A name change

A comment was made to me recently recently that all I do in this blog is QQ about stuff. I found I couldn't necessarily disagree except to assert that it's all constructive QQ.

Thoughts for Tuesday 28th June

Something that I always thought was odd back in Wrath was when there were seperate titles for 10- and 25-man versions of raid achievements, though the 25-man versions had a more blatant prestige to them, that the 10-man version always seemed to have a nicer... poetry to them;

the Astral Walker vs Starcaller
the Immortal vs the Undying
Twilight Vanquisher vs of the Nightfall

at least until Heroic Lich King bucked the trend with;

Bane of the Fallen King vs the Light of Dawn


One of the recent additions to our raid made a comment last week that he thought it was awesome that we raided and progressed, but still had fun while doing it.

I thought it was interesting, because it didn't really occur to me that having fun while playing a video game was anything remarkable.

It's a portal, not a stone!

Why does it irritate me so much when people refer to the Warlock Ritual of Summoning portal as a "stone"?

And as long as I'm whinging, and I know this isn't the timeliest of complaints, but "Shadow Labs" -- where the fuck did the "s" come from? There is no "s" in Labyrinth!

I am just a sad, pedantic little man.

Demonology

I hated this spec when I tried it back in Wrath. Compared to Destruction, it felt slow, uninteractive and overly-focussed on maintaing a full list of dots. So for a long time I assumed that it would be the same in Cata, up until I actually tried it.

Hand of Gul'dan is the exciting new spell, and forms the centre of the rotation, being your highest damage nuke, increasing the damage of your demon, refreshing the duration of Immolate, and [if talented] an AoE snare.

The spec focusses mainly on increasing the damage your minion does through applying dots and Curse of Gul'dan, but the special thing now is the benefit of being in melee range to use Shadowflame and Immolation Aura. The spec actually reminds me an awful lot of playing an Enhancement Shaman, with the hybrid-yness of being a caster in melee, using a smattering of abilities that all deal damage in slighty different ways, and that it's less about the direct damage individual spells do, but about the combinations of spells and abilities that feed into each other to contribute to overall damage.

Also, you get to transform into a huge motherfucking demon.

I just don't like refreshing dots. It's not compelling gameplay to me. I feel less like I'm directly damaging the boss than on a production line responsible for the upkeep of damage spells. I liked Destruction in Wrath basically because the weakness of DoTs at that time meant you only really had to worry about Immolate and your direct damage spells. Demonology, as I mentioned above, was the opposite.

Destruction in Cata has not only had the full compliment of Warlock dots made worth casting again, but now has an additional short duration buff to keep up with Improved Soul Fire. Demonology, with Hand of Gul'dan to automatically refresh Immolate, only regularly needs to keep an eye on Corruption. Even I am happy to deal with that.

Three more Spirit Beasts in patch 4.2

Because people love to have rare and unique things, so obviously the best way to improve the game is to add more and more rare and unique things.

Now everyone can be rare and unique!

The threat/avoidance cycle

I like the Vengeance mechanic a lot. Seeing my AP scale up past 26k and topping the DPS on certain AoE pulls is a nice epeen boost for a role that doesn't often get to epeen.

And while Vengeance does solve the issue with threat scaling with gear for bosses that do enough damage to you to reach that cap, as bosses move to farm and gear improves past the point where boss damage is enough to cap Vengeance, once again our threat naturally declines as gear improves, while the damage classes only scale upwards.

At this point in the tier I'm finding that holding aggro on the pull has once again become an issue. So I've had to refocus on reforging for threat stats, taking myself to the expertise soft cap, and any other convenient stat trades for extra expertise or hit rating are at the moment easy choices to make.

I've also, for the first time in a long time, felt it necessary to shine a bright light onto my threat rotation, just to make sure that I am maximising my own damage, and I'm a bit ashamed at the significant improvement I've only recently achieved in this aspect.

This is all a temporary issue, I know, and once we're in Firelands and the bosses are smacking me as hard as I can take it I'll be back to reforging off as much expertise and hit rating as I can just to get a few more parrys in. But it's interesting to note all the same.

So, TO DO: get a mod that displays my current vengeance stack and/or total AP, because this is valuable information for a tank to track in order to manage threat output. Bonus points for having an awesome audio cue when it caps. Or, or, maybe awesome music that starts when it caps and stops when you drop below 80%. That would be neat.

Bloggers; nerfs; the evolution of WoW

I'm a bit fed up with all people.

To the point, I'm fed up with WoW bloggers. Even the smart ones blow everything out of proportion. Why is this round of nerfs any different from the steady stream of them we've gotten since Burning Crusade gear made Vanilla content blatantly puggable? Have you been asleep right the way through Wrath when Blizzard made it perfectly clear that the current tier was the only one that mattered at any given time?

Do you even remember the progression nightmare that was late Burning Crusade, in which each tier required months of farming the previous one to even begin? You better hope you never fell behind the gear progression curve because there was no easy and quick way to catch up.

I wish more people could enjoy the game for what it is; a game. You play it. You enjoy it. Or you don't. Making a big deal about deciding not to play is just fucking retarded. Like it's some huge major life decision. I think it takes a pretty shallow person to make whether or not you engage in a particular leisure activity a major part of your identity. But I suppose that's just people in general, isn't it. Little difference from anyone else who adheres themselves to a rigidly defined subculture to avoid having to actually define themselves in any unique way.

So yeah. I'm just sick of people.

I have pretty significant faith in the Blizzard devs' ability to design good systems. I understand the reasoning for making older content easier once the competent players have something new and better to work on. I understand how gameplay restrictions make the things that you can do more meaningful. I understand why class nerfs are necessary, even if it's a class that I play.

When I first read that Holy Pallys were being nerfed in 4.2 my first reaction was a to cry out in anguish, and my second reaction was to remember how ridiculously mana-efficient Paladins were compared to other healers and realise the nerf is warranted.

But that's not to say I think every change has been a positive one. I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

I don't think it's a big stretch to conclude that Blizzard has been been trying to please everyone for the last three years or so. I just don't think it's at all reasonable to expect a company, no matter how well-resourced they are, to create a single product that consistently satisfies twelve million people. But dammit if they're not going to try.

I think that's the issue, really, with the evolution [or perhaps devolution, depending on your outlook] of WoW recently. It's become too big and too valuable for Blizzard to concentrate on developing it as a quality game experience without being distracted by trying to keep from losing customers who by definition have little interest in playing the game as Blizzard intends.