On Raiding Disappointment: An Open Letter to Blizzard

When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure - Peter Marshall

Dear Blizzard,

As a subscriber who came to World of Warcraft with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Cataclysm represented my first true opportunity to get in on the ground floor of new content. For the first time I felt as if I wasn't lagging behind everyone else and was finally experiencing content the way it was meant to be experienced. I greeted the new expansion with a lot of anticipation and enthusiasm.

Cataclysm introduced many controversial changes, many of which were not received terribly enthusiastically by the community. I, on the other hand (being an avid Kool-Aid drinker), was thrilled with a lot of the changes, and incredibly excited to see the new content, experience the new levelling experience and, most importantly, to progress through the new raids. I understood the need to make the game more accessible, and supported the changes.

In fact, I was very frustrated with a lot of the complaining and the griping coming from the WoW community. Back in March I wrote a post critizing the community for having a "Doom and Gloom" outlook on the current state of the game, saying that people come and go, but the game itself was in a good place.

This week, you proved me wrong, Blizzard. I now feel compelled to add my voice to the chorous of the discontented.


Lord Rhyolith: Call me Admiral McROFLStompyPants



And it's because this week saw the introduction of significant nerfs to the Firelands bosses, crippling each boss - in both normal and heroic modes - anywhere from 15 to 25 percent in damage done and health, as well as simplifying several of the more difficult mechanics. This was done in an unprecedentedly brief time period since the raid was released.

Regardless of what your intention is, the significance of this change is instantly and universally understood by your player base: If you didn't clear Firelands before this nerf, you failed. Here are your free charity epics.

This is the exact same message that was sent regarding Tier 11 when Tier 12 came out. Didn't clear it before? No problem, let me hold your hand and walk you through it. Don't worry, the Internet Dragons are toothless now, so you won't get hurt. Just try to stay awake, okay?

At least back then we had a new, full-difficulty raid tier to busy ourselves with. Reducing the difficulty on previous tier content in order to allow more people to see it makes sense, at least. And it worked; raids were able to go back into Tier 11 and cut through the bosses like a they were barely there, and mechanics that were previously raid killers became irrelevant.

These changes to the current tier are completely inexplicable and inexcusable. They go too far, much too soon.

I mean, it's not as if people were complaining that the Firelands bosses were too hard. Quite the reverse, really; early on a lot of people were complaining that Firelands was decidedly too easy and that Raid Teams were blowing through it far too quickly. And it wasn't just the elite raiding guilds that were expressing this opinion, either.

Our raid team, for instance, is not at the cutting edge of progression. We are never likely to compete for a Realm First but neither are we at the bottom end of progression. We are probably the poster children of your average raiders; a casually-oriented guild that raids 6-8 hours a week. We expect to tackle the encounters, learn them and defeat them as they were originally designed.

Why aren't you giving us the time to do this?

My guild and I have been raiding Firelands from the day it was released. We were a new guild then, still gelling as a team, but we went in and got things done. Some of the encounters were really challenging and tested us; we wiped more than a few times on some of these bosses, which made downing them that much sweeter. I don't cheer out loud - causing my wife to give me strange looks - when we down an easy encounter. No, that is saved for when we overcome a significant obstacle that has stood in our path blocking our progression like an obstinate traffic cop. I like cheering, Blizzard, but where are the obstacles?

Wednesday night we went through Firelands after the nerfs and did six bosses. The difference in the level of difficulty is painfully obvious. It's actually invasive. Bosses that previously required precise play, good communication and teamwork even at good gear levels are now simplistic and easy. Lord Rhyolith, for example, lasted less than 10 seconds into Phase 2. I didn't even have time to get into position before he died. The burn phases of Shannox and Beth'tilac, which were previously heavy-damage phases that required the use of healer and tank cooldowns as well as skillful play to get through, are similarly laughable. As a healer, it seemed like Health Bars barely moved in those phases.

There is no thrill or enjoyment in beating up crippled children, Blizzard, and that's what you've turned these raid bosses into. You might as well give Fandral Staghelm a wool cap and a cane and rename him Tiny Tim. I actually felt sorry for Rageface the other night because he died so quickly, and his whole purpose for living - to Rage on Faces - was no more painful than a puppy dog licking ice cream off your toes. It does not qualify as something to be concerned about any longer. PETA will be hearing about this.

I think that in the pursuit of the noble goal of making the game more accessible to a larger variety of people a large chunk of the challenge of World of Warcraft has been removed. Many aspects of the game have fallen victim to this, with the endgame being the most notable and most damning, but even levelling is now so quick and painless that there is no sense of danger left in the game. Even without heirlooms, enemies fall over dead with little more than a mere glance, and there is a distinct lack of worry that something is actually dangerous. Low level dungeons are, even with poor gear, ridiculously easy, which is especially obvious when the vast majority of boss fights last under 30 seconds.

In fact, there is so little challenge left in WoW that your players are taking it upon themselves to make the game more difficult. Your very intelligent and creative players are coming up with things like the WoW Ironman Challenge and the Naked Dungeon Challenge just so that they have something to do that doesn't involve one-shotting the poor denizens of Dun Morogh on yet another overpowered Alt.

Thomas Paine said, "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value", and I think that is a lesson that has been forgotten. There is a benefit to difficulties, a benefit of failure. Overcoming adversity is how people learn and improve, and it's how fierce emotional attachments are created. Raiders who raided Molten Core don't look back on the gear that they got with such love and devotion because getting it was easy, but rather because the blood, sweat and sheer red-hot effort that they expended to get it has branded it into their souls.

I think it's time to put the challenge back into the World.

BALANCING ACT

I understand that balancing the many different types of players and trying to make everyone happy is a difficult, if not impossible task. I can't think of a more thankless job that trying to please eleven million people, all of whom want something different, and at the same time trying to feed the corporate overlord's insatiable lust for profits.

I know that there are quite a number of people who are happy with these changes to the raids because it gives them a chance to finally see the content. But I think that there is a difference between seeing the content and experiencing the content.  The idea of merely seeing the content reminds me of a tourist: Someone who comes to visit and see the sights, but wants to have a good, relaxing time and not really get their hands dirty. While experiencing the content implies slogging through the worst that the raid can throw at you and working through the inevitable failures and hardships. These are two very different types of players who want two completely different types of gaming experiences.

However, nerfing current content when there is no alternative, higher-end content available means turning everyone into the Tourist.

I know that Patch 4.3 is brings us the Raid Finder tool and a new difficulty level that caters to the Tourists, PUGers and people who just want to see the content but are, for whatever reason, unable to raid at the normal difficulty levels. I'm sure it's your hope that this elmininates the need for nerfs such as these, and I'm optimistic that it will work very well. But that doesn't change the fact that in this patch, on this raid, you took away my challenge.

We're going into Firelands to kill Ragnaros for the first time this week. Last week it was an exciting prospect, now it's just something to do on a Sunday. Oh, we'll get the achievement, but the accomplishment has been made lesser. Like Roger Maris, I will forever have an asterisk next to my 7/7 achievement.

Sincerely,

Fannon

Dwarven Battle Medic and Dissatisfied Raider.



Ragnaros: Still tough, but 25% less satisfying.

 
 

Previewing Patch 4.3: The Make-or-Break Patch

Well, Blizzard has begun releasing new information on Patch 4.3 - the upcoming final major content patch of the Cataclysm expansion  - stoking the fire of the hot-air fuelled Rumour Juggernaut and setting it off to steam-roll all over the realm of common sense.

Confirmed are such new features as Void Storage and the Transmogrifier, as well as three brand new Heroic 5-man dungeons - one of which is a Caverns of Time instance in a "known location". A new raid tier is planned as well, culminating in an epic encounter with the Aspect of Death himself. Blizzard promises that this fight will be "unlike anything you've yet encountered in World of Warcraft".

Reactions seem to be ranging from swaying in rapturous joy to threatening to quit the game. According to the doomsayer-types, these changes are unconscionable and herald the end of WoW - but they say that every Tuesday, so let's just ignore them for now.


INSPIRED BY CALVIN AND HOBBES

Definitely the most talked about feature of 4.3 is the Transmogrifier. Transmogrification will work similarly to reforging and will allow a player to make any current piece of gear cosmetically look like another, similar piece while still retaining the original stats. This means that it will now be possible to defeat Ragnaros in Firelands while wearing armour that looks exactly like the Tier 1 armour that he was killed with back in Molten Core.

It seems that, for the most part, Transmogrification has been greeted with an almost hysterical excitement. It has also been suggested that this pretty much removes all pretence that we, as players, are not doing anything other than playing dress-up with dolls; only with Internet Dragons and Sparkle Ponies.

I finally get to Raid
wearing my favourite shield

I am intrigued by this feature, but not jumping for joy about it. I haven't ever been one to save gear for sentimental reasons, so I don't have an entire wardrobe of old Tier sets to choose from. But then, I'm not the target audience for this particular feature. This is aimed at the long-time players who look back fondly on their favourite gear and wish they could wear it again.

I'm in the minority opinion, I think; a lot of bloggers and long-time players are already planning farming trips to old raids and scouring the old tier armours for the look that they want to rock when this goes live.

This feature, along with it's companion feature Void Storage - which gives players a place to store all the sentimental stuff they want to keep but have no real use for - are very nice nods to the long term players. It isn't going to fundamentally change the game in any way, but it will certainly make Stormwind a more colourful place to hang out.


NO IDLE THREAT

One change that is definitely going to happen, if it hasn't already been hotfixed in, is a change to the way Tank Threat works and have a Tank able to generate Threat much faster than before. Ghostcrawler wrote a thoughtful post on Tank threat on the Official WoW Blog, but the basic idea is that it isn't fun for a DPS to intentionally do less damage (and therefore less threat) simply to compensate for a lesser geared tank, nor is it fun for someone who is just learning how to tank to worry about raid-geared threat-monsters pulling mobs off just by sneezing at them. As a Damage Dealer, who wants to just stand there and merely do White attacks because you're sitting at 105% Threat?

This change is made necessary because the reality is we live in a world ruled by the Dungeon Finder, and the fact that, for the most part, you don't get to choose who is in your group. The Dungeon Finder does a decent job at ensuring that most of the people are at the same gear level, but when there is a shortage of tanks, which is most of the time, then the group is stuck with what's available. And sometimes that means running through Zul'Aman with a new tank in a whole lot of Blues; forcing the DPS to either do less damage and therefore less threat, or making the Healer go out of his mind healing the group when the DPS inevitably pulls aggro.

Wrath-Style

In effect, by ramping up Tank threat much quicker to compete with amphetamine-fuelled Burst DPS, Blizzard is taking us back to a more Wrath of the Lich King style of Tanking where, as long as the Tank doesn't do anything stupid, it's very difficult to pull aggro of him.

I think this is a great idea.

Making Threat generation, and therefore Tanking in general, easier is really the only way to finally solve the LFD Tank shortage problem. Actually, it's not even about making it easier; it's about making it more fun and less frustrating. Doing everything right and yet still failing because your group simply outgears you is not fun, and I think causes a lot of people to give up on the idea of Tanking before they have the gear or experience to make it actually enjoyable and not comparable to painful dental procedures.

Of course, as Ghostcrawler mentioned, it is still possible to get undesired attention of a mob by attacking the wrong target or using an Area-of-Effect ability too soon, so the DPS aren't going to have free reign to do whatever they please. Damage classes simply shouldn't be able to pull off a Tank once he's established his initial Threat, as long as the Tank plays correctly.


HEROIC VARIETY

The biggest mistake that Blizzard has made during the Cataclysm expansion (at least, so far) was releasing only two Heroics with Patch 4.1. The Zandalari Trollroics are good dungeons, both challenging and varied in the encounter design. But after running them non-stop for what seems like an eternity, I am sick to death of them and never want to see another Troll as long as I live. I would like to see Blizzard not make the same mistake with the three new heroics they are talking about for 4.3.

According to the Preview, 4.3 is going to be the final major content patch for the Cataclysm expansion - barring a Sunwell-esque surprise Raid Tier. This means that whatever content is included in 4.3 is going to have to last us until the next expansion is released (rumoured to be tantalizingly named Mists of Pandara). We're going to be running this content for a long time and that means that if Blizzard wants to keep our attention and its subscriber numbers up, these dungeons better be compelling and varied.

If Blizzard goes the route of the Zul'Roics and places these new dungeons in a separate tier, with an increased level of difficulty and better gear, they run the risk of the same level of burnout happening as we're experiencing now. Running the same two dungeons over and over again is an excellent way to remind your subscriber base that it's summer and there are other things to do.

At least with WotLK Heroics there was a much greater variety of dungeons to choose from, ranging from the very difficult Halls of Reflection, the dreaded Oculus or to the simplicy of running Utgarde Keep for the four hundredth time. Could you imagine the backlash from the playerbase if we would have been forced to run nothing but the three ICC heroics for the last 8 months of the expansion?

With things as they are now, I am forced to run Hero-dalari Dungeons in order to cap out my Valor Points every week. There is no respite from these two dungeons unless I want to run twice as many regular heroics - which is impractical to say the least. Give us more variety, Blizzard! Either give us the ability to queue for all the Cataclysm heroics at the same time for the same VP rewards, or give us more dungeons per new Tier. I'm begging you!

On the other hand: THREE NEW HEROICS THAT AREN'T TROLL DUNGEONS! HOORAY!


DEATH TO DEATHWING, ASPECT OF DEATH!

The Big Bad. The Final Fight. The Alliterative Aspect of Annihilation.

When 4.3 lands we will finally get our revenge for constantly being murdered randomly as we're trying to level up fishing or grab a screenshot: Deathwing will be the final raid of 4.3 and likely the wrap-up for the Cataclysm storyline.

No details have been released yet, and speculation is running rampant as to what kind of fight this will be, what other bosses we'll fight and where on Azeroth we'll be fighting Deathwing. Nothing about the fight has been hinted at yet, but this blue post claims it will be like nothing we've ever seen before. Exciting stuff!

Entering completely into the realm of wild-eyed speculation for a moment, I envision three different, gated raids for the final raiding tier. The first two would need to be cleared before the third Deathwing-only raid would be unlocked. I think a small, 3 boss Raid set in Deepholm and a larger 8 boss raid in a new location that would, lore-wise, clear the way to the final, epic confrontation with Deathwing.

To date, there has been no mention of a lair or other place that Deathwing hangs out when he's not frying lowbies in the Western Plaguelands, so really, we could be fighting him anywhere. This image implies that we'll be fighting him on top of a mountain somewhere, but I had my way I'd want to fight Deathwing right here:

Varian's front porch would make for a great raid room. Although
Deathwing would need to knock down a bit of stuff first.

Why does Deathwing need to have a lair, anyway? Isn't he randomly flying around the world torching everything? The first step in any Deathwing encounter, in my opinion, should be to find him out in the world and attack him there, rather than doing the same ol' thing of assembling a raid at the entrance to a cave where [Insert Loot Piñata Name Here] is conveniently waiting to be killed and give up his stuff.

In the encounter that I would design, each week a Raid Instance portal would appear in a random zone throughout Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, forcing people out of the capital cities on Tuesday morning to look for the thing. Once found, the standard Meeting Stone would be there to help summon the rest of your raid. The coolest thing about doing this is that the actual terrain that the Raid would fight Deathwing on (at least for Phase One & Two - keep reading) would change every time. But from a lore perspective, it would tie everything together: Varian or Garrosh have had enough of this dragon destroying everything and devise a cunning plan to stop him.

Here's how I would design an epic fight to take out Deathwing:

Phase One: Capturing Deathwing
After finding the portal and zoning into an instanced version of whatever zone the portal happens to be in, the Raid comes across Varian or Garrosh and a small group of Battle Mages who have devised a way to knock Deathwing out of the air and hold him. This will require the raid to defend the Battle Mages against waves of summoned Fire Elementals (or something similar) while dodging Deathwing's fire breath from above. The mechanics of this fight could work similarly to Magmaw in the actual chaining. Regardless, this phase is fairly short.

Phase Two: On the Ground.
The Battle Mages manage to ground him, but as he's just too powerful they cannot hold him for long. The Raid would fight a partially subdued Deathwing on the ground and have to deal with all the tricks that a very pissed off dragon in command of the element of Earth can possibly think up. Giant Earth Elemental adds that need to be tanked, insta-kill pits opening up beneath people's feet and giant impaling spikes are some of the possibilities, in addition to having to deal with random, devastating flame breath attacks, claws and tail swipes.

Phase Three: In the Air

At some point, either at a certain percentage of health or after a certain amount of time, Deathwing breaks his bonds and begins to take flight. The raid have to use a mechanic (ropes, magic catapults, jetpacks - really endless possibilities here) to climb on his back before he takes off. While he's flying, he'll call a couple of Black Dragonflight lieutenants to kill the pests on his back and periodically try to knock the raid off by yawing either left or right. When he does this, the Raid will need to grab on to pieces of Deathwing's armour to avoid falling off and plummeting to a very sticky death.

At the same time the raid is dealing with the two dragon lieutenants, they will also need to do damage and destroy Deathwing's armour plates so that he will be vulnerable when he lands. The most interesting aspect of this idea is that the Raid will be destroying the very thing that they need to grab on to so as not to fall off, making management of how much armour to destroy critical - especially because each plate that is destroyed will expose Deathwing's molten insides which, of course, would not be wise to stand in.

Phase Four: Home to Roost
Once the Dragons are killed, Deathwing will reach his destination: Stormwind or Orgrimmar, depending on faction. There would be a short cinematic showing Deathwing landing and destroying the Stormwind Citadel courtyard. A whole legion of Dragonkin will teleport in and keep Varian Wrynn and the Stormwind Guards occupied while the raid has to deal with the boss.

This would be an all-out fight to the death. The Raid would first need to finish whatever armour is left over from Phase 3. Once that is completely gone, Deathwing becomes a dragon of pure flame and the fight really begins.

I'd like to think that Blizzard would pull out all the stops with this fight and include new, never-been-done-before mechanics that are too awesome to imagine or speculate on. I think that as far as previous Raid encounters go, doing something like this would be incredibly epic and tie together all the different ideas that Blizzard introduced in Cataclysm nicely. I am very excited about fighting and killing Deathwing, and I really hope that the fight lives up to the sheer epic potential of fighting a foe of this magnitude.


CONCLUSION

There is a lot riding on Patch 4.3. For whatever reason, the entire Cataclysm expansion has been met with an overwhelming wave of indifference and at times outright hostility from the player base - particularly the long-term players. It seems clear that the final patch of this expansion will make or break Cataclysm's legacy.

There is a feeling among a lot of players, although I personally am not one of them, that World of Warcraft has lost its way. And with new and exciting competition either upcoming or already on the market, Blizzard needs to end this expansion with something fresh and exciting to recapture the faith of the masses and remind everyone why World of Warcraft is still worth caring about.
 
 

Day Seventeen: Favourite Place in the World (of Warcraft)

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days. Originally I had hoped to do one post per day, now I just hope I get them all done in the same month.


DAY SEVENTEEN: FAVOURITE PLACE IN THE WORLD (OF WARCRAFT)

"I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own." - Andy Warhol

When I first stepped foot into Azeroth as a new Dwarf, I found myself in wide-eyed awe at the world that I found myself in, and wandered the snowy wastes of Dun Morogh for hours soaking in all the details. I was amazed at how large the world felt, and how it had a definite sense of place, as if it actually existed in reality. Since then I have become quite attached to the little virtual world we inhabit, even as it grows smaller from familiarity.

Before the great Shattering it would have been very easy for me to tell you where my favourite places in the game world were. They were the places that felt unaffected by all the chaos in the world; little pockets of normalcy in a world gone completely bonkers. They were the places where you could see a little snippet of normal life in Azeroth - where the biggest problems that the people have are other people's prize-winning pigs, finishing the construction of a bridge, or the gigantic yeti living in the hills above your house and eating your livestock. You know, everyday-type stuff.

Dun Morogh, Loch Modan, Southshore in Hillsbrad and Redridge Mountains were some of my favourite spots because of this.

Loch Modan in particular felt like a vacation spot: beautiful scenery, a big lake with lovely water-skiing potential, and not much to worry about other than the odd trogg or ogre who kept to themselves for the most part. I always thought of it as the place that my character would retire to when he was done adventuring. The most alarming thing (aside from the smell of the ogres) about Loch Modan were the five or six Dark Iron dwarves trying to blow up the dam. But I always got the feeling that they weren't all that serious about it, and that they were just doing a half-assed job to keep their supervisor off their backs while they chilled by the lake and smoked the Dark Iron equivalent of a doobie.

For Sale: Vacation home with scenic view of mud, murlocs and giant, rotting fish carcasses.
Dirt cheap or best offer.

And then Deathwing came and blew it up for them. Goodbye serene, beautiful lake, hello slimy mud pit.

Aside from the occasional attack by ninjas, unstoppable undead killing machines, or an army of frothing-at-the-mouth Horde players bent on massacring every Alliance lowbie in the area, Southshore always felt very peaceful; a piece of untainted Lordaeron that escaped the ravages of the plague and remained a reminder of that once great kingdom. It was so peaceful that in order for the quest givers there to have anything for the players to do, they had to send them to an entirely different zone.

Mourn for Southshore. Plague slime stains are impossible to get out of your tattered, zombie rags.

That is, until the Forsaken needed a new toxic waste dump. I mourn for the people of Southshore. People like Bartolo Ginsetti and his weird fascination with ravaging the local Yeti population to make sure that everybody was dressed as badly as he was.

On the other hand, as favourite places go, I also enjoy the forlorn, tragic lands of Lordaeron that were devastated by the Scourge. The Plaguelands had an emotional hold on my heart-strings since the day that I first read about them; the stories that were told there were extremely touching. Mournful tales of loss, heroism, betrayal and death were everywhere. Places like Andorhal - destroyed by it's own food supply, Caer Darrow betrayed, corrupted and ultimately destroyed by the very people charged with protecting it, and Darrowshire and the battle that condemned its defenders and its daughters to a mournful unlife. Sad, wonderful tales that tell of the suffering of the people of that dead land.

What the hell? Where are my zombies? I come to the Plaguelands for
hordes of ravenous zombies, not corn!

Of course, with the death of Arthas and the fall of the Scourge, the cleansing of these zones is well underway. There is still a lot of wonderful stories here, but the Plaguelands have lost the tragic air that made them so compelling. There is something deeply unsatisfying in cleansing a farmer's field of angry mutant pumpkins when compared to a horde of mindless, pitchfork-wielding zombies.

Duskwood is another great, atmospheric zone that ranks high in my list of favourite places. I have always loved the undead as a villain, and Duskwood was packed to the gills with them. Before Blizzard reworked the zone you would spend hours upon hours in the Raven Hill Cemetery surrounded by ghouls and skeletons of all sorts. Duskwood had terrors aplenty for the level-appropriate soul: Stitches periodically wandered the road, ruthlessly slaughtering anyone not paying attention; Mor'Ladim wandered the cemetery and would dispense his elite, undead fury on anyone who got within his incredibly large aggro radius; and the rare spawn Commander Felstrom who annoyingly resurrected himself just when you thought that he was dead.

But at least there's always Raven Hill Cemetery. Fewer ghouls than before,
but always good value for your undead hunting pleasure.

With the rejiggering of the questing experience, however, the zone has lost a lot of its dark charm. While the Embalmer storyline still exists, it ends in an phased battle against Stitches in the burning town of Darkshire, removing the ever-present danger of randomly meeting an elite abomination ten levels above you. The sheer number of undead haunting the graveyard, and the time spent questing there has been drastically cut. It's still one of my favourite places, and the stories being told are still great and the flow of questing is smooth and flawless, but the atmosphere that they create is not as captivating as it once was.

In the end, with everything taken into consideration, the place that holds the most emotional attachment to me is Dun Morogh. The snow-covered peaks of the Dwarven starting area are gorgeous, quaint, homey and have a majesty to them is only rivaled by the much more greatly detailed Howling Fjord. I'm sure that my fondness for this zone has to do with it being the first zone I set eyes on, and walking its roads evokes the memories of those first innocent days of playing the game.

The great Dwarven city of Ironforge.

I always imagined that my dwarf priest Fannon lives there in a little home tucked away high on the shoulders of the mountain that Ironforge is carved into. In the only piece of Warcraft fiction I've ever done, I wrote a little bit about that in a post from last month.

It's odd which zones will capture your imagination. In thinking about this article I'm trying to come up with the specific things about Dun Morogh and Ironforge that appeal to me so much to make them my favourite zone in the game, and I can't really think of anything. I can't point to specific quests that are charming, although I always found Brewnal Village fascinating: a whole town that is so drunk on Barleybrew that they can't even be bothered to construct any buildings, but are content to live in tents as long as there is beer to be had.

The feel of this zone is, to me at least, undefinable. It's home, and that's what matters.


Yesterday, DAY SIXTEEN: WHAT I MISS POST-CATACLYSM
Tomorrow, DAY EIGHTEEN: MY FAVOURITE OUTFIT?

  

Finally!

I logged in late Monday night to grab a couple of screenshots for a post I am working on, and as I am flying through the Western Plaguelands I see this:

He's comin' right for us!

All I can say is: FINALLY! I have been waiting for that stupid dragon to kill me for months now! I think he's been avoiding me, frankly. Our relationship has been a little bit strained ever since that party a couple of years ago where we both got completely drunk and he kept bragging on about how he was going to destroy the world - and when I told him he was full of shit he stormed around the room, flailing his arms and breaking furniture and saying how he was the freakin' Aspect of Death and how he'd show us all. Nobody really took him all that seriously due to his spotty, teen-age moustache and the purple Kylie Minogue T-Shirt he was wearing, but eventually he passed out and his girlfriend Sheila dragged him by the ankle to her mom's Buick.

OK, that actually didn't happen.

But, yay! Achievement!
 
 

The Death of WoW and the Circle of Life

It is safe to say that World of Warcraft is going through something of a transition these days. The change to Cataclysm's new style of play has not been easy for a lot of people – particularly people who have been playing this game for a long time.

Evidence of this is all around us. Every time someone gives up healing or tanking because it's too hard, there it is. Whenever we hear that a long time WoW player has dropped his subscription we're reminded of it. Every time that a player drops WoW for Rift and starts spamming Twitter with an incessant stream of achievement spam, we can't help but notice. Whenever a beloved, long-time WoW blogger closes up shop, a flagrantly obvious fact is right there in your face like a village full of murlocs:

WoW isn't the same game that you fell in love with six years ago.

Over the past couple of months, many notable WoW bloggers have decided to retire their blogs. Tam at Righteous Orbs, for instance, and most recently Larisa at Pink Pigtail Inn has called it a day. Many others have quietly faded into oblivion without so much as a 'farewell' post - their blogs going dark, leaving their readership to wonder. There is no question that the WoW blogging community is smaller and less brilliant because of their loss of these voices that we were so accustomed to hearing, but as Vidalya at Manalicious so elegantly put it, "other's endings are not my endings".

Being plugged into Twitter and the Blogosphere means that it's impossible to not hear grumbling and griping about all sorts of things and very rarely do we hear someone mentioning how great something is. We bloggers are, if nothing else, champion complainers - and it's not a hard stretch to imagine that hearing all the doom and gloom would affect our opinion of our game and our community to the point where we would begin to believe that it's dying.

I'm curious how a WoW player who isn't active in the community feels about this game and it's health. Do they look at their guild and the competition for a raid spot and feel that the game is hemorrhaging people? Do they think that losing a long time guild member means that there is something wrong with the game? Or do they look at it as the natural way of these things?


IT'S NATURAL

With any game that sticks around for a long time, it's natural for people to come and go as their level of interest waivers. I'm not sure how anyone could play the same game for five or six years - or any length of time for that matter - without losing interest or feeling burnout at some point.

Before I started playing WoW, my game of choice was Counter-strike, and I played it for a long time. I ran my own large clan of players, operated my own public server, a private server and Ventrilo server and even competed in organized league play. I was as involved in that game as it was possible to be. Over time, the game became much less fun and the only thing keeping me coming back was the relationships I had with my clanmates. Eventually I quit, disbanded the clan and moved on. It was a very tough decision.

I see the same thing happening with WoW. I know that when I left Counter-strike the game continued on just fine without me, and the same is true when someone from the WoW community leaves. This game is bigger than any of us and will soldier on as we leave.


CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHANGES

For better or for worse is still a point of great debate, but there is no question that World of Warcraft has changed a lot in the past six years.  And whenever change happens there are going to be people who don't agree with or like the changes. There is no way to please twelve million people, and as I mentioned in my 2010 Peevie Awards, it's the definition of insanity to try.

The people who are most likely to be left out in the cold when change happens are the people who have been around the longest. These are your raid leaders, guild officers and respected, pillars-of-the-community types. And in the blogosphere, they are the ones that have become institutions.  "Oh, [Popular Blogger] could never leave, he's been here forever and he's too good to ever quit." Of course, it doesn't work that way. Quite the opposite; they are the most likely to drift away to something else.

Losing one of these bloggers or guild members is hard, but it says nothing about the game or the community or your guild as a whole. The health of any community is determined by the strength of the people involved, and as someone leaves for other things inevitably someone else will come forward to take their place. New raid leaders will step up, a guild will pick a new leader with new ideas, and new bloggers will begin writing to fill the void.


THE CIRCLE OF LIFE

In the past few months since Cataclysm several high profile blogs have shut down, but even more new bloggers have taken up the blogging challenge. These blogs aren't high profile yet, and they don't have the readership numbers of the blogs that have quit, but they are providing fresh new voices for the community to listen to. Different styles, new opinions and formats are being injected into the community everyday.

That's what tells me that our game and our community are doing just fine. This community and game are far from stagnant, as the new and vibrant voices are showing in every corner of the blogosphere.

The circle of life continues.


NEW VOICES

Vidalya issued a challenge in her post: Introduce and link to a new blogger.  I love this idea, and even as a new, post-cataclysm writer myself, here is a list of recent blog starts that have caught my attention. All of these blogs were started around the time that Cataclysm launched, although I'm using this criteria fairly loosely.

Muradin Musings by Janyaa

Unleashed Rage by Bloody Gneisha.

Ask a Salty by SaltySlainte

Mortigan the Lock by Mortigan

Zwingli's Blog by Zwingli (An older blog that has recently returned from the ether.)

Beer Bacon Brawling by Beerbelly.

Healer Aggro by Ttrinity

The Casual Raider by Jack

Rants of a Priest by Morituri

Elfi's World by Elfindale

Cleansing Waters by Mylindara

Specced for Drama by Ama (Who turns out to have been around longer than I thought... her blogspot blog has only been around since November, tho!)

Stand in the Blue Circle by Alacran

Word of Glory by Lynesta

Heavy Wool Bandage by Glorwynn

Healbot by Gina

And more!  I'm quite certain I've missed a bunch of people, and I'm sorry for forgetting you! If you have a newish blog and would like it listed here, leave me a comment and I'll include it.

Lament for the Shieldless

I just did something unpleasant that made me feel a little weird.


First off, I dinged 83 last night on Thosif, my Paladin. That wasn't the unpleasant thing; on the contrary, leveling felt really quite good. I immediately hearthed to Stormwind and trained Holy Radiance, the Holy Paladin's new bread and butter group heal. I am really looking forward to trying that out tonight. My next post will likely be a run down of how the first dungeon with HR goes and my impressions of the spell.

The unpleasantness actually happened earlier in the evening during a random Stonecore pug run where I obtained the Prophet's Scepter for my main healing set.

"So what?" you may ask. And you'd be right. It's a nice leveling off-hand, and it's certainly a large upgrade from what I had previously. Thats not the problem.

Stockholm Syndrome

I play on a very old, very full and very busy server.  It's not really surprising that there are queues to get in after a major expansion or content patch.  This time around it's been awful, however.  2000 people ahead of me in the queue and an hour wait or more is not uncommon.


What surprises me though is after sitting and staring at the login screen for that long, Deathwing is actually starting to look really cute and adorable.

Cataclys-meme response

Janyaa over at Muradin Musings posted a list of questions asking about initial impressions of Cataclysm which incidentally coincides with Blog Azeroth's current Shared Topic.  Since this blog is very new, and I'm not above cheap and easy content, here are my answers.

1. Disk or Download?
Disk. I bought the Collectors Edition on Tuesday in the late morning. More for the L’il Deathwing pet than anything. I was a little worried that I would have a tough time finding one, but my local Future Shop had stacks of them.

2. Did you experience any difficulties? IE: Login servers crashing, late delivery, etc?
No problems at all when I installed it. There was no queue on Tuesday afternoon when I logged in for the first time. I did run into a nasty bug that made the boat from Stormwind Harbour to Darnassus disappear, tho.

3. What are you doing first? IE: Speed leveling to 85, rolling a new race, completely avoiding the new content, etc?
Leveling to 85. It’s now official, my Paladin is my main. I didn’t even give my priest a second glance before beginning to level the Pally.

4. Mt. Hyjal or Vash'jir?
Hyjal. I actually meant to do Vashj’ir first, but my brain got mixed up and I ended up going through the Hyjal portal instead. By that time it was “Meh… I’m here already”.

5. Worgen or Goblin?
Both, eventually. I created the Worgen druid that I’ve been itching to create since I heard that there was another druid option other than Night Elves (eeewwwwww). The Worgen don’t look as cool as I was hoping for. I created a goblin on a different server and they look awesome! Finding a great name for a gobbo was a lot harder than I thought, tho.

6. Questing, dungeons or both?
Both, of course. With 100k xp for just doing your daily random Cataclysm dungeon, why wouldn’t you? I’ve already got some great gear out of Blackrock Caverns, and the dungeons are not nearly as hard as everyone was saying in Beta (50 Whacks with a Wet Nerf Bat). As of this writing, I am just about to ding 82 and most of the way through Hyjal. The only problem I’ve found with dungeons is being required to find the Entrance before you can queue for it in the Dungeon Finder. I love that idea in theory, but it’s annoying in practice.

7. What was the first piece of gear you replaced and with what?
My retribution set is being completely dismantled now. One of the very first quests gave me a new 2-handed green sword to replace my Tyrannical Beheader axe from the ICC 5 mans. As of now, I’m in about ½ quest greens/dungeon blues. My holy gear hasn't really been touched yet, however. I think I have only a new trinket from BRC and maybe one green upgrade.

8. Did you take any time off from work or school?
No, sadly. I had Tuesday off, but that’s it.

9. Will you be keeping the same spec and main, or changing to a different toon?
I changed my main halfway through Icecrown Citadel, so I think I’m good for now.

10. What's been your favorite aspect of Cataclysm so far?
New content is new! (I just lost the game, btw). Also, this is the first expansion that I’ve been max level for and it’s been interesting to see the mayhem that is the leveling zones. It’s amazing seeing dozens upon dozens of people all doing the same quests. The gigantic pile of bones around Baron Geddon in Hyjal was seriously impressive to see.