After tinkering with a Sith Juggernaut for 25 levels, I'm giving Sith Asassin a go. I get that there is not all that much in the moveis to go on in terms of offensive force powers, but I think it's pretty funny that the majority of my abilities are variations on Force Lightning. Force Lightning channeled, Force Lightning instant, Force Lightning stun, Force Lightning crowd control, Force Lightning imbued into my lightsaber. I'm only level 11, but I really want to see how far they take this.
I'm reminded of the first Jedi Knight game [Dark Forces II]. The final dark side ability a player could learn in this game was called "Force Destruction"-- a spherical, red and black fireball-esque projectile. This might seem silly now, but remember that this game was released in 1997, before any of the prequel trilogy existed, when evil force users were referred to as "Dark Jedi" and the Emperor shooting lightning from his hands was the latest in a string of seemingly escalating force powers demonstrated by the films. In 1997, "Force Destruction" was a reasonable extrapolation.
Cut to 2011 and all we really ended up with in three more films was more levatating and more lightning. Mind you, we've had boatloads of lightsaber escalation; double-bladed sabers, duel-wielding sabers, quad-wielding sabers. They put sabers into the hands of characters who had little business wielding a saber. [If a seventh movie is made they will need to resurrect Grand Moff Tarkin as a lightsaber who also sextuple-wields triple-bladed lightsabers.] But in the force powers department, just more levatating and more lightning.
Maybe my Sith Assassin will get the levitating stuff later on.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
lolnerfs, again
So Dragon Soul is being progressively nerfed in a similar style to Icecrown. Fair enough.
Funny that I was just blogging about this very subject yesterday. I need to say that I think using the Firelands nerf as a comparison is a bit of a stretch-- as I wrote yesterday, my opinion is that the Firelands nerf came from a raiding paradigm-shift. That it helped with individual progression was a side-effect.
At last count the official QQ thread was at 133 pages. One hundred and thirty-three pages of people QQing, and other people QQing about the first group's QQing. I think the Internet has trained me well in recognising a pointless argument when I see one.
There really isn't anything to say that hasn't been said before:
-Difficulty in WoW is never, never, never static. You personally are nerfing the content every time you put on a gear upgrade. This is part of the game.
-If you are upset by the game supporting less competent players, even encouraging them to think they are competent, WoW is probably not the game for you any more.
Speaking of the above, it's worth remembering that Mists actually promises to bring us for the first time ever un-nerfable content in the form of Challenge Dungeons. I really don't think enough emphasis has been put onto this feature for the people who complain about PvE content nerfs.
I suppose for me personally this nerf is incidental. My raid has yet to hit any significant wall in progression. Madness took us a couple of weeks to kill. Heroic Morchok took us a couple more after that, with our first kill last weekend. If this nerf serves to make my raid progression more consistent, I'm fine with that.
Funny that I was just blogging about this very subject yesterday. I need to say that I think using the Firelands nerf as a comparison is a bit of a stretch-- as I wrote yesterday, my opinion is that the Firelands nerf came from a raiding paradigm-shift. That it helped with individual progression was a side-effect.
At last count the official QQ thread was at 133 pages. One hundred and thirty-three pages of people QQing, and other people QQing about the first group's QQing. I think the Internet has trained me well in recognising a pointless argument when I see one.
There really isn't anything to say that hasn't been said before:
-Difficulty in WoW is never, never, never static. You personally are nerfing the content every time you put on a gear upgrade. This is part of the game.
-If you are upset by the game supporting less competent players, even encouraging them to think they are competent, WoW is probably not the game for you any more.
Speaking of the above, it's worth remembering that Mists actually promises to bring us for the first time ever un-nerfable content in the form of Challenge Dungeons. I really don't think enough emphasis has been put onto this feature for the people who complain about PvE content nerfs.
I suppose for me personally this nerf is incidental. My raid has yet to hit any significant wall in progression. Madness took us a couple of weeks to kill. Heroic Morchok took us a couple more after that, with our first kill last weekend. If this nerf serves to make my raid progression more consistent, I'm fine with that.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Raiding difficulty
In hindsight it's easy to see the design evolution.
In Cataclysm, Blizzard listened to the complaints from players that Wrath Heroic dungeons and raids were too easy. They gave us some really great, challenging-without-being-ovewhelming, Heroic-level dungeons. They gave us a raid tier we could really chew, each boss by itself a very satisfying challenge to overcome. It felt like a return to form, and to the days when raiding was respected as the highest challenge the game could offer.
Many, many players complained, having not the competence/resources/time to complete endgame content to a degree they were satisfied with. Blizzard responded to these complaints with the assurance that this was all a temporary problem that would only persist for the first tier of the expansion; that once the next tier was available, the previous tier would be made puggable.
It was a couple of months into the next tier when they noticed that puggers still preferred to live on the scraps of the current tier [Firelands trash runs] that complete their now-tailor-nerfed previous tier, no matter how retardedly easy it was. And so we had a very jarring mid-tier "design shift" to make the Firelands normal modes puggable and only the Heroic modes aimed at progression raiders. And this design continued into Dragon Soul; Heroic modes for the progression raiders, Normal modes for the PuGs and their helpful family-oriented guilds, and the LFR for the retards banging their heads on the keyboard and whingeing that they deserve everything a skilled played can get.
I can't say I'm completely happy with the current system, but that has more to do with LFR creating once again a system with multiple raid lockouts, so for the first few weeks of each tier, raiders are "forced" to do LFR in addition to their regular raid, every week, to maximise gearing opportunities-- the first time this has been necessary since Icecrown 10/25.
I'm sure Blizzard thought long and hard about whether the LFR and the "real" raid lockouts should be shared. If getting loot from the LFR version of a boss warrants locking a person out from receiving it a second time, surely the having rolled on the far superior normal mode loot is an even better excuse to lock a person out from taking loot..?
The conclusion which makes the most sense to me is that they see "forcing" raiders to carry incompetent players as a happy side-effect of keeping the lockouts separate. Because in Blizzard's view, causing competent players to make the game more fun for [carry] incompetent players is the best result possible.
In Cataclysm, Blizzard listened to the complaints from players that Wrath Heroic dungeons and raids were too easy. They gave us some really great, challenging-without-being-ovewhelming, Heroic-level dungeons. They gave us a raid tier we could really chew, each boss by itself a very satisfying challenge to overcome. It felt like a return to form, and to the days when raiding was respected as the highest challenge the game could offer.
Many, many players complained, having not the competence/resources/time to complete endgame content to a degree they were satisfied with. Blizzard responded to these complaints with the assurance that this was all a temporary problem that would only persist for the first tier of the expansion; that once the next tier was available, the previous tier would be made puggable.
It was a couple of months into the next tier when they noticed that puggers still preferred to live on the scraps of the current tier [Firelands trash runs] that complete their now-tailor-nerfed previous tier, no matter how retardedly easy it was. And so we had a very jarring mid-tier "design shift" to make the Firelands normal modes puggable and only the Heroic modes aimed at progression raiders. And this design continued into Dragon Soul; Heroic modes for the progression raiders, Normal modes for the PuGs and their helpful family-oriented guilds, and the LFR for the retards banging their heads on the keyboard and whingeing that they deserve everything a skilled played can get.
I can't say I'm completely happy with the current system, but that has more to do with LFR creating once again a system with multiple raid lockouts, so for the first few weeks of each tier, raiders are "forced" to do LFR in addition to their regular raid, every week, to maximise gearing opportunities-- the first time this has been necessary since Icecrown 10/25.
I'm sure Blizzard thought long and hard about whether the LFR and the "real" raid lockouts should be shared. If getting loot from the LFR version of a boss warrants locking a person out from receiving it a second time, surely the having rolled on the far superior normal mode loot is an even better excuse to lock a person out from taking loot..?
The conclusion which makes the most sense to me is that they see "forcing" raiders to carry incompetent players as a happy side-effect of keeping the lockouts separate. Because in Blizzard's view, causing competent players to make the game more fun for [carry] incompetent players is the best result possible.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Trinkets, pretty trinkets
Skadi the Ruthless finally dropped his shiny drake for me the other day. Months of farming = worth it.
On the other hand, I've been killing Anzu for about the last four years and haven't seen a god damn thing.
I take back what I said about Tyrande's Favourite Doll being useless. Decent healing trinkets are pretty hard to come by these days if you're not a raider [or haven't been since tier 11]. The healing trinkets from Firelands and DS are fantastic, but the designers seem really reluctant to provide anything decent in Heroics or as a Valor/rep reward. It's all rng haste procs, mastery, spell power and other stats which are not Intellect.
What I'm only just kind of realising is that trinkets are the slot for which item level is least relevant. For any other piece of armour or weapon, the item level directly dictates how much of your primary stat will appear, or the damage / spell power on the weapon; so 95% of the time higher ilevel is better. Trinkets are completely different in that they may not even have a primary stat on them [usually terrible], or may have a proc which blows anything else out of the water, even multiple tiers later.
For example, this weekend a fellow raider of mine was grumbling about how he still had to use DMC Volcano as he had yet to find a better trinket in three raiding tiers. I told him that's the epeen talking.
Tank trinkets for tier 13 are a really good example of this. The BiS pair from tier 12 were both excellent:
- static mastery with a below 35% melee hit absorb proc
- static dodge with an on-use 20% damage reduction absorb
This tier, we get:
- stamina with below-50% absorb proc*
- stamina with mastery proc
- mastery with dodge on-use
- pure stacking dodge
*can proc from incidental damage and thus the size of the bubble is subject to RNG
Even deciding what stats are worth having is debatable these days. Everyone knows how valuable getting to CTC is, but past that point opinion varies wildly. I've been regemming for Stamina past CTC, but there are still plenty of idiots who think that stamina is worthless for all tanks in all situations and are not afraid to voice this opinion as fact.
And I've yet to see a clear conclusion on the value of Mastery past CTC. The least dumb-sounding people on forums seem to have evidence that it's a two-roll system, which basically means that crit block gets pushed off the table along with regular block, so Mastery will only become less valuable the more avoidance we have past CTC.
What I think I'll do is gem for CTC with one Mastery trinket, probably Spindle because the below 35% bubble is fairly universal in its usefulness, and swap the other trinket depending on what the encounter requires.
On the other hand, I've been killing Anzu for about the last four years and haven't seen a god damn thing.
I take back what I said about Tyrande's Favourite Doll being useless. Decent healing trinkets are pretty hard to come by these days if you're not a raider [or haven't been since tier 11]. The healing trinkets from Firelands and DS are fantastic, but the designers seem really reluctant to provide anything decent in Heroics or as a Valor/rep reward. It's all rng haste procs, mastery, spell power and other stats which are not Intellect.
What I'm only just kind of realising is that trinkets are the slot for which item level is least relevant. For any other piece of armour or weapon, the item level directly dictates how much of your primary stat will appear, or the damage / spell power on the weapon; so 95% of the time higher ilevel is better. Trinkets are completely different in that they may not even have a primary stat on them [usually terrible], or may have a proc which blows anything else out of the water, even multiple tiers later.
For example, this weekend a fellow raider of mine was grumbling about how he still had to use DMC Volcano as he had yet to find a better trinket in three raiding tiers. I told him that's the epeen talking.
Tank trinkets for tier 13 are a really good example of this. The BiS pair from tier 12 were both excellent:
- static mastery with a below 35% melee hit absorb proc
- static dodge with an on-use 20% damage reduction absorb
This tier, we get:
- stamina with below-50% absorb proc*
- stamina with mastery proc
- mastery with dodge on-use
- pure stacking dodge
*can proc from incidental damage and thus the size of the bubble is subject to RNG
Even deciding what stats are worth having is debatable these days. Everyone knows how valuable getting to CTC is, but past that point opinion varies wildly. I've been regemming for Stamina past CTC, but there are still plenty of idiots who think that stamina is worthless for all tanks in all situations and are not afraid to voice this opinion as fact.
And I've yet to see a clear conclusion on the value of Mastery past CTC. The least dumb-sounding people on forums seem to have evidence that it's a two-roll system, which basically means that crit block gets pushed off the table along with regular block, so Mastery will only become less valuable the more avoidance we have past CTC.
What I think I'll do is gem for CTC with one Mastery trinket, probably Spindle because the below 35% bubble is fairly universal in its usefulness, and swap the other trinket depending on what the encounter requires.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
You call this archaeology?
The mount collection continues. One hundred and seventeen, and counting.
Spent a bunch of time Archaeologising yesterday, turning the 50 or so Tolvir Heiroglyphs I'd collected from the AH over the last few months into six or seven Canopic Jars [which I would have been over the moon about if I'd gotten them back when I was an Alchemist] and a whole shitload of vendor trash. Sigh@ RNG.
But still, I've made some progress, and Tol'vir spawns should be significantly more frequent now that I have no Night Elf or Troll rares left to discover. Though I think I'll still wait and save up some more Heiroglyphs before I start on that grind again. Spending gold is far more efficient for me than spending time.
Zin'rokh and Tyrande's Favourite Doll were the aforementioned last two rares. These 359 epics were pretty hot shit about a year ago, but as of this current patch are only really useful for the first few Heroic dungeons on a fresh 85. I can only hope that they end up doing what they did for the level 60, 70 and 80 archaeology heirlooms and lower the level requirements so that they are not totally useless when this expansion is over.
Still, Zin'rokh is a pretty fucking cool model, and I look forward to an opportunity to transmog it. Hm... I wonder if it could be applied to heirloom gear. Do you need to be able to use an item to apply it as a transmog? Probably, I guess.
Spent a bunch of time Archaeologising yesterday, turning the 50 or so Tolvir Heiroglyphs I'd collected from the AH over the last few months into six or seven Canopic Jars [which I would have been over the moon about if I'd gotten them back when I was an Alchemist] and a whole shitload of vendor trash. Sigh@ RNG.
But still, I've made some progress, and Tol'vir spawns should be significantly more frequent now that I have no Night Elf or Troll rares left to discover. Though I think I'll still wait and save up some more Heiroglyphs before I start on that grind again. Spending gold is far more efficient for me than spending time.
Zin'rokh and Tyrande's Favourite Doll were the aforementioned last two rares. These 359 epics were pretty hot shit about a year ago, but as of this current patch are only really useful for the first few Heroic dungeons on a fresh 85. I can only hope that they end up doing what they did for the level 60, 70 and 80 archaeology heirlooms and lower the level requirements so that they are not totally useless when this expansion is over.
Still, Zin'rokh is a pretty fucking cool model, and I look forward to an opportunity to transmog it. Hm... I wonder if it could be applied to heirloom gear. Do you need to be able to use an item to apply it as a transmog? Probably, I guess.
Friday, December 30, 2011
TOR, WoW
I don't think a big enough deal has been made about the Companion system in TOR, and what it means for group content. Now there is no excuse for pugging with people who perform poorly-- you can literally replace them with an NPC. In my mind this creates a benchmark for acceptable player performance, something WoW lacks.
I am extremely curious to see exactly how well these NPCs perform compared to an adept human player in terms of throughput numbers. I have to assume that even with perfect micromanagement, NPC performance will not be on par with a competent human player, though I may well be wrong. I've seen people mutibox dps and healing simultaneously before. Maybe this is designed as a high skill-cap to the PvE side of the game, allowing those with the aptitude to perform as well as two human players. Even if the performance isn't identical, I can easily envisage a hypothetical 10-man raid team having one or two of their players use companions to replace missing raiders, rather than gambling on unknown pugs.
I'm still playing WoW. Raiding is extremely fun, and I fully expect us to finally kill Deathwing this week.
When not raiding, I'm usually messing around with my auctions or mounts or transmog gear. Neeearly completed the Judgement recolour set from BC Heroics, which I think looks really pretty on Syrannia. [As a Warrior she so rarely gets to look pretty.]
A combination of factors has created impetus to level my cooking and fishing skill, and alerted me to the vague possibility of future acheivements in those areas. I actually ended up having a blast seeking out obscure recipes to bridge the gap between cooking skill level 250-300 such as Runn Tum Tuber Surprise from Dire Maul and Smoked Desert Dumplings from Silithus.
I picked up the Shadowmourne quest, because hey, it might happen eventually, and even if I don't complete it for a year or two, I don't think those quest rewards are going be much less leet than they are now.
I also can't help but notice how close I am to the The Exalted title, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I hit that milestone as well, what with all the old instances and raids I seem to be running these days.
I have one hundred and thirteen mounts. Last weekend I went to the trouble of actually making a list of the 40-odd "reasonably attainable" mounts I had left, from camp-fests like Aeonaxx and the Time-Lost drake, to the 1% drop-rate RNG-fests from the likes of Malygos and Attumen, to the various raiding Metas that were either before Syrannia's time or she just never got around to completing, to the thirteen Argent Tournament mounts I have yet to grind from dailies, to the three Flying Carpets that are only a short profession switcheroo away. I am certain there will be another "x number of mounts" achievement mount in Mists, the only question in my mind is whether the number will be 125 or 150. Or ideally, both. =D
Y'know, when you start thinking long-term like this, suddenly spending a night or two camping Aeonaxx doesn't seem like such a bad deal.
I would like to rant briefly about the Spine of Deathwing trinkets. There are a series of trinkets which proc a buff of 88 to a single primary stat which stacks ten times, giving basically 880 of that primary stat. This is, by a retardedly huge margin, the best itemisation a trinket could possibly have for every DPS spec of every class. 880 Intellect, 880 Agility, 880 Strength, and one for healers with 880 Spirit, plus a large chunk of static Intellect because Spirit is practically a secondary stat.
But for some reason the gear design team either hates tanks or have somehow not played a tank since BC, because for some jesus-fucking reason, this "single primary stat" design translated into giving tanks a trinket with the one stat they care least about, dodge rating. Dodge Rating. Not Stamina, which is, y'know actually a primary stat, not even Mastery rating which is about as desirable for tanks as any primary stat ever has been. They gave DPS and healers the absolutely most best ultimate itemisation ever ever and gave tanks DODGE FUCKING RATING. They didn't even give us any sympathy stats like they did the Healer trinket.
I made a rage comic about it.
I am extremely curious to see exactly how well these NPCs perform compared to an adept human player in terms of throughput numbers. I have to assume that even with perfect micromanagement, NPC performance will not be on par with a competent human player, though I may well be wrong. I've seen people mutibox dps and healing simultaneously before. Maybe this is designed as a high skill-cap to the PvE side of the game, allowing those with the aptitude to perform as well as two human players. Even if the performance isn't identical, I can easily envisage a hypothetical 10-man raid team having one or two of their players use companions to replace missing raiders, rather than gambling on unknown pugs.
I'm still playing WoW. Raiding is extremely fun, and I fully expect us to finally kill Deathwing this week.
When not raiding, I'm usually messing around with my auctions or mounts or transmog gear. Neeearly completed the Judgement recolour set from BC Heroics, which I think looks really pretty on Syrannia. [As a Warrior she so rarely gets to look pretty.]
A combination of factors has created impetus to level my cooking and fishing skill, and alerted me to the vague possibility of future acheivements in those areas. I actually ended up having a blast seeking out obscure recipes to bridge the gap between cooking skill level 250-300 such as Runn Tum Tuber Surprise from Dire Maul and Smoked Desert Dumplings from Silithus.
I picked up the Shadowmourne quest, because hey, it might happen eventually, and even if I don't complete it for a year or two, I don't think those quest rewards are going be much less leet than they are now.
I also can't help but notice how close I am to the The Exalted title, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I hit that milestone as well, what with all the old instances and raids I seem to be running these days.
I have one hundred and thirteen mounts. Last weekend I went to the trouble of actually making a list of the 40-odd "reasonably attainable" mounts I had left, from camp-fests like Aeonaxx and the Time-Lost drake, to the 1% drop-rate RNG-fests from the likes of Malygos and Attumen, to the various raiding Metas that were either before Syrannia's time or she just never got around to completing, to the thirteen Argent Tournament mounts I have yet to grind from dailies, to the three Flying Carpets that are only a short profession switcheroo away. I am certain there will be another "x number of mounts" achievement mount in Mists, the only question in my mind is whether the number will be 125 or 150. Or ideally, both. =D
Y'know, when you start thinking long-term like this, suddenly spending a night or two camping Aeonaxx doesn't seem like such a bad deal.
I would like to rant briefly about the Spine of Deathwing trinkets. There are a series of trinkets which proc a buff of 88 to a single primary stat which stacks ten times, giving basically 880 of that primary stat. This is, by a retardedly huge margin, the best itemisation a trinket could possibly have for every DPS spec of every class. 880 Intellect, 880 Agility, 880 Strength, and one for healers with 880 Spirit, plus a large chunk of static Intellect because Spirit is practically a secondary stat.
But for some reason the gear design team either hates tanks or have somehow not played a tank since BC, because for some jesus-fucking reason, this "single primary stat" design translated into giving tanks a trinket with the one stat they care least about, dodge rating. Dodge Rating. Not Stamina, which is, y'know actually a primary stat, not even Mastery rating which is about as desirable for tanks as any primary stat ever has been. They gave DPS and healers the absolutely most best ultimate itemisation ever ever and gave tanks DODGE FUCKING RATING. They didn't even give us any sympathy stats like they did the Healer trinket.
I made a rage comic about it.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Previously, on Star Wars
The levelling curve in TOR seems firmly modeled after WoW, and as such it seems to suffer from the same focus on solo questing. I have just completed the questing on Dromund Kass, including all the side quests, Heroic group quests and two Flashpoints I saw along the way [though I skipped the PvP]. I am now level 19, and am informed that my next story quest is in a zone labelled [explicitly within the game UI] with a level range of 16-20.
My first instinct as a WoW player is to skip that zone and get an early start on a higher level, presumably less overlevelled-faceroll one, maybe do a Flashpoint or two, but then it occurred to me that I'm on a storyline. Can I just skip this portion of the story and pick it up again in the next zone? [And is it too much to hope for a fully-voiced "Previously, on Star Wars"-style recap?] Are there multiple class questlines or just one? If it is just one, would not doing that zone totally derail my class quest line and make me unable to continue? Will I really need to skip all the additional content and side quests just to keep from out-levelling the story?
First-world problems, I suppose. It's probably too much to ask for a game to be offer challenging content by default. Any challenge needs to be bypassable, and the game tuned for people who cannot complete it.
On a related note, the significant other and I wiped two or three times on the first boss in Hammer Station before we conceded that we would need a dedicated healer. I wouldn't have it any other way. The more this game kills me the more I like it.
My first instinct as a WoW player is to skip that zone and get an early start on a higher level, presumably less overlevelled-faceroll one, maybe do a Flashpoint or two, but then it occurred to me that I'm on a storyline. Can I just skip this portion of the story and pick it up again in the next zone? [And is it too much to hope for a fully-voiced "Previously, on Star Wars"-style recap?] Are there multiple class questlines or just one? If it is just one, would not doing that zone totally derail my class quest line and make me unable to continue? Will I really need to skip all the additional content and side quests just to keep from out-levelling the story?
First-world problems, I suppose. It's probably too much to ask for a game to be offer challenging content by default. Any challenge needs to be bypassable, and the game tuned for people who cannot complete it.
On a related note, the significant other and I wiped two or three times on the first boss in Hammer Station before we conceded that we would need a dedicated healer. I wouldn't have it any other way. The more this game kills me the more I like it.
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