OMG New Post…that is a rant…

Wheeeeeeeeeee back for one of my sporadic posts (soon to hopefully be less sporadic). Outside of grad school kicking my ass, harder and harder each and every day, I was finally able to come back form my WoW hiatus this past break and have tried to accomplish as much as possible. Admittedly, with 3.3 and the availability of T9 to…well, everyone, it wasn’t very difficult. I appreciate them making it more available, but I think this time they went overboard. Killing Heroic bosses in 30 seconds or less just…isn’t fun. Trash pulls that once required at least SOME care can now be AoE’ed down with ADDITIONAL trash without difficulty…overall kind of lame, in my opinion. It’s not really Blizzard’s fault (in a roundabout way it is, I suppose) but in general they have been making the game a bit too easy, lately, especially PvE-wise. PvP will always be somewhat challenging and dynamic, as real humans are fairly less predictable (in many cases) than a computer program, but PvE…ugh.

To be fair, I can’t tell you how many people STILL stand in the bad stuff (aka fire) in raids. STILL. It’s hard to pressure them to create new mechanics when half of their player base can’t handle the oldest one in the game. When you see a giant pillar of flame erupt at your feet, and you start taking damage, you should move. Period. I don’t really know why they would ever think otherwise. Even if you think the mage in your party/raid cast it for AoE, why not be safe and alive rather than sorry and dead? If green gas is being emitted around you, what makes you think standing there and breathing it in is going to help your dps?

ANYway, what I will say is that with the new system, it’s been even harder to maintain two characters, especially with one having dual spec, while leveling 2 alts. I know, I know, some people manage it just fine. I guarantee their /played is higher than mine. And now the expectation is for everyone to be in full T9, and since most people are, it’s very difficult being in a group that is not, especially as a tank. I don’t think I’m a bad tank, but a dps in almost all 232 gear plus a few 245/251 pieces is going to be able to pull aggro from a tank in mostly 200 to 219 gear. And it’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing—I was able to successfully off-tank the first wing of ICC 10-man, and tank heal it in my healing set (which has 4 pieces of T9, though not many more 232 pieces beyond that), but…in heroics, people just get impatient and reckless.

Dear Warlock/Priest—if you pull a mob and put 4 DoTs on it because I’m “going too slow” and you expect me to save your ass, think again. I probably didn’t pull because I probably didn’t have enough CDs ready. They are short CDs, so if you’d waited 5 more seconds, I would have been good to go. Alternatively, I might have been trying to get mana, because a mana-less paladin tank cannot tank.

It’s funny, because I usually go pretty fast, so when someone complains, I just roll my eyes.

I am a bit frustrated, though. My defense rating is 633, which is almost 100 points too high. Yet, I’m not enchanted or socketed for def rating at all—the only thing I have is the helm enchant, and I got it for the +30 stam. Everything else is stam or avoidance. I’m hoping to get some gear that prioritizes other stats soon, because being that far over cap is just annoying. What I’ve noticed is that the newer gear actually decreases stam a LOT in favor of not quite as much avoidance, so it seems as if they are actually making paladin tanks a little worse…I can’t be sure though. So far, it’s been mostly heroics which are EZ-mode, and in ICC since dodge is reduced by 20% avoidance is low anyway, and it’s really up to heals to keep the tank up (thanks, Blizzard, cause we didn’t have a hard enough job already…QQ).

But now for my fun-fun frost spec. Bottom line? I love it. So much fun. Second bottom line? Not reliable enough. It’s also nearly impossible to test. Let me handle reliability first, as it’s really a quite simple problem: Fingers of Frost just doesn’t proc when I need it to, and doesn’t proc often enough.

Now let me back-track and compare all three specs briefly, so people can see where I’m coming from.

DPS can prioritize one of two stats to their choosing (or do nothing in particular with either and let the gear scale itself naturally). One is crit, the other is haste. In a nutshell, hit harder, or hit faster. We all know this. Here’s the problem:

Fire doesn’t really gain much from haste. It gains a LOT from crit. Bigger Ignite damage, Hot Streak, you name it, it needs crit. Arcane gains some from crit, seeing as AB increases damage by a percent, so crits can get bigger. Additionally, the Arcane tree grants a 10% bonus to spirit, so coupling that with the Molten Armor glyph and T9 set bonus, it’s easy to get higher crit going into the arcane tree (and indeed, many fire mages choose to take that talent, and for good reason.) However, it gains a lot more from haste. A 1.8 second AB is pretty damn fast, but when you get the AM proc (which procs 40% of the time when using AB), missiles are firing 3-4 times a second. There are 5 missiles total. You get the idea. Imagine stacked with Icy Veins and Bloodlust…yummy.

Frost, on the other hand, is a huge problem. Frost gains no stacking damage like AB does, and has a lower overall damage output than fire. While it has a slightly higher base damage output than AB, Arcane mages scale intel and spellpower, so it cancels out fairly quickly. As in by level 80. Fire and frost mages both get an elemental debuff that increases their crit on a boss, but fire gets the extra ignite with the heightened crit. And has talents to increase crit, whereas frost just increases damage from crits. In terms of haste, well, as mentioned before, Arcane just does better, and has a talent increasing haste by 6%. Frost does have talents to reduce the cast time of frostbolt by a total of .7 seconds, but that’s just frostbolt. We’ve no other spells really, unless we want to cast frostfire bolt (which has a higher crit modifier).

If I didn’t articulate it clearly, this is what I’m getting at. If you have gear stacked with crit, fire is the way to go. If you have gear stacked with haste, arcane is the way to go. If you are in the middle, you could pick either of those, because it outperforms Frost, as frost has no abilities that utilize them as greatly as the others. Fingers of Frost has a 15% proc chance, which is abysmally low. Thankfully, blizzard gave us Deep Freeze, but the damage is still not quite high enough. In my mostly 232 gear I can get crits for around 14k-15k with Arcane Blast at 3 or 4 stacks. Deep Freeze usually crits for 18k. Deep Freeze can only be used once every 30 seconds AT MOST. And herein lies the problem. The damage isn’t high enough, and combined with the CD, it’s just too long inbetween casts to be a reliable source of damage. It will end up being the 4th highest source of damage, sometimes third if I’ve been unlucky with FoF and haven’t gotten many ignites up. But it still only amounts to 10% of my damage.

Now, I understand Blizzard’s position. We have 2 specs that are both viable for raiding and one that is viable for both leveling and PvP. What more do we want? There are other classes that need work, right?

Yeah, uh, wrong. Hybrid classes all seem fine, some even almost too good (druids wut? Good in all four specs? Paladins? PvP like crazy). And pure dps classes (the only “pure” anything class (we don’t have a class dedicated to ONLY healing or ONLY tanking…)) I know, I know, I’m still QQing over it…all I’m saying is, Blizzard is quick to shut down arguments saying that things already work (and the mage class does work, I won’t deny it.) But right now it’s also fairly boring in PvE. Especially Arcane. Frost can be the most boring, because you just spam frostbolt, unless you get a FoF and then you cast Deep Freeze if it’s up, or you cast a fireball if Brain Freeze pops up. Fire is at least marginally interesting…but overall, like everything else in the game, it’s getting to be too easy. Arcane is about mana management for longer fights, and could use a new spell or two that could help pump out DPS at the cost of a bigger chunk of mana (besides just continuously using AB past 4 stacks or using Arcane Power, which isn’t a huge liability) to make it slightly more interesting. And AB could have different damage scaling, maybe.

But what could we possibly do with frost? What mechanic could Blizzard possibly put into place? Well, remember that one time that a Paladin’s Exorcism changed functions depending on whether or not the target was a player or non-player enemy? I propose we bring that back. For example, if they have Brain Freeze make Fireball treat the target as if they were frozen (if they are a non-player target) and not consume a charge of FoF, then you’d probably see more mages using that talent. Additionally, they should increase the damage bonus from Deep Freeze, and maybe have it so that, upon consumption, if Deep Freeze deals damage to a target, spell haste and crit are increased by 10% for 15 seconds. That’d be very nice indeed, since it’d be a short but effective buff. I know mages have the 12% haste buff on the T10 2-piece set, but again, it benefits both arcane and fire FAR more than it does frost, especially since Missile Barrage and Hot Streak proc FAR more often. Having a buff that is unique to frost would be awesome.

I’d also like to see an increase in the proc of FoF, but I’m not sure how OP that would make mages in arenas. Anyone here know how useful it is in Arenas? I’d imagine people don’t count on it because it’s so random and doesn’t proc all that often, but when it does happen, does it make frost mages unfairly strong? I don’t arena and rarely PvP, though I do plan on getting back into it at some point…

And I still like my “chains of ice” or whatever spell. I think it would be awesome and would allow frost mages to stack either crit or haste, and would be awesome for raid bosses and arena. For those of you that missed it, here’s the skinny from an earlier post.

1.) The spell lasts for x seconds. During those x seconds, each time a spell you cast critically hits, it adds a “chain” to the target. When the spell fades or is dispelled (so there is SOME PvP application), it takes the total damage that was the EXTRA CRIT damage, and applies it to the target, possibly as a DoT effect, equal to the number of chains on the target x 2. Along with that possibility, it might be necessary to take the extra crit damage and half it, so as not to be over powered.

By extra crit damage, I mean that if your frostbolt normally hits for 3k, and it crits for 5.5k, the damage stored is 2.5k (and the original 5.5k damage is still dealt to the target.)
So lets say you get in 3 crits with frostbolt and 1 crit with Ice Lance. That’s 4 chains on the target. Take the damage done that was the added critical damage, half it, and apply that damage each second for 8 seconds, as the “chains melt away.”

2.) The spell lasts for x seconds. During those x seconds, each time you cast a spell that normally has a cast time (not an instant like Ice Lance, not channeled like Blizzard or Arcane Missiles), a “chain” is applied. At the end of the spell’s duration/it is dispelled, it applies a fixed amount of damage per “chain” as a DoT effect equal to the number of chains x 2. If a spell crits, the DoT effect for it’s particular chain gets 50% of bonus damage applied as did the original spell.

For instance, let’s say a Frostbolt hits for 3k and crits for 6k, and each chain does a base of 100 damage per second per chain. If you land 3 and crit one Frostbolt, you’ve done 15k damage, and gotten 4 chains on the target, for an additional 400 damage per second over 8 seconds. However, because one of them crit, that one chain will get an additional 50 damage (because 50% of 100 is 50, and it was a 100% damage bonus to the original cast (3k+3k=6k)), so the spell will now do 450 damage per second over 8 seconds.

This will not affect your instant Fireball (should you have specced into it), so if that procs you do still get a chain added because it originally has a cast time.

Alright. That’s that for now. Now that it’s winter break, I’ll *actually* be able to post more. And I’m already planning another one for tomorrow or so. About me being an alt-o-holic. It was recently brought to my attention because I tend to yell excitedly in trade when I see people I know, then clarify and say “Ten’nen” so they don’t think some rando is saying “hi” to them. One of my friends went. “Ten’nen. Just how many alts do you have?!?” So that’s for next time. Until then!

Replacing Yourself

I love random hiatuses. I find that they often occur when life starts by just throwing lemons on you, then starts to rain on your parade, and then shatters everything you hold dear. That may or may not be slightly melodramatic, but you get the idea. Starting grad school, working 2 part-time jobs, working an almost full time job, and holding down an internship left me no time for WoW. I’ll say that I’m glad I’m one of those individuals who can actually bear to separate from the game (as I’m sure we all know people who can’t) but it does leave me sad when I come back to the game and I get tells being like “Hiatus again?!?” or “Oh, we thought you were dead, because, you know, you didn’t tell us you were leaving for a while” or whatever. Sorry everyone!

Anywhozzile, I’ve been popping on and off a tad bit recently, just to run a couple heroics, have a failed ToC raid, kill the first few bosses of an Ulduar run, you know, the usual. When I first came back, it was on a Saturday when my guild (of which I’m a co-leader…*cough cough*) had a Naxx run. I logged onto my main (or what I consider my main) and the raid leader immediately asked me if I could get on my Paladin since we needed another tank. I was a little taken aback, as my tanking gear was just enough to go through any of the heroics, but not necessarily Naxx 10 (or so I thought). Granted, Naxx is child’s play these days, but remember I hadn’t been on for a long time, so I hadn’t been running tons of heroics and what badges I had been getting, I’d been using on my holy gear since healing was what I wanted to do most on my paladin.

While the run went alright (Sapph didn’t even try to eat me YAY!) it did get me re-analyzing which toons I played. For a while I had been doing a damn good job of leveling my priestess. She’s now 55 and hasn’t moved for over a month. Ten’nen was supposed to always be my main, but my paladin has now seen as much or more content than he has, with twice as much gear to show for it. Ten’nen hasn’t even set foot in ToC yet. I think in terms of gear score, they are about equal for BOTH healing and tanking sets. And I find that often when I log on, I see a request for a tank/healer for a heroic and I whisper the person saying “I’ll get on my paladin” and I’ll hop over and run the heroic, just for something to do.

Yet, it has become frustrating. I really enjoy playing Prialeson, don’t get me wrong, but I feel as if I’m changing who I am in the game. Maybe there is nothing wrong with having two favorite toons, but I think there is something inherently wrong with having two “mains.” It’s also frustrating when people call me “Prial” when I’m on Ten’nen. And by frustrating, I simply mean curious and a teeny bit annoying, because I want people to know that I am Ten’nen first, Prial second. Granted, I’ve probably raided with a larger group of people on my paladin, as decent healers who have a smidgen of intelligence are somewhat harder to find these days, and 3.5k dps means nothing anymore, but…it’s still curious.

A long time ago, Firespirit posed some similar thoughts, but I ask this of you, readers: have you ever felt yourself being “replaced” by a different toon? Did it irk you at first, or was the change smooth? When people don’t know your real name and you’re going by your toon’s name, how does that change who you are? Or who you appear to be? Do you act differently on one toon than another? In game versus how you act in real life?

Make the Numbers Go Away

Two posts in one day. You guys are lucky.

In short, I’ve been thinking more and more about the reasons I enjoy WoW, and the many different aspects of the game. A little background on myself–I like to be intellectually challenged, and I like to have to think about, consider, and analyze any and everything I do in my life. This goes from my academic work to my extra-curricular activities to my down time, recreational activities.  For me, WoW has provided an outlet for my creativity and story telling capabilities (through RP, which used to be my primary focus and is what got me into the game) while allowing me to learn to manipulate and change aspects of the game to my liking while being different (my avoidance of cookie cutter specs).

Recently, a lot of the changes to the game have been really frustrating to me on an intellectual level. There is a lot of emphasis on “bring the player, not the class” which has been changed, as Critical QQ put it, to sometimes mean “bring the classes, not the class.” My question is this: why? This especially became prevalent as mages the entire game over saw Frost mages get a Mortal Strike buff to their Permafrost Talent tree, and asked the same question: why?

In case you haven’t gotten it yet, this is going to be a ramble, a verbal flood of thoughts that aren’t extremely organized. Comment away, and hopefully my responses will be able to clarify everything I’m saying. I also state that you “need” things a lot. Note that I am saying this in the context of a raid that is entering the instance without any of the gear found within it or any gear of raids of equal difficulty or beyond. For instance, entering Naxx 10 in heroic gear. Just to be clear.

Anyway, here we go.

First of all, I really want to know: what the hell is so bad about wanting to bring along a class for a specific skill or set of skills they add to the raid? For example, Shamans. Everyone loves Shamans, but we ESPECIALLY love them because of Bloodlust. If you have one Shaman in the raid, even if their dps is only mediocre, you have Bloodlust. That’s an awesome talent that helps the entire raid. Great. Class utility right there. If you have a Druid along and someone dies mid-battle, like one of your healers or one of your top DPSers due to an unlucky lag spike or whatever, BOOM! Battle rez, and keep on going. Class utility. It’s another reason to have a Druid in your raid.

So, Blizzard, why do you insist on spreading abilities around, like handing out ice cream at a 5 year old’s birthday-party? I’m a fan of a more socialist outlook on life in general, but this would make even Marx roll over in his grave. Let’s consider this for a moment, and to do so, we are going to go back to the Burning Crusade (I’m not familiar enough with Vanilla WoW, so we have to go there. Apologies to all who would have better examples). We’re going to go back to our favorite starter instance: Karazhan. And we’re going to look at one Boss in particular: Shade of Aran.

For those of you unfamiliar with Shade of Aran, let me break the fight down for you as best as I can remember. He does several things.

1.) Casts Frostbolt, Fireball, and Arcane Missiles.

2.) Sucks everyone into the center where he is standing, casts a raidwide “Slow”, and casts a massive “Arcane Explosion” that mages only see in their wildest dreams, killing anyone who didn’t get out in time.

3.) Has a funky aggro table, a tank favorite.

4.) Summons 4 water elementals about 2 minutes into the fight.

5.) If his mana gets to 20%(maybe?) before he is dead, he casts a raid wide Polymorph that cannot be broken, drinks, and casts a raidwide Pyroblast.

If I’m forgetting anything, it’s not important.

…False. I forgot the worst part. I don’t know how I did, but I think it’s funny that I did which is why I’m letting you all know that I did. Get it?

6.) FLAME WREATH! He casts it, if you move, the raid wipes. Don’t argue with me. You know its true. Even if 4 people live, its still a fucking wipe. Don’t be a prick about it.

So. The thing about this guy is that his three mage spells are interruptable. What people forget is that the first time they did it, it probably wasn’t with a group of 70′s in mostly T5 or better gear. You went in there with blues, maybe a few Heroic epics or badge gear, but that was it. And this fight was all about utility. You NEEDED to have melee classes who could interrupt his spell casts. You NEEDED ranged classes that could also interrupt (mages or spriest). You NEEDED healers who could toss up HoTs on the move, especially when the Water Elementals come out (usually Renew was fine). If you didn’t work out who was interrupting what spell when, chances are a lot would go through and hit random raid members, which wasn’t good, because they hurt. Shade of Aran was a very good fight, and as much as I hated him, I loved him because it told me very easily who in the raid only cared about the damn numbers which mean NOTHING if the raid wipes.

Fast Foward to Netherspite. Basically, stand in the beams that increase stats, including things like mana costs, and don’t let them hit Netherspite or you wipe. You NEED two tanks for the debuff. You NEED a priest in the raid so you have the fort buff, or else some of your DPS won’t be able to stand in the beams due to low health (remember that whole non-T5 or better gear thing?) Naxxramas has a fight that requires Mind Control, and Noth requires some decursers, but otherwise, I can’t think of another fight that requires a certain class. Even KT, sure it’s nice of you interrupt the Frostbolts, but they don’t hit as hard or as often as the Shade of Aran spells, so thus it isn’t as crucial. Blizzard has changed everything to a numbers game, so the heals are just bigger to counter the damage done, and everyone’s damage is increased to make the fight go faster.

What I would love to see is a fight that requires the use of a certain classes abilities (like requiring a mages “spell steal” for Gruul’s Lair, or needing one of every kind of CC for Hex Lord in ZA). To do this, however, Blizzard needs to return certain class abilities to the classes. Make the abilities require timing and skill to use, so that the fights are no longer just plowing up and pew-pewing your heart out. Consolidate abilities to one or two classes, even changing the mechanics slightly for each of those classes. Now that what, 5 classes (and several specs beyond) have Mortal Strike (Frost Mages, Shadow Priests, Rogues, Hunters, and the original Warrior), it’s no longer a unique ability that one has to plan for. You know it’s going to happen in Arena’s, especially 5v5, even though there is no effective healing counter.

Some people might complain that it’s not fair to require certain classes to progress in a raid. I disagree. If you can’t manage to get 2 priests for 25-man Naxx for Instructor Rasuvius, something is wrong. If you can’t manage to get one mage or druid to decurse on Noth, something is wrong. Maybe some of the 12-year olds (or youngers) who play the game might find it to be too difficult. A Google search will indicate that the average player age is somewhere in the mid-20′s to mid-30′s. And those are probably the people who go to Blizzcon and have multiple accounts–they have jobs and thus can afford it, or at least choose where to spend their money.

I understand that Blizzard is a company and aims to maximize their profits. But (and this is the same complaint I have about the most recent Harry Potter movie) please stop fucking catering to the people who don’t give a damn about anything they see on the screen besides the colors. I’m sorry, but you would make MUCH more money and not lose as many players if you catered towards your biggest fan base. I’m certainly not in the biggest fan base, as I’m not a super hard-core gamer, but age/maturity/intellectually speaking, I’m certainly in the same ballpark.

There has to be a compromise and a priority. If you fear homogenization so much, why do many players feel like characters and classes are becoming more and more similar? Why is it that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been asked to use Polymorph in an instance, or seen any other CCing class use it? Why is it that Warlocks, Elemental Shamans, Boomkins, and Mages all seem to do around the same dps (in comparable gear) the difference being that it’s in different colors, yet really don’t add much more to the raid besides a random assortment of buffs?

So I turn to you, players of World of Warcraft: Do you think Blizzard has succeeded in creating a game where “bringing the player, not the class” has coalesced with non-homogenization? Are you pleased with the way classes differ from one another? Did everything get screwed up with the introduction of Dual Specialization as well? I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses!

Bye Bye Birdie

So over last weekend I got the news that some of the higher up officers in my guild were transferring servers. And by that I mean they had been talking about it apparently for a while and decided to switch during a 7 hour period that I was offline. It was a great “Happy Fourth of July!” moment when I logged on briefly in the morning to mail something to a friend before showering and beginning my day and, low and behold, the guild leader messaged me on an alt telling me what had happened.

I’m not angry at them. At all. But this has happened to me before, where my guild broke up because friends were transferring to another server, and it’s a little disheartening. Honestly, I don’t play the game because I want to get the best loot, or even necessarily to see the end-game content. Really, I play it because I sometimes like an escape from the “real world” for a few hours, and sometimes I enjoy some semi-solitude, away from my real life friends (who definitely mean the world to me but to whom I’ve given almost all of my attention during the school year and ignored my WoW friends) and just chill with people, playing a game that’s quite fun and silly, but allows me to explore my fantasy-loving, slightly nerdy side.  And from playing and RPing, I’ve made several friends who I grew to know and really like/respect as people, and were willing to call my friends, albeit via interwebz.

All of this to say that, when these friends up and leave the server that we played on together, I get a little frustrated and, I’ll admit it, a little sad and upset. Even when running with PuGs, I always had vent to chat in, or guild chat if I didn’t feel like talking very much. And the point of those PuGs? To gear myself up when everyone was off doing their own thing, so that I could join them on their raids and we could all be part of the same discussion with the same goals–downing the boss, getting out loot, challenging ourselves and our knowledge of our classes, specs, and working as a team, while having fun with people you like and whose company you enjoy.

The last two times this has happened resulted in a depart from the game, or at least my mains. For  a long while, after the first time it happened, I didn’t play on Tennenmaho for a couple of months, at least not regularly. I felt lost on Ten’nen with all of his RP/raiding friends gone, so instead of continuing to play him, and since I couldn’t afford the transfer, I leveled up another toon on Moon Guard and continued to try to play with my friends and RP with them. Then I happened to go back to Ravenholdt one day and got involved in a guild that I grew to love a lot, and in whom I made several friends. We raided a bunch, and while I never made it to T6 content, I still had fun.

At the end of last summer, though, the drama llama walked in and the guild exploded. Once again, I felt very lost whenever I logged into the game–I felt I had no goals to accomplish other than dailies. So, I essentially left the game until Winter Break, where I finally got back in it and was invited to Dismemberment by Purgeron, a paladin who, during the last summer, I’d helped out a lot in raids by providing a DPS boost and my knowledge of ZA and TK. So I joined, got up to 80, played scantily over the semester, then after classes ended, I plunged back into the game with a bit more committment.

Now that another group of friends have left…well, it’s like a cycle. I feel a little lost once again. I stil have friends in the game, of course, but it’s a very different feeling when you’re all playing together to achieve a common goal, ya know? For now, I’m just going to continue to level my priest, do my dailies on both Ten’nen and Prialeson so I’m not eternally poor, and try to find a new guild. There are a couple of different guilds in which I have friends that I don’t think I’d mind joining, but at the same time, I might just make a guild with some of my remaining friends on the server, and then whore myself out as DPS to my friends’ guilds, making those my unofficial raiding guilds.

But we’ll see. Hopefully my feet will get planted again. Until then, I may spend some time leveling my hunter on Moon Guard some more, and RPing with him.  For now, I’ll just bide my time and try to enjoy the game as much as possible.

/end QQ