A Good Day

Over the past month or more I admit that I have been neglecting poor, ol' Battle Medic, and not without more than a little guilt. I have not, however, been neglecting the game entirely. I have been sneaking and conspiring, negotiating and stealing rare moments to indulge in Azeroth playtime whenever there was an opportunity.

And the majority of that time has been spent blowing stuff up. Mage-style. Warlocks beware.

My little gnomish pyromaniac has slowly and painstakingly progressed into the mid-60s and is slogging through the mire that is the Outlands.

Anyway, today was a good day. I have been intermittently fishing the high, lonely lakes of Terrokar Forest for the Mysterious Mr. Pinchy for a long time now. Every single skill point in Fishing that my Shaman has achieved has come in the futile hunt for this nearly-mythological crustacean. But no luck. Never even a sniff.

Until today.

Today was a good day.

Sightseeing and Raiding Achievements

"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein

Perhaps one of the more lamentable facts of life when it comes to World of Warcraft raiding is that as each new tier of content comes out, the raids and dungeons of previous tiers tend to get quickly abandoned like an awkwardly phrased metaphor. This phenomena typically gets worse the older a raid is until the only time people will visit is to do the raiding equivalent of sightseeing. Now that's all fine and good if the purpose is simply to revisit a raid that has been completed previously for the sake of nostalgia, but what about someone going in to see a dungeon for the first time?

There are some magnificently complex and wonderful encounters in these old raids. The truly sad thing is that the typical sightseer will go in as an overlevelled and overgeared wrecking machine and rip through these old bosses with the same level of delicacy as it would take to open a Chunky Soup can with a stick of dynamite. Bosses die and encounters are completed with no regard to the very mechanics and elements that make the fights actually interesting. The end result is that the player smacks around some poor, lonely, underpowered bosses and gets the achievement for completing the raid, but doesn't actually experience or understand the raid on anything but the most superficial level. It's rather like going to Paris and never leaving the McDonalds in the airport; you get the stamp on your passport to say you've been there but can't really say much other than the hamburgers are awful.

Sadly, this essentially renders the Raid achievements and the titles that are associated with them meaningless.

Take my Shaman and Paladin as examples. My shaman wears the Starcaller title for defeating Algalon. She got it long after Ulduar was relevant, as an 85 in a full raid of level 85s. I defeated the encounter but really don't have an appreciation of what the fight is all about, nor does the title have any true emotional value; it just looks neat.

My Paladin, Thosif, on the other hand, typically wears his Kingslayer title with pride. I earned that title with my previous guild Shadowgarde through a lot of hard work and effort while the encounter was still the pinnacle of raiding (Halion just doesn't count and everybody knows it). The title and the achievement have meaning to me precisely because I feel that I earned them. The fact that a person can take a group of 85s and blitz their way through Icecrown Citadel in an hour and get the title makes it feel a little less special as well; I know I earned it, but others would probably just assume I got it the easy way.

Now, before anyone gets huffy and starts calling me an elitist, this is just how I feel about it personally. There are lots of reasons that people like going into old raids and dungeons at high levels, and I am certainly don't want to take anyone's fun away. But for me, the thrill of raiding comes from the challenge, and if I'm going to experience a raid for the first time, that's how I'd prefer to see it.

The obvious problem is that it's virtually impossible to get a group of people at the appropriate level in the appropriate gear together at the same time to run an old raid. Very few people will halt their levelling progress on a new alt long enough to gear him to run a raid, and even if someone did it's unlikely that they would be able to find enough other people who were doing that at the same time. It comes down to motivation: There simply is no incentive to do an older raid at the proper level. It's much simpler to either get a guildmate or two to run your alt through it, or wait until you're maximum level.

THE TEMPLATE: HERALD OF THE TITANS

There is, however, one singular achievement (technically a Feat of Strength) that a sightseeing raider can't get: Herald of the Titans. This little gem of an achievement requires a player to be the appropriate level as well as have the appropriate gear for the encounter. No overpowered tourists allowed.

This title is unique in that it is only available for a limited time while a character is level 80 and once you've passed that threshold you're out of luck on that character. If you want the title now, you're going to have to pause your XP, gear up your level 80 alt and find a group willing to go with you and kill the encounter the old fashioned way.

In essence, what this achievement does is make this single old raid encounter permanently relevant.

This achievement is not new—it's been around since Ulduar itself—but as we move into the new expansion I think it can give Blizzard a template for future raids. Why couldn't each new raid tier have a meta achievement with similar requirements to Herald of the Titans, each one with a unique and desirable vanity reward such as a mount or pet? The players that are running it while it's current would get it as a matter of course, but it could give people reasons to run the previous tier with their alts using the proper gear even after it is no longer the cutting edge. This would allow people to get the feeling of Burning Crusade and Vanilla raiding (of having to progress through each tier sequentially) if they want it, but would not actually require anyone to do it if they didn't feel like it.

And while we're on the subject, why couldn't Blizzard add similar achievements to older raids? Why not bring the Hand of Adal title back, but require that only a level 70 in a level 70 raid group could get it? How difficult would it be to reinstate the Immortal and Undying titles from Naxxramas with a character and item level restriction? What would be the effect of a Karazahn achievement that awards a miniature Wolfman or Strawman pet? Would there be a massive move towards creating level 70 raiding teams on Twitter to farm this beloved raid instance? If the rewards were unique enough, the hardcore would likely start frothing at the mouth to get alts to the proper level to get them.

Hell, a new Lady Vashj title might even make Kurn resubscribe for Mists.

Blizzard has made a big fuss about making sure that there is lots of things to do at maximum level, but adding a couple of these little achievements and rewards scattered through the beloved and excellent older content would give people things to do before max level that are equally important to do. Right now, the content is massively weighted towards the maximum level, and that is by design, but that also means that—by design—there is a massive amount of content that the vast majority of people will never get a chance to experience properly.

With the advent of Cross-Realm Raiding and soon Cross-Realm Zones there will potentially be lots of players who might be interested in halting their levelling progression on an alt in order to do some older raiding for their one shot at a unique reward. It may help remove the pressure to level as quickly as possible just so that there's something that they can do with their friends, and allow people to stop, smell the roses and actually experience the content that's out there in this big, virtual world of ours.

The Lament for Theramore

Thee Theramore! O sadly lost!
Alliance lament frae coast to coast.
Now war grips, the barking host
May kill us a';
For noble Jaina's fabl'd post,
Is ta'en awa'.
Dwarvish Lament for Theramore *

It is the worst kept secret in the World of Warcraft that Theramore is going to be destroyed in the pre-expansion event leading up to the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion. The details are still unknown, but the destruction of the city will change the Alliance's position in Kalimdor drastically. At this point it's unclear as to whether Theramore will be in Alliance or Horde hands, whether it will remain a quest hub or become an instanced scenario of some kind, or just be left as a smoking, purple glowing crater in the ground.

And while others (ahem, Rades) have speculated on what the destruction of will mean to the Alliance from a lore perspective, I want to talk about what it's going to mean from my perspective as a life-long Alliance player.

What brought this topic to mind is that I was watching this video of what Theramore will look like after the Horde have their way with it. It broke my heart a little bit.

DUSTWALLOW MARSH

Even the name isn't really evocative of a place you'd choose to go willingly, and certainly Dustwallow Marsh isn't exactly a vacation spot. It's not pretty or scenic. In fact, it's downright dreary and just plain creepy; the sort of place you'd expect a spider to drop down out of the trees at any moment as you're walking through it. As a player, I get an ominous feeling when adventuring in Dustwallow, particularly in places like the Wyrmbog with it's wandering Dragonkin, Witch Hill and the spirits that eternally haunt it, and Darkmist Cavern with it's endless supply of eight-legged beasties.

In stark contrast to the impenetrable depths of the Swamp stands proud Theramore, a small but gleaming (relative to the rest of the marsh, at least) Alliance city perched precariously on an island. Compared to the rest of Dustwallow and Southern Kalimdor, to the Alliance player Theramore seemed like a bright shining beacon of civilization jutting out of the literal middle of nowhere. It was the essential travel hub for an Alliance player looking to get anywhere on Kalimdor since the only other town with connections to the Eastern Kingdoms was in Auberdine (now Lor'danel) and trying to get to some of the more far-flung areas (I'm looking at you, Gadgetzan) could result in a half-hour long hippogriff ride and a good chance to catch up on some reading.

Theramore was also the main quest hub for Dustwallow, and for a lot of players like myself it was the first time setting foot on the Kalimdor continent after following a breadcrumb quest from a bloke eternally standing on the Menethil dock asking whomever walks by to deliver something to the Inn there.

Now, I can't really speak to how other people level their characters, but I always made a point to go through Dustwallow with my characters. It just seemed a more natural and interesting place to go after the Wetlands than Arathi Highlands or the Badlands. I always liked the stories that were told in Dustwallow during it's first iteration. The Shady Rest Inn storyline was particularly moving, with a great emotional pay-off at the end. I've always liked the chain of quests at Swamplight Manor to cleanse "Swamp Eye" Jarl. And of course who can forget setting the raptors loose on the unsuspecting Grimtotem?

It's a zone that reminds me a lot of one of my other other favourite zones, Duskwood. It has the same kind of creepy, foreboding atmosphere to it that I like so much. And both zones had an insane amount of running back and forth before they were mercifully streamlined in Cataclysm. And all of those great memories started in poor, doomed Theramore.


THE COMING DOOM

With the impending destruction of Theramore there is a lot of uncertainty about the future of Dustwallow as it continues it's transition from sleepy, moody swamp that felt very insignificant in the grand scheme of the world to the front lines of an all-out war with the Horde. What will become of the small stories? Who's going to take the time to cleanse Jarl of his demonic possession in the middle of a battlefield? Is someone going to walk "Stinky" Ignatz home with Horde siege engines laying waste to the landscape?

But all that having been said, why do a lot of Alliance players lament the loss of this town so much?

Well, it's been talked about to death, but during the early stages of the War (represented by the Cataclysm expansion) the Alliance has been getting the hell kicked out of it. Southshore lost, massive horde incursions into the Night Elf homelands of Ashenvale and minor ones in Darkshore, the loss of Andorhol after the Scourge were finally defeated, and our new allies in Gilneas turned to homeless refugees forced to live in a tree by the Forsaken war machine. To the Alliance player, Cataclysm has been one iron-booted kick in the nuts after another.

Now we're losing Theramore. Whump. That's gonna sting the ol' Dwarf Potatoes.

I think that for me, at least, losing Theramore is going to make Kalimdor feel a lot less friendly and much more foreign. It's hostile enemy territory now, with no real safe havens worth mentioning for the Alliance. Go away, Dwarves, you are not welcome here.

But in all honesty, the real reason that people are complaining about the loss of Theramore has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with human psychology: People embrace the familiar and fear the unknown. Things that we know are comforting. And in this terrifying new world of conflict, destruction and all-out factional war that MoP is bringing with it people are naturally going to cling to those things that remind us of a simpler, better time of relative peace.

You know, when all we had to worry about was an innumerable, unstoppable undead army that was going to take over the entire world and suck out our brains. The good ol' days.

* Adapted from Robert Burns' poem Old Scotch Drink.

Azeroth Photo Tour: Arathi Highlands

INTRODUCING THE GREAT AZEROTH PHOTO TOUR

Over the next few weeks and months I am going to go on the Great Azeroth Photo Tour. I'm going to visit each zone in the game (in Alphabetical order) and create images of the most beautiful sights and places in each of the zones. I may, if I feel like it, add commentary on the zones or images as well. My hope is that I can get the entirety of Blizzard's magnificent fantasy world completed before Mists of Pandaria is released. I will be updating the Photo Tour on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.



ARATHI HIGHLANDS

Stepping over the magnificent Thandol Span and in to the Arathi Highlands for the first time one is struck by an overwhelming sense of emptiness. Gently rolling hills covered in grasses and thistle with bare rock jutting through the turf; you can almost feel the wind rushing through the zone unmolested by any trees to block its path. It's a zone that feels hushed and solitary.

There is very little in the way of civilization here. One lone Horde town that hasn't changed much from the prison that it originally was, a couple of camps and farm houses, and the ancient, crumbling ruins of a once-great city that is now in the process of tearing itself apart from the inside-out as three different factions vie for control of it.

The most remarkable thing about the Highlands is the mysterious circles of standing stones scattered about, seemingly at random: Huge monoliths impossibly stacked and arranged for purposes that are their own, and surrounded by vicious elementals that make discovering their true meaning hazardous.

The Arathi Highlands is a zone that time forgot. Not just for the lonesome and abandoned feel of it, but also because it is one of the few zones that did not get revamped after the Cataclysm. If you visit, keep your voice down; loud noises feel distinctly out of place in the lonesome and desolate highlands.

Repopulating the Old World: Cross Realm Zones

Sometimes I think you want me to touch you.
How can I when you build the great wall around you? - Tori Amos, China


In a move that surprised everyone, Blizzard has announced that they are going to begin testing Cross Realm Zones in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. I love this idea like a big sloppy Dwarfling kiss, and given the subject of my last post, the timing of this announcement is particularly serendipitous.

I am a unrepentant Wrath Baby; I created my first character in the very twilight of the Burning Crusade expansion, mere months before Wrath of the Lich King went live. Because of this I have never experienced the Old World as the thriving, vibrant place that it was in Vanilla.

For me and thousands of other people who joined the game late, levelling in World of Warcraft is a solitary experience. The wilderness of Azeroth outside of the major cities is filled with bears and bandits and monsters of all types, but even on busy, highly populous servers, meeting another character is something of a rare occurrence. It's a lonely life, being a lowbie in Azeroth, but the new Cross Realm Zones aim to change that.

The way that Blizzard is trying to implement this is quite brilliant, if you ask me. Basically, certain realms will be linked together based on population, and each of those realms will share certain zones that are flagged as "Cross Realm". Using the Barrens as an example, a character on Sargeras would walk out of a realm-exclusive Orgrimmar into a Barrens shared by 5 other servers, and would see and interact with characters from all of those realms normally, just as if they were all on the same server. At the same time, Blizzard will have the ability to keep highly populated zones (Cities, to be sure) exclusive. This way Stormwind won't be crushed under the weight of thousands of people standing at the fountain oogling the fifteen thousand naked Night Elves dancing on the mailboxes.

I think this feature is fantastic. Not just a technically brilliant solution to make an older technology scale and adapt to the changing reality of the current, max-level focused state of the game, but also as a step to the ultimate goal of eliminating realms completely. I talked about this back in January, but the elimination of the barrier walls around the different realms is a very clever way for Blizzard to extend the life of the game. Right now, if Blizzard chooses to do so, the only realm-specific areas are the main cities, the Auction House and any zone that is going to be populated enough not to be a concern like the Cataclysm zones and the new Mists of Pandaria zones.

As a social, massively multiplayer game, it is always a little bit odd to run around the world outside of the two major faction cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar and see, well, nothing. By repopulating the Old World, new players will finally get an experience that is close to what older players experienced when WoW was new and when having a maximum level character was rare: A world that is full of people to interact with.

It really doesn't matter that there are no group quests in the game any more, nor is there any real need to team up with people to defeat the quests that people are given. Having a lot of people busily running around doing there own thing is exciting. It adds an immense amount of flavour to the game.

Like the bustling sidewalks of downtown New York, it's all about vibrancy and life and activity; it's about the soul of this game, which is missing in the low level zones. Bringing that kind of life back to zones other than the cities is going to go a long way to help make new players—and old players who love lowibe alts like myself—remain excited about this game for years to come.

After all, it is World of Warcraft. Bravo, Blizzard. Well played.

The Joy of Lowbies

"It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;
Would thou could'st make the time to do so too;
I'll wind thee up no more." - Ben Jonson The Staple of News


As I mentioned in my last post, I don't have much in the way of free, unimpeded time to dedicate to WoW these days.

The only raid boss that I attempt these days;
believe me, this is a fight with a lot of movement.

I'm sad to say that such an odd, irregular and easily interrupted schedule is not one that is conducive to raiding. Over the past couple of months or so my level 85s have withered due to neglect. My regular raiding has completely ground to a halt after going 8/8 on two toons with no heroic bosses down at all.

With only an hour or so of available time in an evening, running dungeons or LFR seem like an exhausting, implacable mountain to climb and not worth the effort. Doing daily quests gets very boring very quickly. Maximum level PVP is new and scary and intriguing, but would require a fair bit of effort to get the gear that would allow me to survive for more than the brief moment between when an enemy sees me and when he decides that I should be dead.

So what's a Dwarf to do?


THE JOY OF LOWBIES

I am an Altaholic, but not in the usual way. I am in a guild with several people who I would consider the norm for extreme cases of Altaholism: They tend to create an alt and focus intently on it until it reaches max level before giving a new one any real attention. Consequently, they have a lot of max level characters and characters that are well on their way there.

I am a little different. I have dozens of low level characters of every race and every class scattered around 10 or 12 different servers. Not including the Death Knights (only one of which I've ever gotten out of the starting zone; he's level 62), only a couple of these characters are above level 25. My highest level Horde character ever just dinged 18. Seriously.

I really enjoy low level characters and low level questing. There is something very compelling about boiling a class down to its very essence and seeing it naked and helpless in its infancy. In those initial levels each class is very similar: Uncomplicated, pure, and a joy to play. To see which skills are learned and when, and to discover how to use each new skill and see the way a class gradually becomes more complex is very intriguing.

I'm not really clear as to why, but I seem to hit a brick wall between level 14 and level 20. In the mid-teens the class will have taken shape and while many important and class defining abilities are yet to come, the fundamental structure of how the class is played is evident. For me, at least, this is when the experiment to test my attitude towards a class feels as if it's run its course.

As well, it's at that point that a character is out of the starting zones and into the next areas (Barrens, Westfall, etc). These zones are larger and more involved than the starting zones and feel more general and less specific to the character. This is when my mindset changes from, "This is a fun toy to play with," to "Oh gawd, I have how many freakin' levels to go?!?". Taking a character through these zones begins to firmly cement the notion in my head that I'm committing to the grind to get the character up to max level; a long and daunting process, especially for someone who levels as slowly as I do. Therefore, any character that makes it past that barrier and hits 20 is one that—in my head, at least—has been selected to survive and make the slow journey to level cap.

I have really only levelled a couple of different characters past this breaking point. My first character, a hunter, got to level 48 before he was abandoned and left to rot as I switched servers. My Warrior, Priest and Paladin all got to max level in Wrath, and two of them have gone onto 85. Thallie, my Shaman and current raiding main (the cobwebs on her are, at least, fresh) was the first character I created when Cataclysm launched and is the only one that I have managed to take to max level since then. So many more have failed this litmus test and remain unlevelled and unloved.

It seems that the decision to go past the level 20 barrier is a significant one for me. It is a mental commitment to that character; a commitment to learn and master the nuances of the class at the very highest levels. However, if the class, or the character's name or the server or anything else doesn't feel right, then that character is doomed to a shadowy half-life of neglect. Not to be deleted, but doomed to sit in the Inn at Sentinel Hill or at The Crossroads with pitiful white or grey gear, never to be the hero that they could be due to the capriciousness of my whimsy.

So having said all that, with a fervent desire to play but with limited play time in which to do it, I have been spending a lot of time with my low level Alts lately. Some have pushed past the elusive and mysterious Level 20 and have become, at least in my mind, actual characters, whilst some are still merely interesting toys to experiment with. It's been a lot of fun, and I've been indulging myself by seeing areas of the game and doing activities that I've never done before. It's as good a way as any to ride out the end of this expansion, at least until the raid healing bug bites me again.

To Beta or Not to Beta

"It is my desire ... to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm sure this post will frustrate a lot of people who have been anxiously awaiting their Mists of Pandaria beta invite, if there is anyone left who doesn't have one.

As a Annual Pass subscriber I knew that I was going to receive a Beta Invitation eventually as it is one of the perks of committing to keeping a WoW account active for a year. It ain't all about shiny horsies, after all. When it finally did arrive I was thrilled; I had never had a closed-beta invite to anything before so this was something new. I was always a little jealous of people who could claim that they started WoW in the beta, so this was my chance to get into something at the very beginning.

Of course, as a blogger, the beta of a new expansion provides a vast new range of subjects to talk about. There are a lot of changes coming that need to be discussed and opined on, not to mention entirely new and gorgeous vistas that are awaiting my virtual, gnomish-engineered camera. There are endless topics in the beta to write about because the beta itself changes constantly. No blogger in their right mind would pass up the such a rich source of writing material, would they?

Well, perhaps I'm not in my right mind, but after the initial excitement I've decided not to participate in the Beta.

Don't hate me if you don't have one yet, let me explain...


NO TIME FOR LOVE, DOCTOR JONES

With the great heaving chaos that is my life right now, any chance I get to play WoW is a rare and beautiful thing. It often comes in the few fleeting moments between when the Dwarfling is put to bed and the daily chores are done (which means cleaning up the swath of destruction that she leave in her wake) and when I go to bed. Sometimes it's an hour, sometimes less. And sometimes all I can manage is to stagger to the couch and pass out, leaving the great, menacing evil-doers of Azeroth unmolested for a night.

There are two great drawbacks to spending my very limited amount of playtime on a Beta server as opposed to the Live servers. One is that everything that is done in the Beta is transient because it will be reset to zero when the Beta ends and the expansion is launched. So any time and effort that I put into a Beta character is wasted and I think better spent progressing my characters on the Live Realms.

The other drawback has to do with the eternal frustration of crashes and inconvenient bugs. There is nothing more infuriating than having a glitch cost precious time when on a limited play schedule. I don't think I could handle the instability of the Beta. I think it would create far more tension than it would solve for me. And I get enough of that with the low level PVP that I've been indulging in lately.


THE TEXTURE OF ANTICIPATION AND EXPERIENCE

The other, less concrete reason has to do with spoilers. I'm the type of person who values the quality of the experience as much as the experience itself. How something is done is just as important as doing the thing itself. A Beta, with all the bugs and unfinished bits, is not a great way to see content for the first time if the texture of the experience is a primary concern. Seeing things perfectly polished in their final forms is what I'm after, and if that means waiting, then so be it.

However, the other side of this particular coin is that on launch day it is going to be virtually impossible to see things the way they should be seen. The giant crush of people descending on the new zones will make things chaotic and mucky, as has happened with every expansion so far. The Pandaren starting zone is going to be wall-to-wall bear butts competing for the same quest mobs and objectives, people will be griefing with their gigantic mounts on top of quest-givers and things are going to be in a general state of higgledy-piggledy. Not really the best way to experience brand new content either, is it?


ON THE OTHER HAND...

Of course, when I see things like this I can't help but be tempted by the Beta.

Taken from the official WoW site.

From what I've seen so far I am incredibly impressed with the quality of the visuals of Mists of Pandaria. It looks simply amazing; the best work that Blizzard has done so far, I think. I would love to experience it first hand and create some stunning Images of Azeroth posts, but time simply is not on my side.