Time may change me...

The hot topic for forum whiners this week is the recent massive update to WoW, including an epic hundred-page thread  [EDIT: now multiple threads] entitled "I didn't want a new game." By now I'm sure there are plenty of old hands who loved the game as it was, and change can be scary, but what they don't seem to acknowledge is the sheer number of players who have and will stop playing and move on to other things, were the game to stay the same.

In this past week I've seen guild names I haven't spotted on my server for years, not since they were a top raiding guild back in whatever tier. I think it's telling that they're back now, not for the content addition of Mists in one month, but for the mechanics update of the 5.0.4 patch. They are interested in the game they know being revitalised with modern gameplay mechanics.

It's easy to see the Blizzard forums as a single whining voice that can't seem to make up it's mind, but we need to remember that it's really just a throng of people with ridiculously different wants, and there is no change [or lack of change for that matter] Blizzard can make without one segment or another getting pissed off.

Version 5!

Protection Warrior AoE damage seems a bit ridiculous at the moment due to the lack of a vengeance cap. Glyph of Revenge is pretty OP and may get nerfed. Still getting a feel for how to use Shield Block, so for the moment I'm just hitting it whenever it lights up. Or if there's a bunch of magic damage flying around maintaining uptime on Barrier instead.  This will all be easier to understand once I can set up Power Auras to easily visualise it all on the fly.

A fellow Protection Warrior whispered me last night to mention an unintended effect of the lack of a vengeance cap-- that Baleroc mechanic where he increases the tank's health over the course of the fight while buffing his own damage in proportion. While tanking Baleroc this Protection Warrior ended up with 273k attack power, doing an average of something like 350k DPS for the fight, including an Execute crit for 1.5 million damage. In one hit.

Apparently Warlocks are all about multi-dotting now. I feel lucky that in all my years of WoW I've managed to avoid ever playing a spec which did AoE damage by casting the same spell over and over on multiple enemies [perfect example of "assembly-line" gameplay], but it would appear those days are over. Destro gets a conceded pass for having a multi-dot CD which is pretty fucking awesome.

I get a bit miffed when I go to EJ for some theorycrafting advice and their Warlock thread does not even mention playing the game, but is just a series of graphs showing which combination of specs, talents and glyphs provides 3% more theoretical damage overall. I guess as long as they're having fun...

Demonology's going to take some getting used to. I don't understand why Metamorphosis has you spamming just one spell. I think they must have gotten a bit too much feedback from Warlocks who miss the glory days of Burning Crusade. I also miss how front-loaded this spec used to be. Now you have to spend ages building up to your heavy damage phase.

For the moment I'm concentrating on the much more manageable Destruction spec. Single target is strong, assuming the boss lives long enough for you to max your Embers [again, very long ramp-up time]. There is no AoE filler so we end up AoEing with a primary target like a melee class, with AoE spells also providing significantly faster Ember generation so you can chuck out more Chaos Bolts in between, with the ex-bane spell Havok giving you the ability to "cleave" a few spells to another target. I get the feeling that once this all becomes second nature it will be a very fun spec to play.

I've yet to figure out whether Demonic Sacrifice is the best choice for damage. Having a second demon as a damage CD is attractive, but considering how powerful Chaos Bolt is it's hard to pass up anything will buff it directly.

Also, OH MY GOD SO MANY DEFENSIVE CDS. I heard someone say somewhere that it's easy to justify because Warlocks necessarily need to damage themselves as part of their DPS rotation, but haven't healers been coping fine with this for years? Do most DPS have huge defensive CDs by now?

Holy Paladins are pretty much the same as they were. I think I'll be better at it once I can set up a buff indicator for Sacred Shield and that for that proc that lets you cast a free WoG/LoD.

Flash of Light seems a bit less inefficient than it was previously, but I still barely see the use for it. I always thought these "quick, expensive" heals were kind of pointless. My understanding of the design is that they are for emergencies, ie when someone is in danger of dying. But 1.3 seconds is still a very long cast time if someone is in immediate danger. Especially considering your next fastest, not to mention far more effective heal is a 2.1 second cast-- so casting a Flash heal seems to be useful only in the specific situation where you expect a player to die between 1.3 and 2.1 seconds from the start of your cast.

For Paladins especially, now that we're able to always have Holy Power banked I find it hard to imagine a situation where a 1 or 2-point Word of Glory wouldn't do the trick over a Flash of Light. Or barring any future need for it, you could even just hit Lay on Hands. Or if the player in danger isn't terrible you can just have faith in them to hit one of their own CDs to stay alive long enough for you to cast a Greater heal as per normal.

I laughed out loud

...last night when I read the notice stating that Blizzard once again totally expects that they can get this major patch up and running in the standard 8-hour downtime window.

Will they ever learn?

Glyph of Falling Meteor

I've lost count of the number of times I've gone apeshit excited over a new warlock mechanic in WoW version 5. The latest one I discovered last night when I logged in to Coreus on beta to find the Glyph of Demonic Leap [use Demonic Leap while falling and the fall damage cannot kill you-- already pretty fucking cool] has been updated to Glyph of Falling Meteor, which transforms you while falling into a meteor that slams into the ground to reveal your demon form. Words cannot express how utterly, utterly cool this is.

This is why I love Blizzard.

Guild Wars 2

I don't care about Guild Wars 2.

More on mounts

About time we had some official word on the possibility of a new mount achievement, considering how much some people care about this aspect of the game. It is definitely worth mentioning how long it's been since the last time this type of achievement was added-- y'know, a couple of months after achievements first existed.

When that 100 mounts achievement was first added, in patch 3.0.8, it was only barely attainable at all, usually by Warlock or Paladin Engineers, or people who had spent hundreds of dollars on TCG mounts. We've come such a stupidly long way since then, and with Mists is about to add yet another metric asston of new mounts, not to mention mounts now being account-wide, a patch 5.1 equivalent to 100 mounts in 3.0.8 would probably be closer to 250 mounts than even 200.

In my opinion we need to start coaching the devs by discussing at length on the forums the most important question: whether we should get a 275 mounts achievement, or by that point just go straight from 250 to 300-- y'know, really anchor them as high as we can to make sure they don't sell us short.

Oh speaking of mounts, I need to go pick up a couple of $5 game licenses. I find having a second account useful from time to time, and I might as well get a cheap mount out of it when I next use one.

Now I need to get back to petitioning the guy who runs Warcraftmounts.com to remove Tarecgosa's Visage from the list of mounts. IT'S A SPELL, NOT A MOUNT FFS. If you're going to count spells, you also need to count Ghost Wolf and Flight Form and that thing where Kael'thas makes you fly around the room.

"Fuck that loser"

I didn't see that much of a problem with what Brevik said in his interview. The interviewer was obviously encouraging him to talk about the way Diablo III "failed" in many fans' eyes. It was only the part where Brevik said he was happy with the negative responses the game had received, because it vindicated the team who was no longer making it. We call that schadenfreude, dude, and you really don't want to be so open about stuff like that. It's not a good thing.

But then the response from Blizzard staffers was so much more interesting. It would appear he struck a very tender nerve there. Making someone in as senior a position as Jay Wilson lose his shit publicly is a big deal.

I  tend to think it's because Brevik has a very valid point. Blizzard took Diablo III in a direction that nobody asked for, because they assumed they knew what players really wanted, and it turned out they were wrong to make this assumption.

I think it's interesting that the game, by any external measure, was ridiculously successful. It's only that they went so far out of their way to turn in into an "online game", and these days online games are judged by the public on an inverse scale of how many players they lose. So in losing 5 million players Diablo III became the worst online game ever.

Personally I think Diablo III was a really good game, bogged down with terrible controls and way too much story bullshit.