guildies, then every drop that is used is one more drop making your guild stronger. Add to this three – ventrilo is usually usable, four – breaks are generally accepted easier, and five – it’s just more fun to play with people you know, and there is really no reason to run in a non-guild group if you can get into a guild group.

In Cataclysm, they added a whole new level to guilds. Guild levels. Each guild can earn 25 levels. Each level comes with some special reward or perk. Everything from faster leveling to mounts and pets to increased skill ups and gathers! It is enough to make even the most anti-social want to join in and contribute. Also, contributing is simple. Every thing you do, very nearly, increases the xp of a guild. Leveling? 25% of your xp counts as guild xp! Battlegrounds? Kill those Horde for the good of your guild!

Now, many of the initial nay-sayers piped up with, “But that means mega-guilds will level faster!!! NO FAIR!” Well, yes, a guild with 70 active members is going to level faster than a guild with 7 active members. Logically that makes complete sense. So, Blizzard instituted a cap on the amount of guild xp earned each day. The daily cap on guild XP is 6,246,000 xp. That’s about the amount of personal exp it takes to level from level 83 to 84. No small feat.

I am currently in two guilds. One, a rather large progression raiding guild with about 40-50 active members. For the first week of guild leveling it takes about an hour, on average, to reach our daily xp cap. Even with the nerf (previously 100% of earned player xp went to the guild cap, now it is only 25%, when the 100% was active it took about guild about 30 minutes to hit cap, sometimes less). My other guild is a friends and family guild, that is literally me, and two other players. Now to be fair, I haven’t been playing those toons, and they didn’t have Cataclysm until Friday night, BUT regardless, on our best day, when all 3 of us were on, playing for a few hours, and leveling like mad we earned…. about 19% of our daily cap. This was post nerf, which means pre-nerf, just the three of us would have reached almost 76% of our daily cap. I am willing to admit that I still think these numbers are fair. We are 3 people. By no means a “real” guild. And my larger guild is the very definition of a guild, and an active one at that.

It never occurred to me that this would become a limiting factor. I mean, yes, I was aware of the desire to join a larger guild that had multiple perks (after all who can pass up 20% exp from mobs?) but I never really considered how long it would take to bring a guild up to max. I assumed that a large guild could do it quickly and a small guild it would just take time.

The total XP required for a guild to level from 1 to 25 is 845,670,000 – which translates to 136 days assuming the cap is reached on a daily basis.

136 DAYS. Meaning my little guild, playing our hardest, would be 680 days. THAT’S ALMOST 2 YEARS of solid play from 3 people. 2 YEARS?!? ARE THEY KIDDING ME?!? Now previously, we could “pad” our numbers by running old world stuff with a “guild” group and earning the achievements. But they removed that, so now, we can’t even do that. 2 years.

I was annoyed at this, until I was in Stormwind and saw someone selling a guild. Level 2 guild for sale, 6 tabs, 50k gold. Suddenly I had this image of end game guilds, creating a secondary guild, moving enough players into it to keep it capped every day, then SELLING it for huge sums.

The sadness is, this will limit the number of new guilds formed. People won’t want to be in a newbie level 1 guild. People will flock to the high level guilds to get their bonuses. People will put up with bad situations to stay with the perks a large guild has. Something like when a few friends of mine and I splintered from a dying guild to form our own won’t happen as often. I could see us staying in a negative guild just for the perks. Of course, this negative environment would make it likely for us to have bad experiences and end up leaving the game all together.

There needs to be a change, an adjustment, and some kind of account given to small guilds. You should chose a guild for the people, not for the perks. And yet, Blizzard is rewarding perk seeking behavior, for all their “bring the player not the class” they are now saying “seek out the bonuses instead of having fun”.

A Questing We Will Go!

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Azeroth is Shattered. (For those of you who don’t play WoW, this means that the patch applying the expansion hit, despite the fact that the expansion doesn’t come out until the 7th.)

Rather than having an entirely phased world, Blizzard decided it would be better to “force” the changes on everyone. Especially since this is essentially an upgraded version of the Original WoW. WoW 2.0 if you wish. So all the changes were pushed to all the players. And man, were there a metric ton of changes. As a long time player, and a fan of clearly undervalued achievements, I had already completed Loremaster on my main, Joyia. I was excited to see in the flood of new achievements, zone specific achievements for the Original WoW quests. (Previously all of the Original WoW quests were merely lumped together into Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, now they are broken down by zone, with the Kali and EK achievements being metas requiring all the specific zones.) I couldn’t wait to watch all the dings from them when I logged in.

However, when I logged in, I didn’t receive a flood of achievements. Oh one or two, but not the 40 or so I should have gotten from all the quests I had completed. As it turns out, Blizzard made *far* more extensive changes than most players originally assumed. Instead of updating a small number of quests and adding new ones, they updated about 95% of all the quests in the game. In addition to adding new ones. This means that a majority of the quests were re-numbered in the system. So while my “quest total” lists at over 2000 quests completed, I have barely 50 total listed under the various zones.

I grumbled a great deal about this change. But, I looked on the bright side, at least now I had a good reason to go back and see all the changes. So I went to go see Duskwood, my favorite zone, and started to re-run all those quests.

To say I was impressed would be an understatement. Not only did they adjust the flow of quests to be better for the player (gather several quests, make a lap of the zone, return to turn in quests, repeat) but they also updated the quests to take into account things the player did in the previous incarnation of the zone. If you were a fan of the zone before, now it is better.

(Spoilers!!!! – Can you even believe what happened to Sven?! That was AWESOME! –Spoilers DONE)

I might have complained about the quest re-numbering and wipe originally, but now I am thrilled. I will be sure to re-visit each zone, read all the new quests, and experience all the new shiny the game has to offer. Also it makes it a great deal easier to get my Seeker title. Bravo Blizzard, for not taking the easy way out when updating the old world. For taking the time to revisit each quest and make it fit within the new design ideals solidified in Wrath and Burning Crusade.

Where were you when the world Shattered?

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Where were you when <insert event here>? It is common to reminisce about “life changing” events by starting the conversation with this question. Usually these events are large, world changing things. Most people wouldn’t take note of such an event in a virtual world.

On the old WoW forums, there was a thread that asked, where will you log out when WoW ends? People had wide and varied answers, from the original spawn point of their character to the floating islands in Nagrand. Many players even listed what their character would be wearing or doing at the moment of the world ending. At the time, I really didn’t have an answer. Perhaps the Opera house of Karazhan. Perhaps the Stormwind Cathedral. Most often my answer was, in an inn, where I always log out. I never made a decision, because I wasn’t forced to. WoW wasn’t going to end any time soon.

Fast forward to November of 2010. The Shattering is upon us! (For those who persisted and don’t play WoW, today, 11/23/2010, the entire Old World of the game is being “destroyed” by the evil dragon Deathwing. Which is Blizzard’s excuse for an art and gameplay upgrade to the oldest parts of the game.) The world, for the character’s point of view, was ending. So where was I going to log out?

At this point I decided that no two characters would log out in the same spot. Each character would have their own reasons and logic for the place they chose.

  • Joyia, my main, a Human Warlock, chose to log out in Stormwind, the capital city of the Alliance. After all, she was born in Silvermoon City, and yet that place had ceased to be home. So she went to the Slaughtered Lamb for a drink, then stood in the Valley of Heroes to watch the world burn.
  • Pandari, my Night Elf Priest, chose to log out at the moonwell in Auberdine. Many people disliked Darkshore, but I hold a fondness in my heart for this night elf leveling zone, one of the first places I truly explored in WoW. Her healing arts would be needed in the tidal wave to come.
  • Summerriver, my Draenei Shaman, stood overlooking the Barrens from atop a mountain peak. Her shamanist powers telling her the source of the disturbance was here, and here was where she would be needed.
  • Feirea, my Human Mage, chose to stand by the side of Lady Jania Proudmoore. If her services were needed, she wanted to be near command.
  • Pandara, my Night Elf Death Knight, returned to the Acherus, her world already ended, but at least here, she could have some peace.
  • Birgitta, my Night Elf Hunter, on a hill in Winterspring, where she first turned level 60, looking into Hyjal, a zone that seemed to be coming to life.
  • Lumos, the Human Paladin, bringing light to the people of Darkshire. Patrolling Duskwood to cleanse it of Worgen and Undead.
  • Lindrelle, the Night Elf Rogue, battling for Southshore, against the vile Horde.
  • Dizdemona, the Human Warlock, on the hill overlooking Booty Bay. The crisp sea air blowing across the bay, whispering warning of distaster.
  • Leafdotir, a Night Elf Druid, returned to Ashenvale, to battle back the Horde, and protect the great forests from the upheaval.
  • Pouf, my Gnome Death Knight, on a hill overlooking Darrowshire. Perhaps she could help that poor lost soul, searching for her family.
  • Roivas, the Human Priest, a banker at heart, deep in the mountain of Ironforge, guarding her stockpiles against looting, with the hope of making a few gold once the dust settled.
  • Riaetha, the Draenei Priest, in Thousand Needles, watching a race.

Each of these locations are significant to the character, or significantly changed in the Shattering. It’s my way of saying good bye to all those locations, npcs, and quests that I experienced that are going to be lost in the change to Cataclysm. As odd as it sounds, I am going to miss some of this. I am sure the changes will be mostly for the better, but one can’t help but be nostalgic.

Alright, done with that. Now, on to the imagined Elitism that comes from being able to say: I remember when the Barrens was 1 zone, had a terrible chat channel, and I LIKED it.

The Wrathgate

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As a game designer, one should always be on the look out for really good ways of doing things. Always playing new games to get new ideas and learning new tricks. Each exceptional game you play is merely a lesson in how to (or sometimes how not to) do something.

It also shows the mark of a good company when they are able to take a tried and true formula and improve on it. Blizzard did this with a sequence of quests in the most recent expansion of World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King. Now there is still the standard fetch and fed-ex quests, but then there are quests that are clearly the main course of this expansion. One series of quests leads the player through the Dragonblight and hits several minor lore points before culminating in the event of the expansion.

Not only do they reward the player for their persistence with a glorious cutscene but it is followed up with a quest where the player attacks Undercity alongside King Varian and Jania, if you are Alliance, and with Thrall and Sylvannas if you are Horde.

Wrath of the Lich King, as an expansion, very much seemed to have the design philosophy “Make it feel like you are changing the world.” Phasing, a technology that allows the developer to change an area for each specific player was widely used in the expansion. As a player completes quests in a zone the NPCs, locations, even enemies change and shift to reflect the actions of the player. Quests chains tend to be much longer, far more lore steeped than before.

In the Battle for Undercity, it uses phased zones of the three major cities: Orgrimmar, Undercity, and Stormwind, to keep the player from being distracted by standard gameplay. It also pushes the player to complete the event immediately, as they can’t choose which phase to enter. Once completed, the player receives an achievement, Veteran of the Wrathgate. Then from that point on, the area surrounding the culmination of the quest in the Dragonblight is forever changed. Fire burns, bodies are strewn about, weapons lay alongside the fallen. It looks like a battle has been fought, of truly epic proportions, and your character participated.

It should say something that I always make the effort to complete the Wrathgate series on every character I level in Northrend. The lore, the cutscene, the sheer beauty and poetry of the quest line and event is a treat I am unable to pass up. And I have done it 5 times. Each time I revel in the quests and get very excited as I approach the end. I watch the entire cutscene and feel the tears prick my eyes.

Blizzard has managed to take a standard formula, make it exceptional, and make it endlessly re-playable. It leaves my appetite for Cataclysm whetted, with the hope they not only continue to do this kind of thing, but expand and improve it.

(Note: This is also very true of the Death Knight starting area. I honestly wish that people could get a trial version of the game and just play a Death Knight until they were out of the starting area. Yes, many of the jokes and references would be missed by new players, but it is still one of the most well designed and interesting parts of the game. The starting area does many of the same things that the Wrathgate does, minus the cutscene. Unfortunately one must have a level 55 character and Wrath to be able to even start a Death Knight. My fingers are crossed hoping that the starting areas in Cata are at least similarly well done, if not exactly like the DK starting area.)