Altitis

Are any of these familiar?

• Some of your players simply never seem to read strategies posted to the website?
• Some others, no matter how, will always forget about vital buffs or die to ground fire at least once?
• When you explain tactics over vent, some people may be heard sighing after a while, grow restless and want to just go on with it?
• After a wipe (or an arena defeat), part of the team wants to jump straight back into the fray while others want to analyze what just happened, seemingly to death?
• Do some people seem to have a hard time remembering when to blow their trinket cooldowns in the heat of battle, finding themselves short at crucial times?
• Do you find that your arena team is split between those who want to immediately queue up for the next match and the guys who want to discuss what just happened?

If it does, the above symptoms are just a reminder that people learn things in different ways.

Two Psychologists, Peter Honey and Alfred Mumford, expanding upon the earlier works of one David Kolb, have identified four major ways by which people acquire new knowledge:

• Activists are people who respond best to Scout Movement founder Lord Baden-Powell‘s credo of “Learning by doing”. These players will learn a new encounter or a new arena tactic best by simply experiencing it. They are the people most likely to interrupt a strategy session with “let’s just do it”, they want to be in the thick of things and will learn best through practice.
• Theorists are on the opposite side of things. Half of what we’d call our Theorycrafters stem from this group, they have to model something in their head to grasp it completely. The better the model they build, the better their practical execution later on. These players will usually respond best to long and detailed boss strategies, the more the information you provide them with beforehand matches the reality of a fight, the better they will respond.
• Reflectors mainly gain their understanding from analyzing and reviewing their experiences. The second half of the Theorycrafters belong in this group, as they will tend to collect as much data as they can to support their analysis. Players in this group, more than any other, will be ready to spend hours on training dummies running large sequences of tests and changing tiny elements just to find out the single most optimal cookie-cutter approach to whatever they are reviewing. Where the theorist will be content to calculate the best possible output with maths only, a reflector will thrive on maths derived from hard data.
• Pragmatists will learn best from information which is directly tied to practical use. Contingency planning, adapting to the situation in the thick of battle is something they love, endless strategy sessions and what-if-scenarios tend however to quickly bore them unless you can tie every aspect of it to direct and concrete use. A pragmatist would be quite likely to ask “can we do it with one less?” and willing to go through with it.

Learning styles aren’t mutually exclusive. In general, people will respond strongly to one learning style and a bit less to the others in various degrees. Studies in the past tend to demonstrate that the best learning effect is achieved when many or even all learning styles are being catered to.

That’s All Fine But How Does That Help My Groups?

A fine type of pragmatist question, raid leaders and battlegroup tacticians may want to make their briefings appeal to a wider type of learning styles to maximize their progression speed:

• Theorists will continue to thrive on strategies posted on the guild website. Keep it up, you’re most likely already catering to them
• Activists can greatly benefit from videos implementing the strategy (if available). To help their learning, post them in a thread separate from your strategy post
• Reflectors can be brought up to speed by linking to existing parses and combat logs.
• For the Pragmatists, building a checklist with a direct link to in-game effects can work well. Eg: “Keep your trinkets up for phase 2 because we need to produce XXX dps in 30 seconds otherwise we wipe”.
• After a wipe, instead of running straight back into the fray the moment everyone is rezzed and rebuffed, leave some time for the reflectors to review their combat logs, they might not only improve their own performance but also find out exactly what went wrong on the last attempt
• Make sure you foster a climate where Activists and Reflectors in particular aren’t being singled out: both of these more than the other two will really need to experience things in order to truly understand them. Yelling at an activist because he hasn’t read your 10’000 words of strategy explanation won’t help him get better but rather discouraged, but after two or three attempts, he will probably understand the flow of the fight better than anyone else.
• Theorists and pragmatists are the most likely to come up with intellectual leaps of faith going against the official strategy – if yours just doesn’t work, try it out their way. They might just have thought of a way to get around whatever roadblock your team is encountering.
• Keep your pre-encounter briefing short and to the point. The theorists and reflectors will have done their preliminary research, the pragmatists only want the telegraphic style short overview and the activists want to rush straight into battle. Long explanations will just waste everyone’s time for little concrete benefits.

These, and more, can all help speed up the time your group needs to adapt to a new strategy and put it to successful use. Being mindful of the four different learning styles, and trying to cater to all of them, can speed up your preparation time and help you conquer new content faster.

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As usual, we’re finding out that the barebones behaviour of yet another ability is pretty poor. In order to make the brand new ranged paladin taunt more efficient, here’s a macro you can use:

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

Bind it to a key.

This enables you to either taunt your current target or simply hover with your mouse over another foe to taunt with a simple keypress.

A more advanced version if you focus one specific add, eg one which gets CCed (to avoid having a mage or priest sandwich after sheep or shackle runs out):

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [modifier:shift, target=focus, harm] Hand of Reckoning
/stopmacro [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

If you’re holding down shift, it will taunt your focus, otherwise behave just as the other one.

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Based on a mail sent by one of Blessing of King’s readers, and assuming you have leveled as Ret so far, here’s how you can build a basic tanking set from scratch before you even set a single foot into any instances.

The Outer Shell

First things first, get yourself a set of Tempered Saronite gear, except for the Legplates and the Gauntlets. For these two pieces, you’ll want to take Daunting Handguards and Daunting Legplates instead.

Mats you’ll need to get all of this crafted for you:

81x Saronite Bars
15x Cobalt Bars
3x Crystallized Earth

2x Eternal Earth

The Tools for the Job

As a weapon I recommend getting the Hammer of Quiet Mourning from the Zul’Drak Quest “Wanted: Ragemane’s Flipper“. You can get that one from the wanted poster in Light’s Breach.
For your shield, you should be at least honoured with your faction’s main Wrath group (Alliance Vanguard or Horde Expedition), which will give you access to their respective defense shields, Shield of the Lion-hearted for allies or Bulwark of the Warchief for hordies.

The Shinies

For rings, your best choices are:

To get yourself a Stoneguard Band crafted by a JC – requires two Eternal Earths, but is apparently quite popular for JCs to skill up, so you should be able to find plenty at the AH.

To collect and keep the Ring of Misinterpreted Gestures, a reward from the Scholazar quest “Fortunate Misunderstandings” which is part of the chain to align your toon with either the Oracles or the Frenzyheart, something you’ll want to do sooner than later anyway.

For your neck: Try to troll the AH for Torta’s Oversized Choker, a blue drop which seems to be relatively common since there’s always one or two up for auction on my server. Alternatively, you can complete the Scholazar Frenzyheart / Oracle quest chain and pick the Blood-Infused Pendant as a reward for “A Hero’s Burden“.

To cover your back, you’ll want to start with the crafted Cloak of Tormented Skies, which a leatherworker can make for you for 6 Borean Leather, 5 Crystallized Air and 5 Crystallized Water.

Trinkets are a huge problem though, since there’s not a single tanking trinket in wrath which you can get outside of instances. If you have banked TBC tanking trinkets, best hang on to them for a while.

The Finishing Touches

Your Stoneguard Band has a blue gem slot, you may want to put an Enduring Forest Emerald into that slot. Add an Eternal Belt Buckle to your belt and another Enduring Forest Emerald.

The end result will bring you to 528 defense and a bit over 17k HP, assuming you have no TBC defense trinkets. Way enough to grab the next upgrades through normal instances. You can see a mock-up of this equipment here.

And Beyond That?

The only quick to get upgrade from factions at this stage comes from Wyrmrest accord – if you have completed Wrathgate in Dragonblight, you should be pretty close to honoured, which would allow you to upgrade your cloak to the Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions.  You’re now at 532 defense, almost crit immune for normals and heroics. You can run every normal instance in the game with that kit to grab the next upgrades and build your faction rep from there, but you’re probably still a bit light on the HP side for heroics.

A series of potential upgrades:

In Gundrak, Gal’darah drops a nice ring.

In Halls of Lightning, you’ll want the defense trinket off Loken.

In CoT – Stratholme, you’ll find a shield from Epoch and boots from Meathook.

At that stage, it’s going to be enchanting / enhancing time, since further upgrades will pretty much require you to run heroics.

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On my paladin, I finally dinged 80, ending my first toon’s journey to the new endgame.

A couple of thoughts about the latter parts of the journey, if you will.

Veteran of Wrathgate: I completed what some people have dubbed bestest quest chain evar and as is often the case when expectations are high, I actually ended up disappointed. The wrath gate itself, the cinematic (which isn’t playing in my game, had to youtube it) both look like a massive rip-off from Lords of the Rings. Heck, even Bolvar seeing the dragons coming in his last moments smacks of the battle at the Black Gate, when the joined forces of the West see the eagles coming. Now of course I’ve been long aware that Blizzard recycles content and the various easter eggs, cameos and not always so subtle references are actually enjoyable. This transposition smacks of lack of imagination, badly written fanfic, nothing more to me.
And flying through Icecrown later on while getting my exploration achievement just left the same aftertaste: it’s Mordor-on-the-rocks, it borrows really heavily from the visual atmosphere created in the Two Towers when Frodo is at Minas Morgul. Pity.

In a similar vein, lamest dragon ever:

Alexstrazsa, queen of dragons. You may be a massive red dragon with mean looking fire coming off your eyes and whatnot, but the  earrings? horn-rings? totally ruin her otherwise badass look. What’s the point depicting such vanity in a dragon in her dragon form?

Irony is always present in this game. Getting insulted by my future me about my gear? When the future me not only wears the same but manages to have 4.5k hp less than I do? Come on. The future apparently looks bleak, gear-wise.

My future me is apparently totally gimped. Oh well…

So as soon as I ding 80, Steptoe wants to reform our PvP duo. 102 bars of saronite later and a friendly blacksmith located and I’m ready to go with the crafted savage saronite gear. Ret paladin and DK, we’re bound to pwn, aren’t we?

Looks like our start in Season 5 is pretty much the same as our start in Season 2 (when we first formed our duo). Huge learning curve again, and massive fail. 9-1. For all other teams. Geez. 

Oh well. In actuality, I’m wearing kit with more than double the stamina and AP of my future me in Dragonblight, that’s got to count for something.

We also tried out Strand of the Ancients. Fun. With a little help of Megan’s wisdom, I wasn’t completely clueless on the first run. That being said, and to put the record straight, dear Megan:

• There’s always been QQ about PvP on both sides
• The faction which did actually boycott AV in many Battlegroups was Alliance
• I remember in 2005 and 2006 that there was a lot of tears about shammies in BGs, in particular in WSG

And having played AV on both sides (though not since patch 3.0.2) at some point, other mechanisms aside, let me assure you that having to fight through most of the alliance NPCs to get to Vann is a bit different than bypassing most of them when you want to get to Drekk. Which might have been a balancing mechanism due to the fact that Balinda is less of a hassle to kill (and much more difficult to defend) than her orcish counterpart, but as such, it’s badly implemented.

That being said, while the people complaining that alliance have an advantage by attacking first are obviously dumb as a pair of bricks (that is, twice as dumb as I am, I come with single-brick dumbness), the advantage you see of buffing everyone on horde def doesn’t exist. Players trickle in when the BG is started and immediately mount up and race to the beach. You never get to buff the entire raid, at least not with a PUG, and same with assigning groups. Players trickle in and the smarter go either man the canons or look who’s riding to what side before deciding to reinforce the weaker side. Preforms are probably different, but for PUGs, neither side is advantaged or disadvantaged by who goes first, methinks.

I defended Wintergrasp this afternoon, and it was a dreadful lagfest at the end. Manned a cannon for 20 minutes, and then things went downhill for us. Still, it’s good fun, and it’s good honour considering the fun to be had If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should

Last but not least, I keep saying this but I’d really love dual specs to be live.

And this concludes the short report about the last leg of my first journey to 80. DK and mage are next.

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The risk when you’re running as a healing / tanking / DPS hybrid (paladin) with a DPS / tanking hybrid (DK) is that you’ll end up having to heal your buddy who’s tanking to ensure the core of an instance PUG is covered.

We wanted to do the amphitheatre of Anguish last night, and you guess where it ended, I finally bit the bullet and respecced Holy.

And while I will readily admit that the wrath healadin is better than the TBC healadin, despite the new toy (Beacon of Light) or the improved old toys (6 seconds Holy Shock, and no, I’m not really using it unless things get hairy, and long distance judgement of Light), it’s a lot less fun than Ret or the Death Knight.

That being said, I somehow managed to get us through Amphitheatre of Anguish, Gun’Drak and Violet Hold, clobbering together about 1070 spell power and 11k mana out of spare kit I had been assembling in prevision of this very situation, two AH purchases and a couple of well-timed drops in the above instances.

Fun situation: in VH, the run was 4DK + me. A tanking cloak drops off the Aroakka boss (if memory serves). A level 73 DK needs because he wants it for his tanking set. I need for the same reasons. And after I win the roll, he starts whining that I stole it since I’m holy spec.

Memo to the clueless whining noob with a misplaced sense of entitlement: the healer has the same right to need on off-spec gear as a DPS, and if you have an issue with that, you make sure you get really good with combat bandaging. Especially when said healer blew over 200g in respec and AH gear cost to drag your underleveled arse through the instance.

Beacon of Light is an interesting spell. Using it properly at the right time is probably a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve been tossing it on anyone taking a HP dive at the same time as Steptoe (the tank, duh) and it seemed to work OK.

That being said, it took me a moment to figure out how to macro it properly to speed things up, and here’s what I came up with:

#showtooltip Beacon of Light
/cast [target=mouseover, help][help][target=player] Beacon of Light

Binding the macro to a key then allows me to hower over an unit frame to cast, or select a target, or if nothing else is selected, cast it on myself at one single keypress.

That did the trick.

Later, I went outside and tried to kill something with my holy spec. And wept bitterly. Never gonna make 80 with holy spec. I hope the bloody dual spec feature doesn’t get delayed too much, it’s really becoming a must-have feature (and we haven’t even tried it out yet…).

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And here we are, on the brink of 2009, and as usual, it’s time to look back at what changes the year brought.

One year ago, the hot topic in the WoW blogosphere was still the PvE / PvP opposition centered around the notion of Welfare epics. When I wrote my closing post on the matter, I didn’t yet measure how different 2008 was going to be – not only has the topic practically vanished, but as Megan astutely points out, the notion of Welfare epics nowadays could, if used at all, be applied very readily to raiding, whereas PvP gear is currently a lot harder and longer to aquire.

The one thing which hasn’t changed though is that the term is still being used by certain people to demean the achievements of those who are following a different path from theirs, one they deem inferior. 

2008 was largely dominated by the long Wait for the Lich King, and like the end of 2006, the controversies have centered around the hardcore / casual divide and the raiding scene. One thing which has changed drastically though is the reputation of the few dominating figures. In 2006, even me (then still raiding) was following the race to the Naxx world first with interest. Death and Taxes and Nihilum were in a neck-to-neck race and most people were cheering them on. Even if we weren’t directly affected, we could sympathise with all uberguild’s dismay at the reduction from 40-men to the 25-men raiding format.

Two years later, Death and Taxes has suffered from problems but has at least exited the immediate consciousness of the average player rather gracefully. Their opponent, though, through countless name changes, ugly drama, questionable sponsorships but foremost through a series of graceless and classless public tantrums about the difficulty of the game, haven’t just tarnished their name but in the end effect massively diminished the interest of the community in the life and adventures of the überguilds. In my mind they have become like the spoiled, rotten elites living lavishly and criticizing the taste of this year’s caviar and champagne when the unwashed masses are having sausage and beer. In the most ironic development, while they were wallowing in their pride and spitting at the rest of the gamers (with their dwindling cohorts of me-tooers), the world first for the currently most difficult raid achievement in the game, killing Sartharion on 10-men with 3 drakes up, was snatched up by Method.

In the meantime, titles and mounts for PvE feats have become a lot more commonplace, and the introduction of the achievement system has brought an entirely new dimension to certain aspects of the game. Whether by a bit of an accident or clear design, achievements don’t just give raiders more elements to compare and measure up against each other but also allow for different grades of challenges for farmed content. A bit like all those RPGs with several party members where players have developped additional challenges (single character, low level, gametime etc…) but formalized in a quite addictive structure.

I can’t help but wonder how my old 2007 antagonist Stop the Warrior views today’s game. Might give way to an interesting argument.

So here we are, on the brink of the new year. Last night, Steptoe remarked that this was the most hardcore evening he’d ever seen me play: we ran 5 instances in a row together. Which is indeed more than I have ever done in this game. That being said, it was 2 times Violet Hold, Drak’Tharon followed by another pair of Violet Hold runs (Steptoe wanted the plate pantaloons off the voidwalker boss), and Violet Hold isn’t exactly a long isntance – according to my Blessings timers, it takes slightly less than 24 minutes from buffing to exit. It was quite a profitable evening for my paladin, too, with a couple of nice drops.

Steptoe has taken to taking with his Death Knight and is doing well. Let’s also immediatly put one notion to rest: on leveling instances, you do not need to be crit immune as a Death Knight, far from it. Steptoe was level 75 and his gear was around 435ish defense after he got the legplates, with a combined avoidance of about 40%. The healer was a level 74 priest, who didn’t really have too much of a hard time apparently (and since we ran UK the night before when Steptoe was only around 410 defense and the guy came back, that speaks for itself), and throughout the evening the amount of free FoLs I was tossing the tank’s way have decreased quite a bit.

We had two wipes throughout the 5 runs, one early in Drak’Tharon because sometimes a lifetime of experience in not standing in stuff isn’t enough to recognize the stuff you shouldn’t stand in, the second one in VH on the netherstalker boss because of an unfortunate conjunction of me getting hit by an energy sphere about a half second before critting with judgement of blood. Wipe by Bloodicide. Had to happen once.

Regarding Ret performance, I’m a bit peeved about where I was sitting on damage meters. Oh, I came out on top in Drak’Tharon Keep, that one being an undead-heavy instance, no contest. The first two Violet Hold runs, though, I was only third (not by a large measure but still), behind a mage and Steptoe, and in the last two runs, I really had to work my arse off to keep on top against a level 75 boomkin, including eating AP food.

In the end, some gear upgrades, and I dinged Coldweather Flying in the middle of the last run. 3 more levels to 80. Still with about 20 quests in Dragonblight to go, that’s just three zones I’ve seen and used so far. Glad to have my epic fyling back though.

And this concludes my last 2008 post. Whether you level, raid, PvP, and do it casually, softcore or hardcore, I wish you all a very merry evening and a happy new year. To 2009, and may your chosen activities in game and in Real Life bring you joy and merryment.

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I managed to get some playtime in this weekend.

On the Death Knight, I quested a bit more and then parked the toon in Howling Fjords, about 3/4 exp to go to level 71. I respecced the dead guy to Frost for a while to see if I could get it to work for me, using a build with more avoidance than what I had so far to make for a bit more versatility and try out the ice cold version of DK AoE killing.

The build I’m using is this one, and in practice, it has a good rhythm to it. Hungering Cold is like a pallie bubble, it buys you time to apply a bandage before getting back to arse kicking. Frost Strike and Obliterate create some massive arse kicking when needed.

That being said, in terms of sheer survivability for solo leveling, I like Unholy better and will be respeccing once I pick the toon up again. The added damage generated from the third disease at my current gear level as well as the ghoul to make quite some difference, not to mention that two glyphed death strikes on 3 disease are enough to replenish a good 60% of my HP. It’s just plain smoother leveling.

And the third tree, you ask? Well, I still can’t be arsed to spec blood. I know it has some serious butt-kicking potential but for some reason the tree just doesn’t appeal to me so far.

On the paladin front, she’s earned the I’ve Toured the Fjord achievement, obviously cleared the zone, passed level 72 and moved to Borean Tundra.

The one striking thing is that at now roughly similar gear levels, the DK still outdamages my ret pallie by a good 20%, which tends to convince me that the level-70 based nerfs have definitely gone too far. The other thing is that despite the changes to the class, the paladin remains too passive in terms of gameplay compared to all other classes I’ve played. There’s just still too much time when you’re merely autoattacking and waiting for the cooldowns to give you something to do. Perhaps with patch 4.0.3…

At the end of my session, and seeing how various quest rewards have been of the tanking plate variety, I’ve decided to respec to prot for a while to see how the tree plays. I’ll try that one out after my next business trip.

In Howling Fjord, looks like Kamagua is the new STV or something. I’ve been ganked by level 80 players a lot more than anywhere else. I blame the walrus people dailies.

The transportation between Kamagua and (with intermediary stops) and Borean Tundra is original and fun, BTW. Just a tad too much waiting for my taste, but at least I now have a complete flight path between the Fjord and the Tundra.

Been trying to level my fishing and my cooking as well. The buff food I can make from the drops / fish in the Fjord is very nice for a healadin, but for Ret or the DK… not so much. Except for the Dalaran  Clam Chowder, which is, however, a bit of a pain to prepare, since the Succulent Clam Meat doesn’t actually stack has to be stacked manually (thanks for the hint, Tritax). Since I’m a bit slow-witted, it took me quite a while to realize that the best way was actually not to open the clams containing it before cooking, since the unopened clams do stack.

I’ll probably hit a wall soon until I reach Dalaran, where it appears the next set of recipes can be obtained.

And that concludes the present episode of my adventures in Northrend.

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Here’s a cool macro template to get your rune strike into your opponent’s face:

#showtooltip Blood Strike
/cast [nomodifier] Rune Strike
/cast Blood Strike

Make one for each of your relevant runic abilities (not RP, only runes) and you’ll be sure to dump RS whenever the opportunity is up.

If you need to conserve RP for Dancing Rune Weapon or a Gargoyle, simply hold down any modifier key and the spell will be cast without RS. Oh, and make sure RS is first in your macro, the other abilities are on a cooldown, which would prevent RS from being cast on the same keypress otherwise.

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Last night I logged on and was basically minding my own questing business in the still almost sparkling new (for me) Howling Fjords when I get a tell asking me if I were willing to tank Utgarde Keep.

After trading standard disclaimers (First time in instance, first time tanking on the DK and I don’t actually have anything resembling tanking gear, you guys still OK with this?), I took advantage of the DK’s almost unique flexibility, death gated to Ebon Hold, changed runeforge enchant to add 4% parry, and then went ahead and respecced to a more tankey build for good measure. I stuck to an unholy base build because I’m used to 18-second disease cycles by now and changing that right before trying out a new role was, well, not really a good idea.

And off we went on our merry way.

The group was quite spread out, level-wise. I was the lowest, followed by a 71 mage, a 72 priest, and a 72 and 77 rogue.

And how did it go?

Not that well. Compared to the paladin, DK tanking is a strange affair. First and foremost, I felt a lot more squishy than what I remembered from the tankadin (haven’t actually tanked on that guy for ages), and while gear obviously accounts for a lot (I had 475 defense and 89% avoidance last time I checked), the shield and holy shield with their 45% additional avoidance really do make a difference in terms of how in control you feel.

Speaking of control, the next hurdle is controlling a fight. Long essays have already been written on the relative ease of tankadins, and if you haven’t tried out tanking on a DK yet, let me tell you, there’s a real difference right there. Oh, with an unholy leveling build, you do AoE mobs all right. In a normally well controlled setting. In this UK run? Not so much. I felt, for instance, as if I were almost constantly with runes on cooldowns and no buttons left to push. For all the fuss over Righteous Defense, when you’re lacking a snap AoE spell like consecrate to pick up things like Prince Keleseth’s adds (I have either Death & Decay, using 3 runes, which is a rare commodity in mid-fight, or Unholy Blight, dependent on having some RP left), having a 3-mob taunt would sure have come in handy.

Then there’s the other thing which just became quite worrying in the patch notes, the nerf to Icebound Fortitude is something which would bug me in the future. The oh crap button this represented to give me a small health cushion when stuff started to get hairy will definitely be missing once it’s down to 20% instead of 50%.

In short, lots of room for improvement in my gameplay, and quite some adjustments I need to take. I’m quite frankly wondering whether I should just make sure to now level the paladin and the DK pretty much in parallel and use the pallie for tanking on invites and postpone any further experiments on the dead guy till endgame after collecting some decent and appropriate gear for the task.

On the other hand, I’m no quitter. We’ll see where this leads.

And how did the run go itself? Trash to first boss, no real problem. First boss: 1 rogue disconnects, we attempt to 4-man it, wipe, get another rogue, healer disconnects, get a balance druid accepting to heal, wipe a second time then kill the bastard. Next boss pair, the mage remembers that you need to kill both pretty much simultaneously after we wipe. We call it a night. A blue cloth hat dropped for the mage.

Funny factoids:

• After summoning, one of the rogues and my DK are found unguilded (since Steptoe isn’t back to actually invite my toon to our 2-man operation). 5 seconds later and our PUG has become a guild run
• To my surprise, one of my brand new guildmates remarked that I was the first DK who’d actually accept to tank since the release. That’s really unexpected. Oh, sure, there’s the non-tank rerollers who might not be too keen on experimenting while leveling, I can understand that. On the other hand, before I started to lag behind the leveling curve, you barely couldn’t take a step in Outlands without treading on another DK’s clown shoes. For some reason I just can’t fathom that nobody else would have taken the chance, tried it out and then stuck to it. Heck, before dual specs, no other tank can change enchants and respec as conveniently as a DK. I’m really surprised here.

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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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