5 Dec, 2008
PvE, blogosphere
Says the designer crab:
“A couple more points about Naxx: many of the guilds who cleared it quickly already knew the encounters from 40-player days, AND were allowed to practice extensively on beta. By contrast we gave players very little exposure to Kil’jaeden on the PTR.
But really, trying to slow down worldwide progression by making encounters insanely difficult is a losing proposition. We’re in the world now of professional guilds with corporate sponsors and players willing to put in enormous numbers of hours and attempts. We can certainly (and will) make very challenging encounters for which guilds can take pride in server firsts. However, I would not expect to see encounters that are so difficult that the entire WoW community wipes on them for months before achieving success. I just don’t know if that game exists anymore.”
That pretty much sums up everything there is to say. As much as Nihilum Curse SK Gaming 25th November Ensidia Whatever-They’re-Called-This-Week and the other handful of überguilds hate it, the C’Thun days appear to be gone for good.
There’s another piece of wisdom hidden in that statement. When the world’s biggest überguild has fully beta access, sees the content, remains absolutely silent about the difficulty then race through the content on release in order to bitch about the lack of challenge, it isn’t just faux outrage and manufactured controvery. It isn’t just a clear demonstration that whatever firsts they achieve in the future is no longer properly legit and completely meaningless (as opposed to the merits of every single guild who was NOT in beta, clears the content and remains out of the limelights monopolized by what has in the meantime devolved into WoW’s biggest collection of attention whores and drama queens). It also shows that they are a total failure as beta testers and haven’t understood the purpose of all these shiny passes they have recieved.
The game too easy for you? Sod off. You should have said so in beta. Now get off the headlines.
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Tags: hardcore, Raiding
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4 Dec, 2008
PvE
Rule #1: The higher the need, the lower the drop rate
Rule #2: The last item of a full stack always has the lowest drop rate
Corollary: When you need several drops for a quest, even with a good drop rate, the last drop will take longer than all the previous combined
Rule #3: Any item which isn’t needed will drop at a steady pace.
Corollary to Rule 3: The moment you need that very same item, its drop rate will plummet.
Rule #4: Non-bound quest items which can be bought at the AH will always be in short supply and cost a fortune
Rule #5: The moment you start farming non-bound quest items with the intention of selling them at the AH, the supply suddenly explodes and the prices plummet.
Rule #6: Rare dungeon drops will suddenly become commonplace the very moment the entire raid is wearing better kit.
Rule #7: For any items in exception to Rules #1, 2 and the Corollary to rule #3, the mobs dropping them will suddenly be all dead and on long respawn timers the moment you need them.
EDIT: Found 3 more rules to make these a nice 10
Rule #8: Rare & expensive world drops will suddenly be in abundance when you want to sell one.
Rule #9: Better gear will suddenly become readily available the very moment you manage to get a rare, elusive and long awaited item
Rule #10: Player will always complain both about Rules #1 to #9 and every single exception to these
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Tags: humour, loot
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2 Dec, 2008
Altitis
I’ve been on the road quite a bit, which deprives me both of playtime and of post material. To keep it short: I came back this weekend, continued leveling the DK who is now 67, and still in Terokkar with quite some quests left. At this rate I’ll probably ding 70 in Nagrand. I’m more or less inserting some mining skillup runs in the meantime, just hit 245 which opens up small thorium veins. Mining is definitely the least pleasant gathering skill to level despite the changes to allow more skillups through smelting. Bleargh.
The DK will be my new JC since I foolishly threw that profession away for herbalism on the pallie ages ago. Haven’t really started leveling that one yet, though. Tons of ore ready for that part, after all, that’s what banking mules are good for.
I’m still not too happy with the amount of ganking going on (no, I didn’t move yet), although I have to say that when you’re getting attacked in mid-combat by an equal-level drood and just have him eat dirt four times in a row, it has some upsides. It’s the serial bored high-level gankers which get on my nerves. Comes with the territory, I guess.
Has all of that made me a better PvP player? Not really. I’m just more paranoid. And that’s all for this short update.
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Tags: Death Knight, world pvp
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22 Nov, 2008
Altitis
My DK is midway to 65, and is now wearing the typical clown outfit so common in TBC.
A real bummer when compared to the look of the matching starter blue set. So here’s an idea for the next “barber shop” in patch 4.0.3: The armour customisation shop.
Here’s the principle. You get a menu quite similar to the tabard design menu but you select a main colour, two or three highlight colours and a glow, and for a fee get that applied to whatever you’re wearing. No more clown outfits, but it also removes much of the complaints borne out of the fact that certain tier and season sets look too much alike.
As an added bonus, GMs could create guild presets (3-4 variations should be enough) which the players could chose to apply for additional goodness (and simplicity since if you don’t have that, players who want to have matching armors in a guild will have to do it manually). You could even take it one step further, make additional presets available by guild rank for a really flexible and nifty implementation.
Undoubtedly, this is as much fluff as the barber shop but I daresay there’d be quite a few players who’d love to have something like that. What do you think?
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Tags: personalisation
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19 Nov, 2008
PvE
If you’re leveling unholy, and have specced Master of Ghouls, you may be familiar with the following situation:
There’s a group of mobs relatively close by. Your plan: pick one out with Death Grip, load him up with diseases so that by the time any adds follow, you can hit pestilence and spread the infection around for AoE goodness.
You hit Death Grip… and while your pull flies to you, your Ghoul leaps to its former position, pulling the rest with it and getting trounced fast. Your clean pull is now a bit of a mess.
The macro solution requires two macros.
For Death Grip:
#showtooltip Death Grip
/petautocastoff Leap
/cast Death Grip
Then for your first disease (I usually use Icy Touch when DG is on cooldown for the ranged pull)
#showtooltip
/petautocaston Leap
/cast Icy Touch
Why not enclose Death Grip between autocastoff and autocaston? Apparently the server doesn’t really handle the player cast and the toggles in their proper sequence, that means Leap is toggled off and on before Death Grip is executed and the Ghoul still leaps. Silly, eh?
Anyway, the above works pretty well too.
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Tags: Death Knight, macros, Unholy
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19 Nov, 2008
PvE
In HFP, there’s the Valley of Bones, close to Zeth’Gor, with buzzards which will normally aggro on death. With Death Grip, you can pull one away safely, kill it, and then start a 3-4 buzzard chain in short sequence.
These chains should be a good way to get really familiar with the cooldowns of abilities, and if you’re blood or unholy, death rune buildup and consumption.
Bonus point, the buzzards can also be integrated in a quest chain at the nearby Zeppelin crash site (after stealing ravager eggs and purifying hellboar meat), and there are tons of Zeppelin debris around for the collection quest you can get at the same place.
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Tags: Blood, Death Knight, Talent Trees, Unholy
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18 Nov, 2008
PvE
One thing I found rather fascinating with the DK: each spec handles quite differently than the other two, even if all you’re doing is solo PvE.
Let me explain. My “for keeps” first Death Knight is now a level 62 orc. I specced him unholy, did my rounds in the starter zone, the Plaguelands and now HFP. You could say I’m starting to be quite confortable with the class’ rotations and ability timings.
I rolled a second one because I wanted to try out Blood, and later, just before the end of the newbie quests, took advantage of the free respecs to switch to frost DPS.
And one thing strikes me.
Every single spec handles differently. Oh, the basics are still here, you still apply diseases then leverage them for max damage. But the order, timings and cooldowns of each spec are vastly different, and so far, quite unique.
This was a bit unsettling at first. I expected quite some differences between unholy and the other two (ghoul pets and extended disease DoTs pretty much make that a given), but blood and frost are also very distinct. I don’t know how much this is by design, and will probably generate quite an adapting curve at each respec, but this is definitely another plus to the class.
The other thing I’m starting to see is that strict rotation thinking doesn’t really cut it. It’s more like a rough sequence of events which can be summed up like this:
- Load up diseases
- Burst with Runic Power if available
- Unleash Frost + Unholy (FU) or Blood Abilities
- Replenish own health if necessary
There’s a talent in unholy T2 which extends the duration of diseases to 18 seconds, which means DKs with this talent will have longer timespans before needing to refresh their rotations. Stuff is usually long dead before that, however, so for normal leveling mobs, the point is pretty moot.
Some things to consider pre-65 (haven’t investigated the rest, too lazy to build hour-long spreadsheets):
- Obliterate is the hardest hitting strike and uses FU runes. It is a finishing move of sorts, though, as it consumes all diseases
- For Unholy builds, Scourge Strike is your core choice until level 64 if your mob has too much health left to make an Obliterate worth it. It’s also a FU ability.
- For Blood, Heart Strike is the preferred spell until level 64, and it runs on a blood rune.
- At level 64, Blood Strike (B) outperforms Scourge and Heart Strike until their respective next ranks.
- For Frost builds, there’s a must have T3 talent, Annihilation, which makes Obliterate not consume diseases, making Obliterate the best choice. Frost Strike, while producing only 50% of Obliterate’s spreadsheet damage cannot be blocked, parried nor dodged however, which makes it a good tanking strike (duh).
Nothing exactly clearcut in the above scenarios. Now all three trees have talents which transform some runes into Death Runes (universal runes) which give more flexibility to spell sequence. In Blood, the talent in in T3, requires an Obliterate strike, and transforms Frost and Unholy into Death Runes. Both Blood and Frost builds may probably have a good synergy if they incoprorate both Annihilation (Obliterate doesn’t consume diseases) and Death Rune Mastery (transforms FU runes into Death Runes on Obliterate) into their respective builds.
Unholy’s own Death Rune talent is in T6 and uses a Blood strike to transform a Blood rune into a Death rune.
Frost’s take on this is even deeper in the tree (T7) and also uses either a Blood Strike or Pestilence to create a Death Rune.
Where does this leave us? Well, as you see, while leveling, each build is going to have different priorities. Unholy will require liberal use of blood runes to have enough unholy and frost / death runes available to sustain its diseases and use Scourge Strike.
For Blood, Obliterate will be a finishing move. After diseasing his target, Heart Strike following by RP abilities will produce a good output and a quite stable routine before having to refresh diseases. If an enemy can be finished by an Obliterate + sequence, the next fight will have death runes handy for flexibility.
Frost has to alternate between Obliterate and Blood Strike in order to maximize DPS.
Lots of things to consider. Factor in that your Disease front-loading may be resisted and you need to recast these, and contrary to my initial impression, there’s simply very little you can do in terms of clear, regular rotations. Most of the time I admit that if I’m starting to be in a cooldown bind, I still resort to pretty much random button mashing 
Looks like while Death Knights are a very powerful class while levelling, they also appear to be a rather complex class to master properly.
And I like that.
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Tags: Death Knight, Talent Trees
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18 Nov, 2008
PvE
So Nihilum and SK Gaming merged, rushed to level 80, and then proceeded to clear all raid instances weeks or even months before the unwashed masses. Good for them.
When you pay a monthly subscription to burn to content which is meant to last other people a couple of months within 2 days, that’s your business.
Then something interesting happened in the PR statement released below (emphasis is mine):
“We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?“
By that statement combined with the timing of the whole thing, Twentyfithnovember (that’s the new name of the merged operation) made one thing clear. They no longer represent anyone in this game but themselves. Not even what you would qualify as a hardcore guild.
Mind you, it’s not the fact that they rushed through content and cleared it all within two days, it’s the fact that they take this and act as if they were any reasonable measure of anything.
By their own words, Twentyfithnovember have just rendered themselves completely irrelevant. They aren’t even a role model for the other gamers, they’re just a cadre of people sponsored to raid and churn out world first.
The one thing which they have made crystal clear is that Blizzard should in no way listen to anything they could say in regards to content tuning or balance, in the best case they could be treated as an extended QA team to spot and test out bugs on the PTR. For anything else, their point of view is so far removed from the reality of the playerbase that they could just as well be playing a different game altogether.
And that’s actually what they are doing.
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Tags: hardcore, Raiding
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17 Nov, 2008
PvE, PvP
… Get out of the kitchen!
While I have another post planned to join the chorus of bloggers writing about their first Wrath experiences, I have come to a realization this weekend.
Let’s call it by its name and not beat around the bush.
I’m a carebear.
I’m a PvP wuss.
Long time readers may remember that I rerolled on a PvP server in Spring to join some friends. Leveling there at late evenings during the last 6 months of the Burning Crusade wasn’t really heavy on world PvP. I had a couple of encounters in areas where you expect them, mainly STV and Hillsbrad Foothills, and a couple of skirmishes in HFP more recently. All against the perhaps dozen alliance players in the same level range, and (I thought) pretty much all in good fun. If we decided not to ignore each other, it was the typical Rock-Scissors-Papers game with the twist that the player who started it would most likely live.
Wrath exposed me to the other side of it, though - level 72+ players camping just outside of Thrallmar on their epic flyers, in twos or threes, hellbent to deny the aspiring DKs passage. Level 78 players escorting their guildies through Howling Fjord quests and hell-bent to slow the progress of the opposing faction level 70-71s around.
I realized, there and then, that I’m not cut for a PvP server. Oh, I do enjoy organized PvP, within the boundaries of the formalized engagements which you can find in BGs, arenas but also outdoors encounters like Halaa. I like more or less balanced engagements where I feel I have at least a shot at at, even if it means being outnumbered.
I however derive no pleasure in ganking lowbies myself, so there’s no sense of compensation in the nature of “do unto others…” from the gankfest. I’m getting pissed off when I get 2-shotted while trying to read a quest text, and that’s been happening far too often for my taste since the 13th.
Steptoe having apparently left on another of his semestrial smoke breaks, I’m again in an almost people-devoid guild.
Which has me reviewing my options.
Anyone has any suggestions for a casual, late night, EU-English carebear horde player? Ideally the server should not suffer from login queues, have reasonable BG queue lines up to 1am server time and horde should win BGs from time to time.
Open to any ideas.
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Tags: world pvp, wotlk, wrath
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14 Nov, 2008
PvE
I decided to join the army of deep red wannabes in Ebon Hold for my first steps in Wrath. I’ll keep it relatively short and spoiler free. The backstory is well done, the build-up of the DK’s first three levels too. If you haven’t done so already, here’s one warning though: At some stage, you will gain the quest The Light of Dawn. At the top of the screen, you should have a yellow indicator indicating the equilibrium of forces between two factions, and below, potentially, a countdown.
If there’s no countdown showing on the third line, stay put at Browman’s Mill. There’s an event in progress, which holds a key piece of storytelling, and when I mean key, it really holds the story together. Go make yourself a cup of tea or something, the event will reset about every 10 minutes. Getting in there in the middle will make you want to stick around for the next round anyway, but unlike other story pieces, once you’ve stumbled upon the end, you will only get the audio afterwards… which can be mixed in with emotes from other players and whatnot.
So how does the heroic class handle? That is a bit more difficult to answer. The class is definitely powerful, but it is also complex to take stock of. If you haven’t tried it, it handles a bit like a rogue on slow-motion where all combo points aren’t always useable. By design, you’ll be alternating between several abilities all the time, about 5 per rotation (though most of the stuff will be dead before you finish a rotation anyway. Yay for training dummies).
The fact that it’s not a 1 or 2 button spamming class is definitely nice. On the other hand, you’re mostly always doing the same things in the same order, so it’s also a bit of a faceroller - you just have to roll from left to right
When going to bed, the DK was level 59 and about 500 rep off friendly with Argent Dawn, and still plenty o’ quests left to do in EPL. I’ve tried out unholy so far, and will probably respec to blood for a comparison at 60, but the undead just roll over and die before me. There’s a bunch of elite abomination wandering about in Andhoral, with about 11k health, and they were no problem at all either. Compared to the endless fight those represented on my then prot pallie, it’s certainly a very welcome change.
Will I stick to the class in the long run? I have no idea. I’ll most certainly be riding around in HFP over the weekend and then decide.
In terms of server load, Blizzard was on top of their game on our cluster. There was no visible performance hit in Ebon Hold at all, despite the starter part being packed full with other wannabe death knights. The other thing which is very well done is using the phase technology to make the area evolve over time (which also trickles down the population and avoids brand new level 55 DKs in starter greens with only 3 abilities to have to constantly dodge duelling challenges by the level 57s in full blues with all of their availabilities ready. These two populations play in different story times and simply don’t mix.
In terms of races, in the end I went for looks first and picked a male orc. The just look badass in the dark plate set, although as is often the case, with the blue set you have at the end of the DK intro storyline, I tend to believe that shrugging with these on would probably squish the Death Knight’s brain neatly between shoulder pads.
Finally, one thing which I realized this morning which would definitely add to the heroic dimension of the class, Blizzard shouldn’t have stopped with just the introduction quest series, but added a new series of story-driven quests every 10 levels to renew the Ebon Hold story line and, possibly, refresh the gear set with an upgraded kit with again matching looks and colours. That would definitely have added to the epic feeling of the class.
And that’s it for a first evening in Wrath. I’ll probably move the pallie to Northrend over the weekend to test the temperatures there. Got some righteous arse-kicking to do after all this defiling.
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Tags: Death Knight, questing, storytelling, wotlk
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