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 you’ve heard already, Blizzard plans to bring an option to switch between two specs at the drop of a hat (probably out of combat) including switching your gliph selection in the process. A neat feature on the surface, right? In particular for all tanks and healers.

See, when you’re actually not needed in your main function for a specific fight, you can switch specs and gear and take a second role instead of being either nigh-useless (and thus a liability to the raid) or even switched out.

It is a very exciting prospect, but it also carries an inherent risk. Until 3.1 hits and the system supposedly goes live, Blizzard has to at least pay lip service into improving solo viability and possibly fun for the tanks and healers out there. After that? Not so much.

If there is currently fear that healadins switch to Ret in droves because dealing DPS is more fun than healing in Holy’s present shape, Blizzard will at least have to consider the issue (their knee-jerk reaction right now is exactly the same as last time Ret was fun to play, which takes us back to patch 2.0.1 before TBC went live: oh noes, Ret does damage, nurf quick). With dual specs, though, the standard answer risks to simply become dual spec Ret for soloing, and be a brave little one-trick FoL-bot if you want to raid.

I think the risk to see this happen as very real, and it will be supported and sustained by the droves of players who can’t just say “I experience things differently and find healing fun myself” but have to post, ad nauseam, that since they actually find something you loathe fun you must either find it fun too or be severely brain-damaged. You can find examples of this attitude in any of the o-boards’ healing class forums. Never mind that these players shoot their class in their collective foot, though, we all know that the most vocal individuals on the o-boards aren’t usually the brightest crayons in the box.

With 3.1, we will need more than ever to be vigilant about Dual Specs as an excuse. Never, ever should “just spec DPS on your second spec” become admissible as answer to issues within one specific talent tree. And players should really avoid at all costs to resort to “Spec X is fine, dual Spec Y if you don’t like it”. We cannot afford to leave Blizzard off that particular hook, at the risk of ending with a constant downward spiral in terms of gameplay quality.

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With time and many tweaks and adjustments, the WotLK beta has wrought many changes from the initial beta outlook. As we get closer to patch 3.x and its class overhauls, I took a long, hard look at the current state of the healadin.

And I don’t like it.

Admittedly, it is hard to make any truly informed decision from outside the beta – the latest changes for instance are still not final, nor does reading patch notes or second-hand accounts really give a feel of how the new trees will actually play.

That being said, from the looks of things, the hopes I had been harbouring to see an evolution of the healadin playstyle seem to have been in vain.

Due to a combination of factors which include mana cost adjustments, the nerf to the Infusion of Light talent and the addition of the admittingly interesting Sacred Shield spell, complex and more varied healing cast rotations which include Holy Shock appear to be, again, on the backburner compared to using our TBC single trick, spamming Flash of Light. Granted, on longer fights you’ll be keeping Sacred Shield up every 30 seconds (Woo! Sacred Shield is the new Seals) for variety, and if you spec all the 51 points in holy you’ll even get the option of keeping Beacon of Light up every minute.

But from where I’m sitting, it looks like the Wrath healadin will be, again, mostly a FoL-bot. So much for versatile and more interesting gameplay.

Not to mention that the Infusion of Light “adjustment” just killed, again, any semblance of 2v2 and 3v3 arena mobility for the holy paladin, one of the biggest issues holding the class back and keeping its number massively under-represented in those two brackets.

On the other hand, you can spec into a solid protection tree, said to provide much more damage (and hence solo viability) in Wrath than TBC, or an extremely sexy reborn Retribution tree which doesn’t just provide better DPS than ever before (OK, let’s cross our fingers, between patch 2.0.1 and TBC go-live Retribution was massive, too) but also pretty solid healing capabilities with the Art of War and Sheath of Light talents. Add to this that you can actually spec up to 5/5 Illumination in holy with 51 points in Retribution for off-healing or 5-men main healing, and you have (as it currently stands) not merely a good, non-gimped, non-laughingstock spec but you have something even more invaluable to many paladin players.

The realization, at last, of the Paladin vision of old: the dream of a holy warrior who can both smite his enemies and keep his allies alive, by staying in the thick of battle. And that alone is heavy enough in the paladin player psyche, especially among those players who stuck to the class through 4 years of disappointment and clericking for the lack of alternatives, to make the Wrath Healadin, as it stands now, the least attractive spec to come.

Caveat Emptor: As mentioned in the beginning, I’m merely theorycrafting. Actual results, in the beta or after a couple of additional adjustments, may change between now and level 80.

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As quoted by MMO Champion, the almost-standard staple of warlock talent builds, putting 5 points into improved corruption to make the bloody spell instant, has been changed. Corruption becomes instant as a base spell, and the talent boosts its damage.

Further, Ruin will get swapped around with Devastation, and become a 5-point talent for the same effect, allowing people to include it in 51-point builds if they want to.

It’s about damn time, if you ask me. That being said, and still beeing the Blizzard cheerleading optimistic PR-Gobbler that I am, I am still really happy about that entire review philosophy they have for wrath to put stuff which has become must-have talents back into base abilities.

How well they will deliver on the promise to provide us with talent trees providing multiple and open choices remains to be seen, but I like the whole approach, even if they could have done this same exercise in 2006 already. But hey, better late than never (critics will of course counter with too little too late, but I wish them happiness in WAR).

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To follow up on my previous post, via the EJ thread linking to it, someone wrote about his experiences group healing in the Wrath beta on the o-bards:

“The Good – Holy shock and Infusion of Light
Holy cow, it looks good on paper, but man for 5 man healing, this is amazing. Literally amazing. My staple heal for small pulls was Holy shock. The 6 second cooldown feels right, and it was critting for me for roughly 4200. Hot. I saved people multiple times.

Now for the ‘power’ infusion. This changes everything completely. I had 28.5% holy crit and 34.5Holy Shock crit. It was critting a lot, and the power infusion gives you a full 15 seconds to decide when to use it. The beauty of instant holy light heals is just out of control. It will wreck raid healing in terms of cast time heals all landing after a Huge ol’ Holy Light. But for the 5 man, it is just sick.

It saved people who pulled threat multiple times, and the librarian boss did a fair share of aoe damage, and yet I didn’t feel like I was gonna be screwed for it. I was using Holy shock to top off the paladin, flash of light the small damage on the rogue/myself and just watching the warrior before blasting him with a max rank Holy light. For a while I was reluctant to use the instant IoL on a downranked HL, but the more comfortable I got with it the more I loved it.

Another amazing thing. You are going along, just flash spamming for small damage here and there. Lacing it with Holy shock on occasion, although I found this to be unnecessary unless they took a sudden huge hit. But if the Damage spikes FAST and you wanna quick way out, I found that popping Divine Favor, holy shocking the lowest person, then max ranking the next lowest person was a great way to not only heal for a lot (many times HL crit too so 12k healed in like 2 seconds), but this would get my lights grace fired up which would lead in to many consecutive max rank Holy lights to top people off.”

This pretty much confirms my previous theorycrafting about weaving HS into a healing rotation. Barring any bad surprises with the mana cost of the last two levels of Holy Shock (currently the last 3 levels are all at 650 mana which seems odd), it looks like there will be a lot more variety in healadin gameplay in Wrath. Gone are the day when they were mostly flashbots, but gone as well is the helplessness when things go South, Lay on Hands is on Cooldown and your only chance to avoid a wipe in the next 2.5 seconds is praying that the HL you’ve just started casting crits.

At the very least, it will make things a lot more interesting.

The same poster however has also some very bad experiences with Sheath of Light (bugged or bad implementation? Hope it isn’t final) and aggro management with Hand of Salvation instead of the old Blessing appears to be funky at best. If you want the full details, go read it for yourself here.

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In one of these interesting meta-spats in the blogosphere, Tobold took exception to Richard Bartle‘s statement in an interview to Massively that “I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft.”

Tobold proceeded to write a withering post about Bartle’s bitterness and irrelevance in modern MMOs which, Tobold believes, the old curmudgeon doesn’t grasp anymore.

Unfortunately, Tobold apparently didn’t actually read the interview in its entirety at first, but instead reblogged and echoed another blogger’s own outrage about the above sentence. Which means that basically he’s quoting Bartle out of context and proceeds to show him:

“Well, as attempt of somebody who has become irrelevant to make it back into the news this succeeded; but now he’ll have some clever explaining away to do, before everybody considers him to be just crazy.”

Leaving aside the series of cheap shots reeking of, well, ageism, the interesting bit at the end of Tobold’s post is quite ironic in the context of the original interview:

“dismissing WAR because it shares features with WoW or other MMORPGs simply stops all evolution. Relying only on people coming up with revolutionary new ideas that found completely new genres would mean we would only get new games once every decade or so. WAR is important because it will attract a large audience, and it will evolve the MMORPG genre in some way. Discussing the evolution and the changes is a lot more important than listing the similarities.”

Now I have a lot of respect for many of Tobold’s opinions, but when you decide to take on someone else’s opinion, it’s probably better to read the source for yourself rather than reblogging just one provocative sentence. Cheap shot for cheap shot, considering Tobold’s self-professed interest in American politics, I’d expect, as a fellow “Old World dweller”, that he’d be a bit more critical of overblown gotcha-style reactions and look at the issues.

And what are the issues? What is Bartle really talking about? He’s talking about game design, and the distance which comes when you start seeing a game with a designer’s eye instead of a player’s:

“What I’m saying is as a game designer, I have terrible problems in experiencing the kind of fun the players have because I’ve gone past it. I understand it. If I didn’t understand it, how could I design for it? If I could only understand it by experiencing it, how could I understand what every single other player who isn’t me would think about it? As a designer, I’m not designing for me. I’m designing for everybody.
Because I’m designing for everybody, I need to understand how everybody likes the games.”

That kind of distance isn’t limited to gaming of course. It’s basically a common trait that for any kind of activity where a participant moves behind the curtain and gets shown the ropes. Watching an illusionist as a simple spectator is entertaining. But once you get taught the art of sleight-of-hand, you no longer watch the show, you analyze how the illusionist’s trick is working.

In gaming, we have (hopefully) public Q&A testing because not only the game devs but the in-house Q&A teams are no longer able to approach a game with a player’s eye, or, as the saying goes, with a fresh mind. As a consultant / professor who co-created the online multiplayer game genre I essentially see Bartle as two steps removed from the player experience, being the one to critique Online World Design as a field in computer science and entertainment instead of doing the designing himself. As he stated in a response to a comment of mine on Broken Toys, he sees his role in the MMO ecosystem as one who wants to provoke thoughts in the designer community, if only to actually have his audience make the willing and informed decision to design differently.

Having become a trainer myself recently, I have experienced and embraced myself the power of the Socratic method, that is, transmitting knowledge through questioning.

What Bartle is saying later in the Massively interview (and which Keen ignorantly dismissed as “After that dumb comment he rambled on for a few paragraphs talking about Age of Conan, mostly with incoherent rhetorical questions“, missing the mark by several more miles than Tobold since he actually did read the Massively interview) shows very clearly where he’s coming from:

“I might have a look at [Age of Conan] from a point of view of seeing what things – the class balances are like, seeing how they’ve implemented the – I really ought to write up a book on how to read a virtual world so that I have a vocabulary in order to explain it to people. But there are a number of things you can do with player versus player, and I want to see the way they’ve done it not because whether it’s cool or not but because of you chose that way. Now, why did you choose that way?

You chose that way because you’ve got a particular vision for your virtual world. Your particular vision for your virtual world is saying something. You made this the center of your virtual world. That tells me something already in advance. What it tells me is you want to compete with the games that don’t have it so that you’re carving your niche. But why did you choose that niche? You chose that niche or a particular reason. How did you implement it? You’re trying to rip off Dark Age of Camelot?“

And here lies the irony because that’s essentially what Tobold concludes his post with: “Discussing the evolution and the changes is a lot more important than listing the similarities.”

That’s exactly what Bartle is about. You provoke thought with, well, provocation. He percieves the information he has on WAR today as not being distinctive enough from WoW to attract him to it. Fair assessment? Probably not. From the sound of it, he certainly hasnt’ played the game yet, so he doesn’t know. On my part, I’ve had very little interest in the WAR hype so far, the only two things I managed to grasp in almost two years are:

• That all the jaded, bitter, “would-quit-WoW-in-a-second-if-something-better-comes-out” players (including those who still dream of the paladin class as it could have been instead of what it is) are investing so much hope in it that they will most probably be disappointed
• That it is generally positioned as WoW in a different setting, with more PvP, with RvR (and collision detection).

I haven’t investigated further and won’t before it releases. But one of the only two perceptions I have of the game is actually dangerously close to Bartle’s provocative statement.

Beyond the provocation, though, what Bartle tries to achieve is to get designers to question their own motives. That a game is going to be built around several arbitrary design decisions is probably a given, but Dr Bartle wants his designer audience to think these through in terms of why they are made, what their consequences are and why these decisions are preferable to discarded alternatives.

As I snidely pointed out earlier in that same Broken Toys thread, there has yet to be a hugely commercially successful MMO based on the visions and design concepts of celebrities like Bartle, Garriott or Koster. But if the sheer gravitas of their personae gets game designers to make conscious decisions to ignore them, I do believe that Bartle, at the very least, will be pleased at a job well done.

PS.

Reblogging is bad, mmmkay?

PPS

Tobold, your line “although some of those comments might have been Richard himself, disguised as “Anonymous”, which would be more understandable” is totally beneath yourself. You’re better than that.

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Part of the pre-announced Death Knight’s abilities include using the disease debuff quite liberally. I’m wondering how that will play out in PvE (obviously I don’t hold my breath, bosses will probably be immune to most of it).

Diseases in WoW are an interesting mechanism. One of them even made headlines and rose to prominence far outside the MMOG milieu, when patch 1.7 introduced Hakkar’s Corrupted Blood with a coding oversight leading to it being spread to capital cities by mischievous players. What makes it quite unique is that beyond debilitating effects you’d get from other debuffs like poisons, disease also spreads around, usually to nearby allies or party members for instance.

I’m curious how Blizzard is going to handle this aspect (if they include it at all). Assuming it spreads to nearby allies on a chance per hit, the most interesting question is how threat will be dealt with. Let me explain:

A DK main tanks, and uses a disease debuff on the primary target. A couple of seconds later, the rogue’s hit triggers contamination, and the debuff spreads to another mob. The disease aggro could be attributed three ways:

• To the DK who cast it
• To whichever player who caused it to propagate
• To the mob which was infected before

The first option would basically give the DK tank some means to increase his multimob aggro for AoE tanking. Therein lies danger, though, for the DK in a DPS role risks overaggroing. In short, it would place part of the DPS side of the class in a similar bind than retribution paladins pre 2.4, generating uncontrolled and unpredictable aggro.

The second option is even worse in the sense that it would transfer uncontrolled add aggro to softer targets than a DK.

The last option would be interesting to say the least. Imagine a scenario where the aggro generated by a spread disease gets highest on the newly infected mob’s list. You’d suddenly end up with a hostile NPC going after one of his own. There lies chaos (probably fitting the constantly shifting DK lore best), and it would probably be good for a couple of laughs.

I wonder which way this will get implemented. The only certain thing is that if the disease doesn’t discriminate and jumps also back to players, it will quickly  become a waste of an ability.

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As most of you will have seen already, Kil’Jaeden is down, and the PvE content of the Burning Crusade is now complete.

Two things strike me, first, it was SK Gaming who got the world first, putting an end to 25 months of Nihilum dominance. Congratulations.

The second thing is that KJ fell (again) in less than one week. Thanks to the gate system, Blizzard basically ensured that Sunwell Plateau would artificially remain unvanquished for 10 weeks, but in practice, the instance would probably have been cleared within 4 weeks without gates.

Now a couple of years ago, I would probably have jumped to the conclusion that spending all that development time on the top content to see it eaten up in a month was overkill, catering to 0.1% of the playerbase for very little additional content. But in reality, this kind of discourse is almost always tied to the notion that the casual content comes up short (something I may have been guilty of myself in the past), a notion which is only true in the eye of the beholder. In practice, lots of content has been added for casual players as well, and while old Azeroth isn’t really being given much love these days, little touches here and there still happen.

In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?

Well, I do believe the relatively short time between a boss’ gate opening and its first kill is actually speaking less about blizzard’s devs and more about top raiding. Let me venture an educated guess here, but to me the 10-20 guilds forming the world first contenders have mostly reached the game engine’s limits itself, a point where no matter what combination of methods are being coded, they can recognize the pattern, relate to a previous boss fight, and devise the appropriate counter almost naturally (if I liken this to the Treck borg, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate geek). There’s probably a point where stuff like not standing in burning vortexes, clicking on spawned thingies, dealing with nasty adds, handling aggro resets, positioning the raid properly, not staying around your guildies when you’re about to explode, managing fear, composing with an  enrage timer, decursing, healing and dpsing according to whatever situation becomes natural.

In a similar vein, one thing about having Altitis is that the newbie zones is probably what you will have visited more often than anything else – I sure did. The draenei and blood elf starter zones are something I’d qualify as both very well done and faster to finish even on the first run-through than the original ones. And that isn’t just because the zones were done with a lot more polish than their predecessors, but also because there’s only so much you can do in terms of newbie quests before the player recognizes and reacts to patterns. Let’s face it, there’s only one single questline in the draenei and belf zones which provides original components, the Stillpine Furblog chain in Azuremist Isle, and even that one, in the end, amounts to little more than fedex and kill.

I think (but feel free to tell me just how much I’m talking out of my arse) it’s pretty much the same with boss fights. The limits nowadays are the game engine proper, but also the imagination of the devs – there might still be some mechanisms to be devised to innovate on boss fights, but in the end, it probably becomes harder and harder to find new stuff which can be countered with more than one specific raid composition, allows for more than just one set of cookie-cutter approaches, and is more than “chug enough of the right type of consumables to beat”.

The bottom line is that this relatively short time to clear the hardest bosses in the game demonstrates, in practice even more than in marketing speak, that we have indeed reached the end of TBC, in the sense that only the new skills and talents WotLK will ship with could provide room for new mechansism and types of boss fights.

Even then, I’m not sure there will be enough novelty and variety available to dispel a feeling of “more of the same”, a complaint I’ll go on record predicting will become much more pervasive in the top raiding circles once Wrath is live. Something which, unfortunately, will probably not be fixable within WoW, independently of the quality and challenge Wrath could provide. Should any of the competitors in the MMO market provide a decent endgame, I expect a good portion of the top raiders to leave for pastures providing a different shade of green.

Makes me pretty glad to have Altitis, actually. I’m nowhere near the point where I could reach the limit of what the game has to offer.

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As everyone will have found out by now, there’s a lot of WotLK info bursting out today. Gamespy’s report on Deathknight is particularly interesting.

In November, while arguing that each of the current tanks has its particular spot in the game, I wrote:

While details of how the Death Knight will fit into this are probably still several months off (I expect late beta before a reliable pattern emerges), a possible venue of implementation may be either a specialization against high magical environments, or perhaps an experimentation to create a parry tank (a current tankadin qualifies as a block tank) which would go pretty well with the dual-wielding or 2H tanking.

And in January, responding to one of Tobold’s periodic worries about warriors in the tanking corps with the introduction of DKs, again:

First and foremost, the DK’s proper tanking mechanism will determine which niche the class will occupy. Niches which currently remain largely unoccupied include, as others have pointed out, a proper magic resist tank. Alternatively and fitting to the shieldless tanking, the DK could be designed as a parry tank, holding aggro through DPS output and being at the top of its ability against fast-hitting bosses (and that would mean eating up one of the tankadin’s niches, but I digress).

And look what Gamespy reports on DK’s tanking mechanisms:

Death Knights don’t use a shield, so their primary forms of mitigation will come in the form of Parrying, and the inherent power of their Presences and rune abilities. Blood runes are currently being billed as the primary tanking abilities, so to speak, while Frost is envisioned as more of a crowd-control type of rune. Choosing the right tools for the job will determine your success when tanking, like activating the Presence that increases the Death Knight’s damage mitigation, as well as increasing the amount of threat that they generate.
(…)
The Death Knight’s particular niche will be in tanking magic-damage-dealing bosses. They will have an ability much like a banshee’s anti-magic shell, greatly diminishing the amount of incoming magic damage they’ll receive in combat. While the Death Knight should be able to capably fill in any sort of tanking role with some success, they should be ideal against bosses that primarily deal magic damage.

(Emphasis mine).

Now how this will all work out in practice will, as I stated previously, depend largely on how varied the bosses in Northrend will be, but beyond being right on the money with my speculations, I believe Blizzard has done the best thing they could to provide something sufficiently unique in terms of design to ensure that the DK will complement the tanking corps instead of replace it.

Oh, some of the fun in having mage or warlock tanks will definitely be removed, but on the other hand, it removes the need to build separate and specific sets for such tasks. I definitely like the way this is going.

I hope the warrior panic will stop now.

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Daostrasz has an excellent post out here for people not making full use of a good gfx card and plenty of RAM, explaining how you can improve the eye-candy value in the game.

If you’re above 30-40fps in general, you should have enough power under the hood to take advantage of it all.

Go check it out at the source, with the proper screenshot support.

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