Altitis

Unless you have been removed from the news cycle, you already know these two important tidbits of information:

• The Wrath Beta has started
• The NDA has been lifted.

In other words, any proposed changes are now public, in the open, and up for legit discussion.

To kick this off, a few highlights from the beta patch notes (first edition):

Maths get Nerfed

Less stats to cope with: 

 While theorycrafting is fun, there’s a point when the amount of maths you need to evaluate your gear upgrade paths gets in the way of things, and simplifying these by removing some stats is a good move in my book. The first change will benefit all classes who today combine melee and magic to a certain point, like hunters, paladins, druids and shamans for instance. The Spellpower change is a no-brainer too: healers won’t have to build a separate gear set for damage anymore.

Hunter Love

Several hunter changes which should rejoice all pet maniacs everywhere, among others:

While I haven’t taken a hunter up high enough to be able to fully measure the amplitude of all the other changes, the above are no-brainers. Finally completing unique abilities for all pet families is something which hunters were waiting for since patch 1.7… and that was 3 years ago. Loyalty won’t be missed. Auto-levelling new tamed pets within 5 levels of the hunter? This has to go live. It just has. Bite and Claw made equal? Again, no-brainer. Min-maxing had killed Bite-only pets in TBC. Welcome back, I say.

Paladin Sanctification… and Cursing

Again, way too many changes to list them all. Here are a couple of chosen few:

 Lovely start here… except that a longer daze effect on Avenger’s shield gives indisciplined DPS more time to rip aggro off a pull before it even reaches the paladin.

Blessings renamed into Hands… Mmkay.

I don’t like the sound of this change one bit. Salvation was pretty much a cast & forget blessing. Now part of the responsibility of personal aggro management gets shifted from the DPS to the paladins. I can already hear the arguments after a wipe. Instead of fostering personal discipline, the bad DPS will just blame it on a paladin too busy to cast a hand to shed the extra aggro they shouldn’t have gotten if they had been better players.

Several changes which appear to attempt to foster more hybrid gameplay or talent builds. It remains to be seen how this plays out in practice. I’m skeptical at this point. However, the big Hammer Tossing contests starting when a boss goes below 35% of health are sure to amuse for at least a week or two.

Combat Log changes

• The combat log now differentiates between a spell failure due to resistance and spell failure due to missing the target. Where once both events reported as a resist; a spell missing the target is now reported as a miss.
• Overhealing is now reported in the combat log.
• When a source of damage is entirely prevented (by a shield block, a full resist, or a damage shield like Power Word:Shield, the prevented amount will now be displayed

Lookie, that starts making sense.

As you will have guessed, there are way too many changes to comment them all in a hit & run post like this. There will be more later, but in the meantime, you will of course get class-specific commentary from your favourite class-specific blogs.

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Stating that the wow blogosphere is overloaded with high quality hunter sites is probably an understatement. All you ever wanted to know about hunter done not simply right but done well is there at the simple click of a mouse.

I’m therefore always a bit taken aback when I read taming advice for hunters above level 20 which goes:

• drop freezing trap
• Concussive shot
• Tame

Of course, this works, it’s the stuff for average hunters. It may fail for mobs with swiping and other moves which may interrupt taming (ravager anyone?)

Good hunters? They practice chain trapping.

How does that work again?

• Position yourself at max range and then move three steps forward
• Drop a freezing trap
• Turn around 90°
• Wait until your trap cooldown is up
• Use your pull shot macro on your future pet
• Strafe away from your trap a couple of steps
• When your future pet gets frozen, drop another trap
• Start taming

Granted, it takes you about 20 seconds more to set it up, but it’s perfectly safe and you don’t get hit. And face it, not getting hit in melee range is the Hunters’ Way.

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One of our regular readers would like to continue verifying how deep the often stark contrast between my favourite hardcore blogging antagonist Stop and me is running, and wrote us both asking to define our best moment in WoW (but would rather not be cited by name, so we’ll keep that under wraps).

The thing is, in three years of playing, defining the one single best moment in the game is something I’m hard pressed to do, so instead, I’ll recall a couple of highlights:

Group Quest

My first quest group was on one of my first toons in his 20ies, joining up with two other guildmates to complete several quests in Darkshore and Ashenvale. There was nothing really remarkable about the whole thing, except that the three of us would soon end up top brass in that guild, and later on transition over in one of the few successful guild mergers I’ve seen for level 60 activities. Over time, all three of us also ended up on the officer roll in that guild.

We all still play today, we are all still in the same guild (OK, me not too often since I have a dozen of horde toons wanting some playtime too).

Battlegrounds

My very first venture into WSG, at level 30 (don’t gasp, back in these days the brackets were 21-30, 31-40 and so on) on a rogue. One of the people, a pallie, queuing up at Silverwing with me (back in the day, you had to be in Ashenvale on alliance or the Barrens on horde to queue up, no fancy battle masters in the capital cities), gave me the pep talk and ran me through the basics. When the gates opened, I remember having an adrenaline rush, heart pounding, nervous like hell. I don’t remember whether we won or lost that first game, but it was definitely fun.

In late Summer and up until September 2005, I played in what I like to call the golden age of WSG – the brackets had been retooled to what we know now, and the game was still too fresh in Europe to have many level 60 toons with spare money to spend. In this relatively short timeframe, twinking was almost non-existent. I spent a lot of time on an orc shaman perfecting the twin shaman cap runs: basically ghost wolf and then rush along the Eastern edge of the map, up the ramp to the ally base, both jump down together. Two earthbind totems, two frostshocks, healing – it was a massively unfair advantage for horde, and the only time this could be stopped was when we faced three smart hunters who understood that owning the midfield was the key to victory. With Improved Concussive shot, they simply stopped anyone from passing (their team mates moping out in close quarters), and edged out a very impressive 3-0 victory in times where the best alliance could hope for was usually losing 2-3.

But then I got involved in a chat with the alliance guildmates, and we came up with a two-hunter counter to the twin shaman runs – one trap upstairs, a shadowmelt nelf hunter there, the pet hidden out of sight, and the twin shamans were separated and killed cleanly without being able to support each other. And suddenly the almost impregnable horde domination of WSG faltered, at least in that one single bracket.
The fun eventually stopped around the end of September, when suddenly every single game had at least three or four undead rogues with Fiery Weapon enchants and more HP than a blue-decked warrior (soon followed by an equally impressive army of gnome rogues). It basically removed most of the competition and fun in that WSG bracket.

Much much later, when leveling my belfadin, I stopped by in the 30-39 brackets, mainly in AB, and realizing that even without respeccing or regearing for the task, my healing definitely made a difference in the outcome of the game was definitely another highlight. It culminated with AV at level 70, where my personal pride was to sit both at the top of the healing done and HK meter, not only knowing that healing helped the team, but also certain that I had won most honour from these games.

Arenas

I joined up with my buddy Steptoe during season 2 for a lock / pallie duo. When I joined the team, it was at 1440, and we promptly proceeded to tank down to 1323. But then, the steady progress we made, week after week, while our duo started to act as a functioning, well-oiled team, was definitely one of the other highlights in the game for me. We ended up just shy of 1700 rating. That’s of course still massively in the scrub range by all standards, but for us it still meant steady progress and an improvement week after week. I still miss arenas with good old Steptoe, bless his black rotten forsaken heart.

Raiding

The first time Stoney dragged me through ZG was an amazing moment. It was just a short two-boss run and my lock was level 53 at that time. I felt utterly useless but still, the scale up from 5-men to 20-men play was definitely an impressive experience, along with the unique jungle atmosphere of good ole’ Trollville.

Another memory which stands out was when we quickly assembled 16 people to have a quick go at Kurinnaxx after an MC run – it was far from an optimal setup, it was getting late-ish, but we just went in there, cleared the trash methodically and downed the boss without any fuss. Oh, the kill itself was nice, but it was actually the pride in the guild chat that we were able to simply get job done despite not having the optimal setup (most of the guild was still in ZG kit at that time, it’s not like we were 16 full T1 or T2-clad warriors) which stands out most in my mind. Oh, and remember the two guys I mentioned in my first group quest memory? One of them was running on a dorf priest alt, and won the Vestments of the Shifting Sands. When his white-bearded and dignified elder dwarf character donned these, hilarity ensued.
I’ve always thought of him as the pink plush pocket healer since.

Tanking

Long time readers will remember I had issues with Shadow Labs early on, in particular finding groups which would be able to pass Vorpil. After Steptoe quit the game earlier this year, I respecced my belfadin to protection just so that I could go back to tanking and test out the various odd pieces of gear I had assembled in 7 months as a healbot. Well, going in there with your random PUG, I didn’t expect too much but that flawlessly executed run still stands out as one of the great moments I’ve had in the game.

Exploring

The first thing which really impressed me when I started playing WoW after two years in FFXI was when I noticed a wolf killing a squirrel in Dun Morogh. I watched this happen in awe and this simple bit of coding to improve the atmosphere of the world made a huge difference for me. Suddenly I felt like I was playing in a world which felt “real” in the sense that it conveyed the impression that it was existing for itself. FFXI always had a certain artificial quality to it, a bit like those horror rides you can find in theme parks where the various figures and effects only spring to life when a visitor (or his cart) passes by. WoW had that unique quality that it was a “living world” functioning regardless of whether a player was present or not, and other elements only reinforced that feeling. In FFXI for instance you could cross an entire zone chased by a train of monsters (back in the days you had to zone out in order to have a mob return to its spawn or patrol area, they simply never gave up), reach the gates of the city with a sliver of life and watch, with your final breath, your blood splatter the armor of the totally impassive guards who simply ignored what was happening at their feet (not that the goblins chasing you would be bothered by them witnessing your murder either). In WoW, at least at the lower levels and around factions you’re in good standing with, a guard means salvation instead of stony indifference.

In general, even years later, WoW never ceases to amaze me with little details I hadn’t noticed before. Rhoelyn’s little Azerothian picture quiz was really fun in that respect. Just a couple of days ago, while leveling my latest little belf mage in Eversong Woods, I noticed, for the first time, that behind some troll village where you are sent on one of those nice extermination quests, there was, just out of reach, a burning tower.

Well, there we go. Those are definitely among the highlights of my three years in WoW, and among the reasons why, pre-WotLK depression or not, I keep enjoying the game. Is this specific to a casual player? I doubt it. I am however quite curious to read what Stop will come up with, if he decides to answer our reader’s question as well.

And you? What are your own highlights in the game?

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I’ve left the first couple of Blog Azeroth shared topics slide by since I didn’t have anything worth sharing, but I’ll hop on this particular bandwagon

So character names. Going back to my teens when I was playing pen & paper RPGs (yes, my nerd roots are that deep), names which sounded more or less gaelic were all the rage with the couple of nerdy friends sharing that hobby, and that’s more or less a broad overtone I stuck with ever since.

Gwaendar, my current posting handle, has evolved from the simple Gwaen I used to pick for many female character names back in those days, not just P&P RPG but computer games as well – Ultima and Bard’s Tale series had Gwaen already.

Gwaendar I believe I first used in FFXI as there was a Gwaen character on my server already (although at that time it was neither my main handle nor first character created). The toon name then carried over to my generic net identity when I switched over to WoW, mainly because I was soon to create my first guild’s website and Gwaendar was my main at that time. I stuck to it because it was convenient.

Celerann is a name I picked for my pallies and I started using with WoW. For the inspiration I probably picked Tolkien’s Celeborn and transformed it to a female name.

Caythlin was / is my gnome lock (and the name passed on to a couple of other female casters since), simply a gaelic-sounding modification of Kathleen, a name I seem to like for some reason (it’s actually the second name of my first daughter, my wife likes it too).

Then we have Alastair, which used to be my main toon name for male characters for a long time, and my first main on FFXI for instance. I used this as a modified version of Allister (as in Crowley, go figure) for my male characters for a good dozen years, and was quite amused when I finally met an authentic (and very Scottish) Alastair at work a couple of years ago. The name eventually gave birth to the female form Alastaria, which I still use for mages mainly. On FFXI, when I made a taru-taru, the name more or less naturally gave Alasutaru, which coincidentally is pretty close of the Japanese rendering of Alastair.

I further use Grandak for orcs – I was looking for something with a more guttural sound than my usual choices, Farngath for some dwarves, some variations of Tramplegnome for certain Tauren toons (go figure).

When PCTing my shaman over to Doomhammer, I had to rename her so I decided to go for something a bit different than my usual routine. I wanted something to do with the shaman class, in line with certain first and last names you’ll find on NPCs. I rather unoriginally came up with Wolfdancer but I like the sound of that, so it’s OK, I guess.

And that’s more or less most of the names. For pets, it’s a lot simpler, my hunters’ best friends are usually either Nerf or Nerfbat, and that’s it.

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As we saw in the previous benchmark in our series, the surveyed Damage Meters get level 70 character solo play right. Before that one I ran a test series with my level 13 hunter, though, and the picture starts getting differentiated.

Here is the summary table:

The black squares indicate where I forgot to screenshot the data (/em slaps self). It was actually the first series I ran, though, and my mind wasn’t entirely settled on what I wanted to measure at that time.

Regarding Assessment’s Damage Done, it doesn’t show the pet separately in the total damage dealt, and rounded the figure at 11200 (hence the italics). The figure displayed above is obtained by substracting the pet damage from the drilldown view from 11200.

Recount’s pet damage started lagging below the others pretty early in the series and the gap tended to grow over time. There’s no practical mean to account for the loss of healing done tracked by either Assessment or Recount.

And then there’s DamageMeters, who was struggling on several counts:

• Despite having the correct setting, it didn’t take the pet into account before a manual dismiss & call pet. At that point, the difference in pet damage was 156 (one fight). The gap never stopped growing fight after fight
• In the detailed view, DMM doesn’t identify Gore 2 by name, but instead attributes some Autoshot damage to the pet, 291 damage to be precise.

Recap, SW Stats and Violation all tracked overhealing which WWS didn’t recognize, but the figures remain consistent both accross these three, and the sum of effective healing + overhealing matches the WWS total. DamageMeters got the healing figures right for that matter.

This concludes the solo play with pet for a low level toon. Due to the various troubles, I’ll run a test on my level 60 warlock next as a complement.

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Looks like I’m not the only one peeved by this hotfix:

• Several hunters wasted a lot of cash getting the needed items to make it possible, based on the blue statement that this would stay as it was a creative use of in-game mechanisms
• Big Bear Butt Blogger feels like me but writes it a lot better: “There was nothing… just no reason at all to do this, except out of spite that the cool kids figured out a way to have fun that some idiot at Blizzard didn’t think of first.”
• Time Well Wasted (discovered through BBB) goes to the heart of the issue: “We’ve seen this time and again: a player discovers an inventive use of a spell or an item or a game feature, and has a lot of fun with it — then Blizzard comes away and yanks the fun toy away because they didn’t mean to do it on purpose. Sure, sometimes that toy causes imbalance, but when it doesn’t, it makes no sense that Blizzard should get prickly about it. Your game just got MORE FUN for its players. You have unintentionally SATISFIED a paying customer. What business model sees this as a bad thing? Instead of hotfixing it, Blizzard should be wholeheartedly embracing this quirk and turn it into a supported feature: rare-looking pets that take significant effort to tame, sort of like an epic hunter pet quest.“
• Tzia at Have Bow, Will Travel, points out the matter of consistency and credibility of the CMs: “Am I upset? YES. I had no intention of taming this thing, since it would have taken a specialty meta gem, and a few people to help me just to get, and then I would have had to go through the horror that is grinding up a lowbie pet. However, you do not say one thing and then do the other.“

Expect more backlash to come within the next hours. Frankly, I’m not into disruptive actions or whatnot, but I hope that everyone who spent the gold to aquire the gems and mats and is now sitting on them petitions a GM for a refund, so that there is at least some kind of feedback into the system that this was a crappy decision, to say the least.

Beyond that, though, as Tzia stated, the really stupid thing is that this dev decision diminished their Community Managers’ credibility (again). Considering the state of the o-boards at the best of times, as well as the rampant paranoia, nerf-calling, trolling, venting, ranting, crying, whining, lashing out, trolling and whatnot which makes the bread and butter of the interaction between forum posters and the CMs, this decision sends out the message “our CMs are really a PR function, not Community Representatives”.

Moroagh has spent some time discussing about the input designers can get from their community. Tobold expanded on the notion, differentiating between listening to the wanton noise and taking the pulse of the playerbase. CMs ought to be one of the tools the devs could, should (and sometimes do) use to take player input into account. When you basically make them liars on a cosmetic but extremely visible and popular symbol, you make their job of getting the pulse that much harder.

Definitely one of the poorest design decisions in recent times.

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As seen on Mania’s Arcania, Blizzard applied a hotfix preventing taming of the Ghost Wolf in the future, and reversing their previous stance on the matter.

Apparently they spent hours agonizing over this and decided to pull the plug (while at least allowing people who already tamed theirs to keep it).

I’m all for cutting Blizzard a lot of slack in terms of game balancing and adjustments, but this hotfix is useless, pointless and petty.

Here you have some ingenious players going out of their way to tweak taming mechanisms to the extreme and getting the last second out of the process in an original and ingenious way. They’re pushing several of the game’s features to the limit, and as a reward get a unique pet. The Ghost Wolf was the mark of the most dedicated pet collectors out there, a trophy showing the world that here was a hunter willing to go not one, not two, but a good hundred extra miles for a pet.

I don’t see how keeping this in the game would have had any negative impact whatsoever, even on the micro scale, on the environment. Spending several “design discussions” on this matter and ultimately removing it is not just petty but most certainly wasted time. To answer my own question: yes, it is an utterly pointless nerf.

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Often, PUGs are a lot better than what the constant barrage of horror stories suggest, and with the bad reputations such random gathering of people have, there’s ample opportunity to be pleasantly surprised when things work out well.

Sometimes, though, you do run into genuinely bad players, who do not just play subpar but will also stubbornly refuse to listen and adapt to whatever the circumstances demand.

Shorsha, of CC= Constant Consecration (best backronym in WoW, ever), recounts one of these experiences in Blood Furnace with a huntard who stubbornly would refuse to turn Growl off his pet, while having it fight the main DPS target. The hunter eventually left without ever saying a word, and Shorsha, being fundamentally a nice person (at least from what I gather) now feels bad about it.

There are people who live with the philosophy that nobody is ever too old to learn or too young to teach, and some who may react badly to being told what to do but who can nonetheless adapt, and eventually accept that they haven’t been born best player ever and can perfect their gameplay.

There are people, however, who stubbornly refuse to admit that there is anything they could change, improve or perfect in a group setting. These are basically the sociopaths who should have, in an ideal world, stuck to single-player games, or at least to soloing. When they end up in a group, wipes or at least conflict is usually inevitable.

Competing for aggro with the MT, with the exception of specific boss fights requiring this as a tailored strategy, is a mistake one is allowed to make on the first two, three instance runs. Say in RFC, Deadmines, Wailing Caverns and à la rigueur up to BFD. In the mid-sixties, considering that the Outlands instances tend to require a bit more skilled gameplay and at least a modicum of knowledge of both your class and group dynamics, this is inexcusable.

Tanks in general require both hitting and being hit by their targets to generate the fuel of their threat mechanisms. Remove the being hit part and you cripple your tank, forcing him to blow a taunt which may be on cooldown when it would have been most required, say to save the group’s healer. This is however a lot worse for tankadins than warriors and druids.

Let’s remember how the tankadin threat generation cycle works:

• Tankadin spends Mana on active and reactive threat generation spells (consecration, holy shield, sealing / judging)
• Tankadin gets hit, increasing threat output
• Tankadin loses some health
• Tankadin gets healed back
• Through Spiritual Attunement, the Tankadin regenerates the mana to start the next round of the cycle

Without mana, no threat. Without getting hit, the Tankadin loses no health and therefore gets no mana back. In this particular case, this specific huntard’s mistake was double: Not only did he disrupt the tankadin’s threat generation cycle, he also wasted 15 of his pet’s focus points every 5 seconds, focus points not spent on dealing more DPS.

Double incompetence, cannot and doesn’t want to listen, and you get the guy to leave? I say bravo. Your group inevitably worked better as a result, if only because the threat generation cycle is no longer being disrupted.

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I was leveling my mage in Southern Barrens a bit last night, and there, right before my horrified eyes, I had another sample of that sorry excuse for a huntard, the sadly still-too-common Melee Hunter.

Now while I have a whole complement of hunters spread across 5 servers (I had to check) all sitting around level 24 and 43 (go figure), I haven’t really put in any serious playtime on my latest one, the mandatory Altitis hunter on my new server. In fact, the poor orc is still sitting in Durotar at level 6, waiting for me to tire off leveling my fishing or my mage. He’s been there since I PCTed in, two months ago.

I made him a couple of days after taking the mage to level 10, and while I fully appreciate that the pet changes everything for a hunter, right after the mage those first early levels feel dreadfully sluggish to get through. Of course, that experience isn’t unique to the hunter in comparison to our little fireball-throwing apprentice, but I digress.

Thinking about it (which you know is almost of tectonic swiftness, what with my limited brain power, read: 2.5 years in the game and I just realized the bleeding obvious), those first 9 petless levels are probably to blame for this aberration of a ranged class, the melee hunter. Indeed, until you get your first animal companion turning you into a potential duo of death and destruction, most fights end in close combat with a raptor strike and a couple of sword or axe swings (which is the part making those early levels so frustratingly slow).

Design induces melee hunter behaviour, something which may follow players around through their whole career. Hunter is one of the two classes (the other being druid) who don’t get their class-defining traits before level 10, whereas all others have the key elements of their gameplay available at level 4 at worst (unless you count bubble-hearthing as class-defining for pallies, which would leave them deprived of core elements till level 6). A not-too-clumsy warlock for instances gets his first pet at level 2. Warriors, Paladins, Priests, Rogues, Mages get their class-defining gameplay elements right at creation. Shammies have to wait until level 4 until they can plant totems.

Aside from the fact some starter zones obviously can’t support a young hunter’s need to tame three different kind of beasts, and the fact that you have to travel to your racial capital in order to learn how to feed and train your new companion, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to have 1/7th of the class’ progression path made melee like it is. In a similar way, druids get access to shape-shifting too late in their career (and unlike hunters, take until level 20 to start leveling at a decent pace). Melee hunters are a design-induced aberration, perpetuated by players who don’t know or don’t believe better.

A fatality? Unfortunately yes. With more than three years after the Go-Live, a reworking of something that low on a class’ progression is about as likely as me killing Kil’Jaeden. However, next time you meet a melee hunter, just remember that his 10 first levels induced that behaviour, and that you’ll have to prove him with hard numbers that shooting at things from a distance is actually much better for him.

All in the spirit of Winter’s Veil, of course.

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I had to laugh at a recent guild application, which reminded me of some funny ones we’d get in my old pre-TBC guild which I would routinely scan and respond to on the web site (I was more or less informally the guild’s PR officer at that time).

So here’s a little list of things to do when you don’t want to make things too easy on yourself when applying to a guild:

• Instead of copying and filling in the application form in a new thread on the guild’s recruitment forum, reply to the application template. Obviously, you are so awesome your application needs to remain in plain view for future applicants
• Don’t link your armoury, recruitment officers should have something to do to kill time, and letting them figure out which one among the bazillion Legolaselfxxx you are will teach them to look up to Greatness
• Don’t post your spec, just assure you’re willing to respec… if requested
• Brag about how good you are at delivering top DPS, the fact that you’re a hunter with 5/51/5 spec clearly shows you know your class’ cookie-cutter best damage build (good thing BRK doesn’t read Altitis or we’d have to call in life support about now)
• Decent spelling and grammar is for tossers
• “ermmmmmm [insert 12 more "ms" here]” shows that you are a thoughtful person, and it also allows your readers to share your superior state of mind
• Apply as a raider to a guild raiding on weekdays when your playtime is restricted to the weekends
• Copy-Paste an application form you used for a completely different guild
• Bonus points if the name of the other guild is still in the copy-pasted form, recruitment officers should know you’re hot stuff and will also invite others to tender for your services
• Extra Jackpot if you actually copy / pasted your brother’s application form to a BT guild when you’re applying to Kara without being keyed
• Lots of lol, u, wud definitely give your speech more colouration. In particular if you suggest you’re from a place where English is, usually, the first language
• “That sounds a littel gay lol” is the absolute best way to complete your application form, unless you somehow manage to sneak “up yours” in somewhere.

There you go.

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• Planning a Raiding School – the notions we had, the post mortem (1)
• Closing the 2007 Welfare Epics Debate with a Look at PvE (8)