Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Pre-expansion Month; or "Why Did I Pay For This?"

The new Blackrock Spire is short but sweet. I ran it a few times just for fun. (I know, right. Does anybody play video games for fun any more?) Also because it's the only challenging healing environment that exists right now because the rest of the game is fucking broken.

"But Coreus, it will all work out at level 100! This version of the game isn't designed for level 90 so it's unfair to--" Yeah let me just cut you off there. If it's not designed for level 90, why did they put it out while we are all stuck at level 90? A week or two before the expansion is understandable when the changes are this drastic, but we are spending one whole subscription period in limbo between working versions of the game.

If I'm starting to sound a bit like a broken record on this subject it's only because I can't do Proving Grounds, I can't do Arenas, I can't do Brawler's. The Black Market is gone. PvE is a joke now but I can't even put out decent numbers because my class is dependent on abilities and stats that are not in the game yet.

I know the game never has been perfect but this is the definition of breaking it.


But anyway, Blackrock Spire. I feel like I'm doing more damage (relatively speaking) than I was before, but that's not something you can really judge in a 5-man dungeon, especially when you significantly outgear it.

There were some wipes, but only because BRS was designed in 1996 when claustrophobic three-hour-long maze-like dungeons were the new hotness. So we still have to deal with low ceilings, tiny doorways, mobs strategically placed within aggro radius around corners and not a single clue which way is forward.

Now I'm worried that they're doing another Cataclysm and making the game too hard again. I mean I'd be happy with that but I understand the other eight million players aren't so easily entertained.

I keep instinctively trying to switch from melee straight into direct healing and have a minor panic attack when I realise that it's not working and everybody is still dying, then another panic attack when I realise I could have changed stance by now if I'd remembered to do that first and everybody is still dying.

Blizzard seems to have recognised that smart heals were ironically dumbing down healing, so every untargeted healing event now follows the "random injured target" paradigm, with the exception of Renewing Mists which I assume would be just terrible if it wasn't intelligent about its targets.

The annoying thing for melee healing now is the number of buffs we need to juggle. Tiger Palm, Crane's Zeal and Rising Sun Kick all need to be kept up, while managing Chi and Vital Mists, and if you have any cognitive resources left on top of that, a glance at the group's health bars every now and again can be useful.


I've been pondering doing that thing where you keep 25 completed quests in your log for some quick XP once we can level again. What I thought was funny when I googled it was all the people who went to the trouble of writing a whole big paragraph about how that would be a waste of time and there's no way they would waste their time doing anything pointless like that.

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