Tunnels of Doom

I spent an awful lot of time on my main two weeks ago, a phenomenon I associate with two things: One is that my guild began requesting that all characters identify the mains/alts they are associated with so people can start putting players together with their various toons and the other is the annual Love Is In The Air event.

On paper, the idea of associating the various alts with their mains in the guild makes a ton of sense. However, the unexpected side effect I found was that it allowed other guildies to send me requests for level 85 assistance while I was trying to work on leveling my Mage. The guild I’m in values helping each other out above pretty much everything else so when I’m asked to give an assist I try to be open to that unless there is some external factor like time that prevents it. So now that everyone knows my Mage is an alt for my Warrior, I found myself with less time for uninterrupted level grinding.

That may sound like a bigger complaint than it is, and while I do lament a bit that after weeks of earning double-digit level gains over the course of six or seven days I was only able to squeak out three during that week, focusing on my main did have some positive net effects.

The principal perk was that I finally got the chance to try my hand at tanking because some guild members needed a tank for non-heroic Halls of Origination. Fortunately I’m fairly familiar with that instance so I agreed to give it a go provided everyone there understood where I was at with the skill.

Let me tell you a few of my initial impressions from my first foray into tanking. The first is that tanking is very stressful. As a DPS you have basically two objectives: Put the hurt on and don’t die. When you’re tanking there is so much more going on at any given moment than even the most frenzied fights offer DPSers, it’s really easy to feel like you’re drowning, because it isn’t just “hold the aggro,” despite what it may appear from the outside. First of all there’s the threat, which is I’m sure something I’ll get better with in time so I wasn’t all that concerned with how well I was maintaining the aggro. I didn’t do very well, but it seemed like something that would eventually start to make sense, especially as I learn the rotations and abilities.

But once you scratch past that layer, you also have personal survival which I know is a healer concern primarily, but since as the tank you’re in charge of absorbing the blows you have to make sure you’re not making the healer’s job impossibly difficult. As such it seemed like the better I was at handling my own damage mitigation by watching for interrupts, making sure Spell Reflect was being used, popping Enraged Regeneration if it looked like I wasn’t going to get a heal exactly when I needed it and keeping an eye out for Last Stand necessity, the better I did overall. The thing is, DPS has to worry about survival as well but the difference is tanks are supposed to be getting hit so at some level you have to decide what is “good” damage to take and what is damage that needs to be avoided, interrupted or healed through.

A level above survival you also have group management. This is where I struggled the most I think. In one-on-one fights I did pretty well, but as soon as there was more than one mob in an area I found it frantic and frankly not all that fun to be trying to maintain threat across a group of enemies. This is where I definitely need to find some way to practice because I’m reasonably comfortable with my single-target threat maintenance abilities but I’m pretty terrible at target-switching and I had a lot of difficulty getting a handle on AoE threat generation.

I think crowd control is supposed to help with this a little bit but the other thing I struggled with was mob positioning, especially when it came to kiting casters away from CC’d mobs so AoE or errant clicks didn’t break the crowd control. I’m simply not sure how I’m supposed to convince casters to move toward me and go where I need them to be. Unlike melee mobs who keep moving toward you to continue hitting as long as you hold aggro, casters are more than happy to let you back away and of course that has two undesirable effects: The kiting fails as the mob stays right where they are and held aggro starts to fall off since backing out of your own attack range reduces the amount of threat you can generate as you spend time outside of melee range.

Overall it was an interesting learning experience and when it was over I decided to regroup a little and spend some additional time researching tanking strategies with a renewed perspective that came from having even a tiny bit of context to apply the lessons. The other thing I did was start to pay more attention to the tanks that ran the instances where I was filling the DPS role, principally during my Mage dungeon runs.

Then last week I actually did a LOT of dungeons because as I’ll talk about later the level grind through Outland was kind of dragging me down and I figured the dungeons at least were still really fun and, as a bonus, entirely new to me. Having that many LFD groups means you see a lot of various group compositions and a wide range of tanking styles and abilities. It seems to me that I can classify the tanks I’ve run with into three distinct groups and I should note ahead of time that these don’t seem to have anything to do with which class is being used, anecdotally it’s entirely dependent on player skill (though I would note that there seem to be a slightly larger number of Death Knights in the lower two categories and a fractionally larger number of Paladins in the top category, which could easily be accounted for by the simple number of tanking Paladins and the number of DKs in the game, many of whom probably queue as Tanks just to get into Dungeons faster).

• Fail Tanks
  These guys are just not good. They drop aggro on mobs and don’t pick it back up, they pull way more mobs than they can handle and they almost universally hope the healers can compensate for their tendency to quickly get in over their heads. It’s possible to make it through a dungeon with one of these players, but it’s an exercise in frustration and typically involves several wipes. Within this category there are two types of players: New tanks who are learning and perhaps unwisely choosing to learn via the dungeon tool (this may explain why it seems a lot of these guys are DKs and learning to tank in Burning Crusade dungeons) and players who think they are actually doing it right and spend most of the time blaming everyone else for their failings and ragequitting.
• Mediocre Tanks
  These are the kinds of tanks who can lead you through a dungeon and even keep the party from wiping but requires a lot more attention devotion from the DPS and healers to assist in drawing errant mobs back to the tank so he can pick them up again, target switching to avoid pulling threat off of single mobs, avoiding AoE spells at all costs and having healers pull out advanced techniques to keep them alive. These are the tanks that can shine when they have a stellar healer behind them or if the person they loose aggro to happens to be a plate-wearing Fury Warrior or something equally sturdy and melee-based. Most of the time it seems like people will tolerate these kinds of tanks with no real challenge to them which avoids unnecessary confrontation but dungeons tend to take at least 50% longer to complete with these kinds of tanks because there is no such thing as facerolling through an instance with one of these guys. Occasionally you will find a player who claims to be learning how to tank or is returning to it after a long absence who spends the run wringing their hands about being a Fail Tank when in fact they are a solid Mediocre and often just need to pay attention to a few details or in some cases need to do some additional research to learn the little tricks to some of the bosses (like turning Quagmirran toward the wall at the end of The Slave Pens).
• True Tanks
  These are the gems you get every so often who know the dungeon inside and out, expertly hold aggro on even the largest of pulls regardless of how much damage output the DPS is doing and even manage their own health to the extent that the healer is free to make sure DPS who stand too close to the fire don’t have to stop melting faces even for a moment to heal up. I know that this is entirely possible for tanks because I’ve run into several of them across the battlegroup and in a variety of dungeons. Running instances with this type of tank is exhilarating because everyone almost always has a great time, a quick run and there is scarcely ever any group friction. Obviously these are the elite tank players and I presume by definition they are going to be less common than middle-of-the-road tanks, but I’ve started to form the opinion that it doesn’t take some crazy inborn natural talent to elevate Mediocre Tanks to True Tanks, it simply requires practice, knowledge and the ability to assess what the rest of the group is capable of. My example of this is I ran through Hellfire Ramparts with a group who had a healer that was either very young or stoned or both but he was pretty miserable at maintaining his mana stores (which is a pretty key skill for heals) which meant that in any fight lasting longer than a few minutes the healer would go OOM and leave the rest of us to our own devices. The tank, a True Tank, quickly realized this and told the healer to try a bit harder to watch his mana count and then adjusted his own strategy to make smaller pulls so the healer could have more frequent breaks to recover some mana. The point is he made this determination within the first three fights and while he didn’t advertise what he was doing it was pretty clear we were going from fighting seven or eight mobs at once to three or four, which we were able to burn down while the healer still had a bit of mana to spare. The healer continued to jaw in party chat about what everyone else was doing to cause his mana loss, but it never became an issue that seriously threatened the group once the tank made the adjustment. That, to me, is a mark of a great tank.
  The one downside of True Tanks is, perhaps as an occupational hazard, they tend to be cowboys who rush into large pulls with cursory checks of healer and DPS mana, expecting everyone to be as adept as they are. For the most part this doesn’t cause problems (if the tank couldn’t handle it they wouldn’t be in this category) but occasionally it can result in partial wipes or healers going out of mana, which, even if the party survives is never a good thing.

Obviously at this point I could be considered nothing but a Fail Tank but the question becomes one of how to transition (as quickly as possible) from bad to better. Obviously practice is the key but the more I think about it the more I wonder if the wisdom of a thought I had a couple of weeks ago wasn’t somewhat overlooked at the time. In Miner Whiner Edition I talked briefly about leveling a new Warrior from the beginning, doing exclusively (or nearly so) LFD dungeons for XP and going Protection the whole way. I dismissed it at the time because the notion of leveling another Warrior wasn’t (and in many ways isn’t) terribly appealing.

But the more I think about it the more I wonder if, even if the process were a bit onerous, such an endeavor would be a really smart thing to do. Because as I analyze what it would take to be a decent tank I notice that part of the difference between me in Fury Warrior spec and me in Protection spec is simple familiarity with the core abilities. I can improve my DPS output as Fury by managing the Rage resource better, finding slight improvements to the situational rotations, learning the nuances of cooldown management and so forth. But these are the things a more advanced Fury Warrior thinks about, not “If Ability A and Ability B are both up, which do I use?” Because I already know the answer to that question from a Fury perspective in most situations. This is definitely not the case as a Protection spec and I think the game does a pretty good job of teaching you how to make those core decisions as you progress through a single spec. Trying to switch once you’ve rounded out your spellbook as much as it will go results in exactly the scenario I’m in now: Total options overload.

I had an idea that might make such a task more palatable, and there are some secondary notions that I’ve been mulling over as well. For example, once I finish leveling up my Mage I’m going to definitely cool it on the focused level grinding. I do have a few alts I’d like to work on, but I figure I can take a casual, easy approach to it, going through 150% rested XP at a time which means playing for about an hour or two once every week and a half. Practically for me that means spending two or three sessions a month on each alt which sounds about perfect to keep the novelty factor alive without getting bogged down in either end-game stuff on my dual mains (which is how I’ve begun to think of the Mage and the Warrior) or in the drudging sections of the level grind. I think both taking a more relaxed attitude (as opposed to the “I’ve got to hit 85 yesterday” approach I’ve taken with the Mage) and spreading the alt play across several toons will really help keep things fresh.

Of course that doesn’t really address the key issue which is that I don’t necessarily want to go through as a Warrior again. So my thought to deal with that was to make this training Warrior an Alliance character. Ideally what this would do would be to create a sense of freshness even within the familiarity of the class because all the quests, NPCs, capitol cities and player bases would be completely new. I’ve heard plenty of people say that you haven’t really experienced WoW until you’ve leveled through both factions but so far I haven’t had much luck in finding my groove on the Alliance side. I hope that between the new Cataclysm quest progressions and the dungeon training I won’t get hung up the way I have with previous Alliance alts.

There are some downfalls to this idea: Primarily there is the lack of the sugar daddy factor that I am certain has been a big facet to the ease of leveling on the Mage since you can’t mail large cash infusions to cross-faction alts. I’m also not positive if the heirloom items can be sent to alts on other factions although I’m less concerned in this case with rapid leveling since it’s a matter of practice and not advancement once I get to the point where I can use the LFD tool. Another minor bummer in this case would be that, as opposed to if I leveled a Horde Warrior, I’d lack access to an established Blacksmith/Miner. Granted, it probably wouldn’t make a ton of difference; it’s only a rare instance that I’ve regretted not having my Mage be a tailor who can make cloth armor, especially since so much of my gear has come from instance drops. Seeing as how I’d be spending most of my time on such a Warrior in dungeons, I ought to not have much concern for having decent equipment nor a ton of opportunity to mine for ore. When you consider the lack of extra cash for AH mining that makes blacksmithing kind of a non-starter anyway.

Regardless of faction I guess the other benefit of the training Warrior tactic is that I don’t have to feel any obligation to level it further than necessary to learn what I need to know. There wouldn’t be any pressure to carry on past a point where the returns begin to diminish since at that point I can switch over to my main orc Warrior.

One thing is for sure, I need to find some way to get some practice because I don’t want to subject my guildmates to more of my “tanking” until I can be at least fairly sure they won’t have to use phrases like “Well… it could have been worse. Maybe.”

Lovin’ Achievements

I mentioned above that I had to put in more time than I expected on my main also because I wanted to do the Love Is In The Air world event and you realistically can’t expect to do them all without being at least level 80 if not 85. Plus I think of the Warrior as my Achievement toon, so that’s where that comes from. Anyhow I thought the Love Is In The Air event as a whole was pretty enjoyable with a minimum of grinding or aggravation. I admit the Lovely Charm Bracelet creation process is a little less than obvious via the information available in-game and the I Pitied The Fool achievement seemed to cause a lot of frustration especially since the Love Fool object is fairly expensive.

Basically there are a handful of daily quests which reward you with Love Tokens at a rate of five per quest. One of the quests is really easy, it requires you to find ten players or NPCs nearby and use a benign quest item on them. Another is a fairly standard “kill 5 so-and-sos” type of quest requiring you to travel to Uldum. Assuming you accept the quest in Orgrimmar, the portal takes you a short flight away from the quest zone. Finally there is a daily quest per faction capitol city that asks you to give a Lovely Charm Bracelet to the race leader (Garrosh, Sylvanas, etc.) which is straightforward enough. However, in order to make a Lovely Charm Bracelet you have to collect 10 Lovely Charms which are randomly generated from defeated mobs that grant experience or honor provided you have a Lovely Charm Collector’s Kit in your inventory. Practically speaking that means you have to just go around and grind at-level mobs while you possess the Collector’s Kit until you get multiples of 10. I think there are four faction bosses you can exchange a Bracelet for 5 Tokens with but naturally that requires a bit of travel for those without ready access to portals or teleportation. All told you can earn 30 Tokens per day by doing the six dailies which brings me back to the Love Fool portion because you need four Fools at a cost of 10 Tokens each in order to earn the achievement which means it takes at least two days of daily grinding to buy what you absolutely need. The real issue is that the specifics for where exactly to place the item in order to fulfill the achievement requirements aren’t very clear so it’s pretty easy to accidentally waste a 10-Token Fool (by not being on the Blacksmith island in the Arathi Basin, for example) and I can see why that’s potentially frustrating. In my case I always play with a browser window open to Wowhead so I just used their handy event guide and didn’t run into any issues, but if guild and trade chat were any indication, that’s not a universal thing.

I will say that one thing I like about doing these world events is that they often have me doing things I might otherwise avoid, such as the Arathi Basin. It wasn’t the most exciting PvP event I’ve tried but it was interesting to have seen it and I’m not sure I ever would have gotten around to it had it not been for the world event achievement. They are a little stressful at times because I would hate to miss one lousy achievement or something and have to wait a whole year to try for the Violet Proto-Drake.

Alt Nation

I mentioned above that I have several alts I’m interested in working on once I finish with the Mage (and aside from any possible Warrior training alts). My main objective is to get some high level professions established and though I originally intended to use the professions as an opportunity to level a number of different classes I think that I may not ultimately have all that much interest in learning all the classes. For example, Druids just don’t interest me all that much, possibly because they’re so incredibly numerous (at least on my server—although I was surprised to see that according to this census site druids seem to be less popular than I would have guessed, based on the number of them I encounter in PUGs). I get that they’re one of the only classes that can serve in each possible role (more or less) making them incredibly versatile but to me they’re just sort of meh. It probably has a lot to do with the idea of morphing away from the the normal character model and into something generic which doesn’t reflect my gear all the time. I’m also very uninterested in Rogues although if you believe that WarcraftRealms site they would be the player’s choice for anyone who wanted to buck any trends: They appear to be the least played class of them all. Still, melee DPS is a been-there-done-that proposition for me.

Since I’m not necessarily trying to play all the classes or all the races or what have you, I figured I could pick a couple to be the core that I wanted to explore and then create Death Knights to cover the remaining professions since they don’t have to worry as much about hitting level caps before they can train further in their primaries.

• Troll Shaman
  I already had the Shaman from my first foray into the game but he’d languished along with most of the other alts from that era around level 6. Somewhere along the line I got the idea to make him a tailor because my Mage was accumulating vast quantities of low-level cloth that was no longer beneficial for leveling First Aid. Initially the Shaman was an Herbalist/Alchemist but by then the Mage was very far ahead of him in those professions so I switched to Tailoring and sent over all that cloth. I thought at first that the Shaman would just be the Tailor and nothing more until I realized that I didn’t really have a viable healer class in mind if I ever wanted to try that aspect of the game. My understanding is that Shamans aren’t the best choice for healing though they can certainly play that role but I figured if I was going to focus on having this Shaman character be a healer he’d need to avoid the same pitfall as my “tank” Warrior and practice as he leveled up. That meant making heavy use of the LFD tool which eliminated any gathering professions as serious second primary options. The more I thought about it the more I realized the obvious instance-farming professions were Tailoring and Enchanting. So the Shaman is/will be my Tailoring, Enchanting Healer.
• Blood Elf Paladin
  Talk about common: Combine the most popular Horde race with the most popular class in the game and you have this alt. Still, I’m interested in the Blood Elf lore so I’d like to level through the Silvermoon area at least once and having another plate-wearer will be a nice way to make use of all that Blacksmith leveling I did on the Warrior. This character is also my only female toon which is a bit atypical for me because I tend to play female characters a lot in games that allow for that sort of thing but I found the social aspect of WoW to be sort of awkward to navigate as a guy playing a female character in the past. I figure I can tolerate it on this one character especially since there’s no reason why I’d ever need to worry about a second tank/DPS class being a go-to character in any circumstance. As for professions I’m going to stick with Jewelcrafting since I’ll end up sending stuff over from the Warrior a lot anyway and the compliment to that would have to be Engineering.
• Tauren Hunter
  I’ve mentioned my Hunter previously, he’s a Skinner/Leatherworker and while I’m happy with my Mage as my choice for ranged DPS it’s been enjoyable enough that I don’t think doing another character with a similar role (but very different mechanics) would be too terrible. He’s already fairly well established in my stable of alts, being close to ready for LFD (I think he’s sitting at level 14) but I’ve specifically avoided putting to much time into him since at the moment it just feels like it would be time better spent on the Mage.

Conspicuously missing from the profession list there is Inscription which looks interesting but the thing is the more I thought about it the more I realized that there isn’t much reason to have an in-house Inscriptionist, especially since with the new glyph system you don’t ever need to acquire any one glyph more than once, even if you swap out an existing glyph from your profile. That means having one on hand would really only matter for those infrequent occasions where a specific glyph you want to use is very over-priced on the auction house and I figure if that isn’t what guild members are good for I don’t know what is. When I thought about this earlier I assumed I’d be skipping over Engineering but I’m pretty sure I’d be happier having an Engineer on  my alts list than an Inscriptionist, especially since I’d probably have to level the Paladin ahead of the others in order to stay on top of the demand and I don’t really want to have that kind of mandate hanging over these alts: They’re supposed to be breezy to level anyway. If I did decide to make a fourth alt to handle Inscription I’d simply make a Death Knight which I’ll probably do at some point anyway so it’s not a big deal either way.

Dungeoneering

I spent a ton of time in dungeons over the past two weeks because I had some time off of work and my parents were in town which meant there were more opportunities than usual to be reasonably sure that I could play uninterrupted for a bit (though surprisingly perhaps not all that much extra time to play; I’d say I averaged even slightly less play time over the last week than I normally do). Really when it comes to queuing for dungeons that’s what it comes down to, because I can play the game if my daughter is asleep but my wife is indisposed somewhere, I just have to be willing to drop what I’m doing and attend to my child if the need arises. I don’t usually feel all that comfortable bailing out in the midst of a PUG to go change a diaper or whatever so if I’m on point with my daughter I avoid dungeons. Having grandparents around makes that less of an issue.

Anyway I had two main objectives in running lots of dungeons: One was to save some of the drudgery of the 60-70 progression on my Mage since as much as I thought doing Blade’s Edge and Netherstorm would make Outland feel fresh and new, the truth is the questing in Burning Crusade just isn’t up to the level of Cataclysm or even Wrath of the Lich King. As such I queued a lot to avoid questing through a lot of very familiar zones like Zangarmarsh. Interestingly, I realized that while I love the Nagrand zone from an aesthetic and lore standpoint, the reason I skipped through it on my first visit to Outland was the same reason I glossed it over on this second pass: The questing in there is just not what I would hope for. The potential of the zone, in my opinion, is wasted. Having read Rise of the Horde I’d really have loved to see more use of Oshu’gun and some better backstory on the orc clans but instead we get Halaa which is kind of a mechanically flappy PvP area, lots and lot of ogres and ol’ Hemit Nesingwary and his endlessly grindy kill-fest quests. Yawn.

Unfortunately, with frequent queuing comes what amounts to XP farming runs on familiar dungeons. I think I ended up doing Hellfire Ramparts at least half a dozen times between levels 63 and 64 and I know I did Escape From Durnholde eight times while I was levels 67 and 68. Now, Hellfire Ramparts is an easily farmable dungeon so it wasn’t that bad: It goes quick, it’s straightforward and it has decent drops. Durnholde on the other hand is awesome from a lore perspective which means it’s teriffic… once. After that it’s got a lot to dislike between the two long travel sections (one auto-flight on a drake to begin the quest and one after you rescue Thrall on land mounts which, inexplicably, Thrall’s mount is not swift so you have to constantly stop and wait for him) and the bland human bosses (up until the end which is actually a pretty fun fight but doesn’t in itself make up for the tedium of the rest of the instance). Plus worst of all the drops in there are really pants such that after eight runs I don’t think I came away with a single blue item to show for all that time. Theoretically the final boss can drop Pauldrons of Sufferance, but I never saw them. Not that it matters, because I got something better.

The thing is, it isn’t that Outland is bad, but I can understand why in light of later expansion content Burning Crusade has gotten kind of a bum rap. Essentially Burning Crusade is an incremental step off of vanilla WoW which means that now especially that we’ve seen so many of the changes Blizzard has come up with through the years applied back to Azeroth through Cataclysm, Burning Crusade is now the last bastion of the old-style WoW with all the disjointed, unwelcoming quest progressions and semi-drab tank-and-spank boss encounters. Plus, the talent tree redesign implemented in 4.0.1 made the 60-70 path a big dead spot in character development. Somewhere in there I had the first level advancement that didn’t net me a single thing: No ability unlock, no new trainable skill, no talent point, nada. And many of the levels had nothing but a new teleport or portal unlock which isn’t exactly thrilling. Now, level 69 does unlock the final talent point in your primary tree (which in my case means access to Living Bomb, the final piece of the super combo I talked about last time) but that starts the push into the 70s which appear to have much more excitement in terms of new abilities and fun stuff.

The net result is that hitting level 60 now marks a period where I found myself not wanting to slow down and experience the content with wizened eyes (having more exposure now to the game lore and the significance of both the Burning Legion and Draenor/Outland as a whole) but rather to speed up and get through it as fast as possible. To this end I started bouncing between my Mage and my Warrior so I could take advantage of the daily random dungeon Justice Point bonus for doing Cataclysm randoms. The sole purpose for this was to earn enough JP to get my hands on this little number: Tattered Dreadmist Mantle. I suppose you could say this is the first heirloom item I actually earned, as the cloak I’ve been wearing on my Mage since early on was a gift of sorts from the guild advancement system (and a paltry sum of 1,200 gold) but between that item and these new shoulder pieces I have a +15% XP boost to all quest and mob kill experience, not to mention the additional 10% I get from Fast Track due to my guild affiliation which means at the moment all told I’m running at +25% XP.

The weird thing about the LFD tool is how I know it’s supposed to be random but luck of the draw being what it is I seem to do nothing but run the same dungeons over and over. Not only did I get stuck on HFR and Escape From Durnholde on the Mage but I can’t seem to get a Cataclysm random that isn’t either The Lost City of Tol’Vir or Halls of Origination. Now HoO is fine with me because there are seven bosses in there and with the 4.0.6 patch that means I get a minimum of 210 JP just for the bosses alone and 350 if that’s the one that pops up as my daily random. Tol’Vir is an okay dungeon and everything but after finishing it a dozen times or so without ever even seeing the Vortex Pinnacle or Blackrock Caverns, I have to wonder what the deal is.

WoW Bits

• One minor feature request that I think would be nice to add to the LFD tool—in addition to the level range indicators—is an estimated time rating. This could simply be an aggregate or average of all the runs done in that battle group in each instance which will obviously mean a pretty rough guess because I’ve had some dungeons that ought to take maybe twenty minutes last for over an hour due to wipes and queue times but I’m sure there are some elegant solutions (throwing out any data points where a mid-instance queue took place for example) and the idea would be to get a sense for what you’re in for especially if you’re using the LFD to collect dungeon completion achievements. The example I ran into was that the Magister’s Terrace is a sprawling instance but there was really no way for me to know this going in and I only had about 45 minutes to get it done when I started. Usually this would be plenty of time but between the sheer length and the fact that we had to queue for a tank after two or three bosses and tried to make do with a hunter’s tanking pet… well, I had to drop early which means I’ll have to try to do it again at a later time.
• I’ve been having an odd issue ever since patch 4.0.6 where my ESC key doesn’t always bring up the game menu. Usually it does, but randomly it will become non-responsive even if I’ve successfully accessed the menu that way earlier in the same session. This is sort of a bummer because I had gotten to where I knew the main keyboard shortcuts well enough that I had turned off the micro-bar in the UI but I have had to re-enable it because it’s pretty tough to log out if you can’t get to the main menu. I’ve looked around some on the support forums but haven’t seen anyone else reporting the same issue. I’m hesitant to file a ticket about it too because I know the first thing they’re going to say is “disable all your add-ons and try again.” I sometimes think the worst thing about add-ons is that they become tech support’s default skapegoat even if they’re unlikely to be causing the issue at hand.
• I’ve been reading through the Chronicles of War anthology which combines the Warcraft novels Rise of the Horde, The Last Guardian, Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal. I’m enjoying it very much and am just beginning the final novel in the collection which has caused me to start looking ahead at what my next Warcraft novel should be. It surprises me that while The Last Guardian does a fairly decent job of chronicling the First War (covered by Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans in the games) and Tides of Darkness/Beyond the Dark Portal are essentially direct novelizations of Warcraft II (including the expansion), thus recount the Second War; but as far as I can tell there are no analogues for Warcraft III/the Third War. It’s possible the Christie Golden novel Arthas details the events of The Frozen Throne which was the Warcraft III expansion and perhaps this is intentional since Warcraft III the PC game is still readily available at retailers and playable even now. Still, at this point I’m very interested in the game lore and backstory but I don’t have much desire to force my way through an RTS which is far from my genre of choice. I’ve toyed with the idea of picking up the game and burning through it in god mode (which is how I saw the story unfold in Starcraft… have I mentioned I’m really bad at RTS games and don’t particularly care for them?) just to witness the cutscenes and so forth. But I dunno, it feels a bit like that crosses a particular obsessive threshold (which I’m certain I’ve already cleared by a country mile): I’m not sure I want to be the guy who bought a game he didn’t like and didn’t really want to play just so he could experience the plot of it first hand.

Blood Bowling For Dollars

Since this Edition covers a two week period it’s maybe less surprising that I have other games to talk briefly about but still noteworthy. I had a chance a couple weekends back to play Blood Bowl again with Dr. Mac and I had a great time even if the game was awful. And when I say awful I mean well and truly the worst game of Blood Bowl I’ve ever played and possibly the worst game that has ever been played.

Blood Bowl is a game where you have to roll dice to be successful but in many ways the paradox is that you are most likely to be triumphant if you can find a way to avoid rolling as many dice as possible. I suppose then that probability being what it is, there are just going to be times when luck favors no one in a particular match and it’s just next to impossible to accomplish any key task. Then there are times like this game when on no less than four separate occasions (at least two each) there were clear opportunities for points to be scored and due to the abyssal failure of dice rolls that were well within the acceptable risk thresholds no points were ever scored. That’s right, we ended in an 0-0 tie.

I’m talking here about multiple end zone drops. Pushes with Sure Feet that failed and caused casualties. Strength 5 Break Tackle dodges that failed. Balls were thrown in from the sidelines a half dozen times it seemed. It was ugly, frustrating, painful, silly and a surprising amount of fun. Dr. Mac and I have known each other since grade school which is something over two decades so we have a lot of history, but playing Blood Bowl over Xbox Live was reminiscent of all those childhood sleepovers where we would get to giggling and being goofy until finally one parent or another would come in and admonish us for being up too late and keeping the whole house awake at the same time. Halfway through the match I heard what sounded like Dr. Mac’s wife whispering to him to try to keep it down lest he wake up his sleeping children. Half a country away I snickered through clenched teeth at how hilariously familiar it felt and tried not to wake up my own slumbering family.

Ultimately the match may have been a bust but it was as clear to me then as it has ever been why I love games and how fortunate I am to be living in a time where two grown men can spend a late night recapturing a small piece of their youth, 750 miles away.

The Brink Of…

Another game I had the opportunity to play was Pandemic using the On The Brink expansion I received as a gift during the holidays. The expansion to me is a pivotal part of the game because Pandemic itself became such a staple in my gaming circles that I got to where I almost didn’t want to play it anymore. One thing I like very much about what they did with the expansion is rather than make the game generally more complex and altering the overall feel of an individual session (which a lot of expansions seem to do; for an example of this see the Race For the Galaxy expansion The Gathering Storm) the designers instead focused on compartmentalized modifications to the core game that could be used individually or in tandem as desired. Some expansions fiddle with the core game mechanics, notably the victory conditions often get adjusted which is where I think a lot of the sea change comes from, but Pandemic with On The Brink is still Pandemic, it just has a bit more variety and some additional unpredictability.

I played with my parents and since I had shown them the original game quite some time ago I didn’t get all crazy with bio-terrorists and virulent strains but focused instead on using the new role cards which I think are the best new additions in the whole of the set. I concede that having all the extra roles means a greater chance of getting a combination that works against the group ( our configuration was Archivist, Troubleshooter and Operations Expert which made mobility and research challenging) but at least with more options it makes it less likely the game will be won or lost based on whether or not you pulled the Dispatcher and Researcher together.

I went with an easier 4-Epidemic setup because I know from experience that having newer players start with more challenging levels results in either the veterans pretty much dictating the entire game (“Okay, now on your turn you should fly to Jakarta via shuttle, treat one disease, discard your Jakarta card to fly anywhere and end up in Paris where you need to build a research station and bam, you’re done.” “Uh, okay.”) although I concede that part of that phenomenon could be very readily attributed to the fact that historically in all my games we’ve played with our hands face up. Anyway, we ended up taking the victory though it was getting kind of ugly toward the end which typically means we won just in time.

I’ve been thinking a bit about what has made my leveling experience so much faster with my Mage than it was with the Warrior, because I did some rough math and came up with an estimate that I’ve been leveling 66% faster this second time around. That’s such a significant change, I had to know what might be the cause.

It might be easy to chalk it up to changes in the game this time around, and the +15% XP bonus I get between the Fast Track guild perk and my heirloom cloak certainly have a significant impact. But theoretically those should only be accounting for a 15% increase in leveling speed. Then again it could be attributed to the fact that there are new resources available to me this time around: If nothing else I have never needed to stop and spend time gold farming so I could afford the next ability at the trainer or so I could replace a piece of 10-level-old gear that I wasn’t getting as a quest reward or world drop since I have my sugar daddy main who can spare more gold than I’d ever reasonably need at these levels (and who I have send comparatively high level equipment to auction so the Mage can keep the profits). I also have taken advantage of the Random Dungeon tool to queue for dungeons on a regular basis which has kept me from having to sport very many greens without wasting a lot of time in the LFG channel trying to find a healer or whatever we used to do. But even those perks don’t seem to account for the fact that I’m leveling so much faster this time out.

Before I tell you what I think the biggest reason has been, I have to stop for a minute and call attention to the fact that one aspect that cannot be ignored or overlooked is the changes Blizzard has made to the questing progression in the game. And as part of a community that spends a lot of time griping about things Blizzard does, I want to be clear that this is pure praise: Questing in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms is wonderful. And I don’t just mean it’s wonderful compared to the dismal, cluttered grind that it once was, I mean wonderful on its own merits. Everything from the improved starting zone experience to the way quest chains end with useful rewards to the more consolidated quest hubs to the fact that they comprise the single-player component of the game now to great effect and on through the much wider variety of quest objectives, interesting game mechanics and the occasional entertaining cutscene it’s all so, so much better. But by far my favorite thing about the new questing in Cataclysm is the way it flows organically from level-appropriate zone to level-appropriate zone so you shouldn’t see as much of the “What zone should I level in at XX?” spam in Trade Chat anymore. And! At any point you can always hit up the Warchief’s Board and find a low-XP quest guiding you to an appropriate zone, even if you somehow managed to miss the transition quest in a particular zone you were working in. This is all huge in making leveling a swift process because it takes a lot of the guesswork and wasted time out of it where before it wasn’t always clear when it was time to move on and where you ought go when you did. Huge, huge kudos to Blizzard for their stellar work in this area, as it’s clearly had a big effect.

But I really think that the two largest factors for my blistering pace with this alt has been my focus and my efforts to reduce travel time. At no point have I allowed myself to succumb for long to the myriad distractions that this game offers, going off on side ventures to look for a rare recipe I read about on Thottbot, making extended mat gathering runs, getting lost in Orgrimmar trying to find a profession trainer instead of asking a guard for directions or working on silly achievements when there is XP to be earned. Granted the first time through was a learning experience and I don’t mean to imply I regret how I did it before, just that the meandering pace of leveling my main can be directly attributed to, well, meandering. But the other big component has been controlling my travel time. I admit that my new class makes a lot of this much more possible, as does the lowering of the entry bar to mounted travel (to level 20 from 40 if I’m not mistaken). I mean, hitting level 24 and training to teleport to all the capitol cities was a revelation. I actually wish it hadn’t taken me nearly five levels to figure out that once I could teleport to Undercity, it was completely redundant to leave my Hearthstone set there. The correct way to handle it was to set my Hearth at the closest location to my current quest hub so I could bounce quickly between the two. I also avoided the one-quest-at-a-time trap and gathered all the quests I could, fulfilling their requirements in as much of a loop as they allowed and turned them in in batches.

I’ve been devising other travel-saving techniques as well: With my Warrior I crisscrossed Azeroth, questing in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms in roughly equal amounts. But I’ve scarcely set foot in Kalimdor this time around other than a handful of teleports to Orgrimmar to follow a Mage-specific quest or two. There just isn’t any need for me to waste the time and resources when there are plenty of zones in EK for me to gain XP. I also try to keep my travel time in-city to a minimum: In the Undercity my class and profession trainers are all spread out around the whole place requiring a lot of running back and forth. But Brill is a very short paid flight away and over there all my primary professions and class trainers are right next to the Bat Handler so once I do my business with the Auction House and the Bank, I jump on a bat and fly just outside the city walls to get my training done before I head back into the field. I’ve even started taking advantage of the portal in Undercity to The Blasted Lands, which was put there as part of the Burning Crusade expansion but happens to help me because that’s been a questing zone for me this past week. It’s not meant to get me anywhere other than The Dark Portal but it beats ‘porting to Stonard and riding my horse South for five minutes when I could jump right into a quest objective instead.

Again, Blizzard has done a lot to facilitate some of this, between adding copious amounts of Flight Masters (in practically every spot you find two NPCs to rub together), lowering the entry point for mounted travel and providing extra alternate travel mechanisms. But between their efforts and mine, this has been a breezy trip through the lower levels.

Stay Frosty?

Okay so I respec’ed my Mage’s primary talent tree from Frost into Arcane. That might sound like I had either decided I disliked the Frost tree or I saw something about Arcane that really intrigued me. Neither is actually true—although I did like what I was reading about Arcane’s DPS potential—the real impetus came from the fact that I love playing as a Fire Mage so stinking much. Maybe that sounds funny, but it was like this: Once I dual-specced as Fire I wholly abandoned Frost and it felt like a waste that I had a whole talent tree I couldn’t even be bothered to pour my newly acquired points into as I leveled. I suppose it came down to the fact that having a very crowd-control-y suite of abilities to lock enemies down while I beat them down certainly felt safer than tossing fireballs at them and hoping to burn them down before they reach me and start testing just how squishy I really am wearing robes as my protective gear. But safe was also sort of bland.

Let me try an analogy to explain why the Fire spec is so exciting to me: If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering maybe you can relate to the way you sometimes build a deck with this one really killer combo in it, but perhaps it’s very specific so it isn’t easy to get out. Or maybe it relies on a restricted card that you can only have one of so the odds of it coming together just so are fairly small but you enjoy the deck anyway because the anticipation of “Is this the match where I obliterate them with the force of my awesome combo?” is enough to keep you playing for the satisfaction of waiting for the stars to align. And often in Magic you build your deck in such a way that even if the Ultimate Combo doesn’t pan out, you can do some very cool stuff with smaller subsets of it, occurring often enough to remind you why your patience will eventually be rewarded.

In the Fire spec there is this sequence that is similar to that. It starts with the basic nuke spells: Fireball and Scorch (or Frostfire Bolt if you prefer) which you apply as much critical strike chance to as possible because, properly specced, crits do two things: One, they always apply a short-lived Damage Over Time effect and two, they have a chance to activate an instant version of a long-cast, high-damage spell called Pyroblast. The thing about Pyroblast (the instant cast version distinguished from the normal by an exclamation mark) is that it also applies a slow Damage Over Time debuff (damage is applied every 3 seconds for a 12 second duration) to the target such that if you crit a target and the crit procs Pyroblast!, you’re going to have two DoTs ticking on the enemy right off the bat. This is where the combo starts to get really interesting because later in the talent tree you unlock an ability called Combustion.

At first, Combustion’s description sounds weird and confusing, almost unhelpful. What this long-cooldown ability does in essence is apply a decent amount of burst damage on its own when cast but more interestingly it takes any currently ticking DoTs on the target and combines them together into a new Damage Over Time debuff that deals the per-second amount of the original debuffs’ damage over 10 seconds. So let’s say you cast Fireball and it crits, applying a four second, 100 damage DoT to the target (25 dps) but it also procs Pyroblast! which then applies a 12 second, 1,200 damage DoT (100 dps). At this point you hit Combustion which deals X damage but then applies a new DoT for 125 dps over 10 seconds (1,250 damage). Note that this is a new DoT, so any damage incurred on the original debuffs ticking down isn’t taken away meaning if you cast Pyroblast! one second after Fireball procced it and waited two more seconds before casting Combustion you’d get three of Fireball’s ticks (75 damage) plus one of Pyroblast!’s ticks (400 damage, remember it deals its damage in three-second increments) and then the entirety of Combustion’s damage for a grand total of 1,725 damage over the course of 13 seconds or 133 dps in DoTs alone (not counting the burst damage done by all three spells).

Want it even cooler? Later still in the tree you get Living Bomb, a 12 second DoT ability that has an instant cast time which adds even more DoTs to Combustion’s pain-bringing. Plus there is an ability called Critical Mass which improves Pyroblast to make targets extra vulnerable to spell damage. The coup de grace then comes from a final talent tree ability called Impact which procs 10% of the time from any damaging spell and gives the Fire Blast (another instant cast) the ability to spread DoT debuffs from one target onto others that are adjacent. The idea for the full Impact-Combustion combo then is: Living Bomb sets off a long-duration DoT, then the nuke spell (e.g. Fireball) crits, proccing Pyroblast! which applies the third DoT and lowers the target’s resistance to spell damage at which point Combustion is kicked off instituting a massive DoT debuff. From there either Combustion itself procs Impact or you cast an AoE (probably Flamestrike, which can be improved to be instant cast) across several nearby adds or mobs to give Impact a high chance of proccing and you drop the Impact on the target, stunning them and spreading Combustion’s manic debuff to anyone standing in range. Then you break out the hot dogs and have a nice ol’ fashioned weenie roast on their smoldering corpses.

Dungeoneering

For good or ill I’ve made it to the level where Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire open up for my Mage in the Duneon Finder which means if I want to do a full random queue I’m liable to end up stuck in BRD for the next hour and a half minimum. As I said when I soloed it with the Warrior, it’s sprawling and frequently confusing although at least when done at-level it isn’t quite as much of a farm fest: You end up having to kill all the mobs anyway to advance so you get plenty of keys, plus it does help to have someone familiar with the instance run through it in a way that resembles order. Even still, it’s a long, long grind compared to other dungeons which, don’t get me wrong, can be a very good thing. But when you’re queuing with the mindset of “I have an hour and a half to play, including queue time,” getting stuck in BRD can be a big bummer since it means you probably won’t see the end of the run (and are likely to leave the group abandoned right near the end).

I’ve also gotten to the point where the instances are getting harder and can no longer reasonably be mashed through merely on the strength of the Tank’s AoE and some judicious healz. As such PUG quality is starting to become an issue and I’ve had a couple of rough instances over the weekend. Curiously they both came in Blackrock Spire though I don’t think that was really a key factor. In the first example the tank was another one of those cowboys, pulling every mob in the room with reckless abandon and worrying mostly about driving his DPS through the roof. Honestly it didn’t affect me all that much since he was at least maintaining the aggro but he was moving so fast that he wasn’t even looting corpses (a big part of the reason I run dungeons is to farm BoE greens to sell for a few gold each on the AH) and he certainly wasn’t stopping to let the casters replenish their mana. But I was figuring by and large it was his funeral, the one thing that had me kind of annoyed with him was that he kept kiting the mob groups around corners so he broke line of sight for me a lot. Again though, not really a huge problem for me just sort of annoying.

The healer, on the other hand, must have been grinding his teeth for the bulk of the instance because LOS matters for healers as well and having no mana means not being able to keep this cowboy alive. At one point we wiped and the tank made the mistake of saying something fairly innocent like “Come on healer, don’t let me die.” In my opinion the healer rightfully flipped his lid. The resulting discussion was not suitable for a family website but can be summarized as follows:

“You can’t be seriously blaming me for that wipe. You’ve been pulling more trash than you can reasonably handle for the whole run, kiting out of my LOS and being willfully ignorant of my mana. /ragequit”

After he left there was a short pause and the tank said, “He seemed mad.”

I briefly considered pointing out that the healer had a very strong argument there but instead I tried to keep the peace since we were very close to finishing. I ran back to the door before the room we’d wiped in and watched him charge in, not even waiting for the other two DPS or a new healer to drop in out of the queue. As he kited the angry mob of mobs back toward me so we could both die again, I quietly left on my own.

The other thing about hitting the mid-to-late fifties was that we’re starting to see Death Knights now. Incidentally this lead to the other bad run in which an Unholy DK queued in the tank role and tried to run us through BRS. I’m not terribly familiar with DKs but my understanding is that the tanking spec for them is Blood not Unholy. I’m typically willing to give people the benefit of the doubt but it was pretty clear early on that this guy was not going to be able to hold aggro to save his life. Incidentally the three DPS in that run were all Mages (one of each spec, which I thought was kind of funny) and, well, let’s just say if you’re tanking for Mages, you need to be able to pull threat back in a hurry and it was clear this guy couldn’t. We wiped twice before we realized what the problem was.

Usually when people initiate kick requests I decline. People can be pretty short fused about booting party members: I’ve seen guys get a kick request for having low DPS after someone posts their Recount data in party chat. That’s pretty tacky in my opinion, especially in low level dungeons where there is hardly a DPS target necessary to finish them. I tend to decline kick requests for this reason: I’m happier to give people the benefit of the doubt and other than extended AFKs I don’t typically think performance—being as it is so incredibly subjective—is a good reason to dismiss someone most of the time. On the other hand, this is my time we’re talking about and people who threaten to waste it because they advertise that they are able to perform some vital function when in fact they are not capable of that, well, that’s the difference between performance as a measure and performance as a binary operator.

The formula I use is this: If it seems reasonable to expect that we can complete the dungeon at hand with the current party, then I decline any kick actions. If we’re just going to spend the next half hour wiping and eventually all quitting and firing up the queue cooldown, someone has to go, even if it’s me.

Off-Planet

At the tail end of the week I pushed through to level 59 and headed through the Dark Portal to Outland. Which means that give or take I’ve now brought my alt up to the point I was with my Warrior some three months ago when this WoW resurgence began. I’m a tiny bit nervous that this could be the point where I start getting bored since I so recently worked through this content for the first time and I’ve noted that there is a big lull in the Mage training progression at this stage: I learned Arcane Brilliance at level 58, the next spell I learn doesn’t unlock until level 68 (unless you count the teleport and portal spells to Shattrath, which I kind of don’t). Now, there are some very cool things coming up in the Wrath levels like Spellsteal and Invisibility, but Burning Crusade for Mages seems kind of like a snoozefest. Right now I’m mostly focused on getting my flying mount though because I know that makes a lot of the more frustrating parts of the game nearly infinitely easier. I also know that I’m not likely to be hampered by trying to earn any achievements or do any completionist stuff in Outland as I did (or thought I would do) with the Warrior. One thing I’m very interested to do is explore the zones I skipped previously, Blade’s Edge Mountains and Netherstorm. I’m also excited to use the Dungeon Finder tool to see all the instances I missed because I didn’t take advantage of the Dungeon Finder.

Actually, I want to take a step back for a moment and just remark on the beauty that is the Dungeon Finder for a moment. Okay, yeah, I know it isn’t perfect and I know that it’s pretty dependent on there being a sufficient number of tanks and healers available. But as a solution for the problem of how difficult it can be to organize dungeon runs without such a tool, it’s absolutely brilliant and a huge part of the reason why I’m having fun leveling another character right now. Every time I’ve gotten a little sick of the questing grind through a dull zone like the Burning Steppes the elixir that cures my woes has been a dungeon run with no crazy traveling, no excessive waiting around while someone spams LFG chat looking for a healer and—this point can’t be overstated in my opinion—no reliance on bored high level characters running you through, eliminating both the challenge and the fun of doing the instances as they were meant to be done.

Anyway, the one thing I’m hoping doesn’t become a problem is that there are a lot of non-dungeon (and therefore non-Dungeon Finder) group quests in Burning Crusade, many of which have really valuable quest rewards. Ideally I’ll call on some kindly guild members to help me out for a few minutes so I can clear those parts but if not I may have to skip over some of the items I want and hope I get some lucky drops in the dungeons.

WoW Bits

• I actually didn’t play very much at all over the past week: We were out of town for the weekend so Friday night was a bust both for WoW and for Blood Bowl which I’m still trying to coordinate with Dr. Mac. Saturday night I didn’t miss it as I was busy having a wonderful date with my wife but even Sunday night I didn’t get much time in because I was cleaning up and doing laundry from our time away. The only reason I was able to make it the seven or eight levels that I progressed was because I scarcely even logged onto my main, spending all my available time working on the Mage. I think I may have spent half an hour doing dailies one morning before work but honestly at this point I’m pretty focused on just pushing the Mage up to 85 and I’ll worry about how to handle the Warrior when that’s all done.
• I want to talk about AddOns for a minute because for as much as they can drive me batty, I’m a constant UI tinkerer but I also like to try to keep the number of AddOns I run to a minimum, installing only those that I really use and find useful. Primarily the ones I wouldn’t want to play without include Bartender, ArkInventory, Titan Panel and Auctioneer. I also have Recount but I don’t know that I find it utterly indispensable, though it is nice to see how well I’m doing as a DPSer especially when I’m trying to get better. I haven’t quite figured out how to manage threat monitors: Omen is what I’ve typically used but I don’t need yet another non-game engine graph to keep an eye on. I’ve been trying out Tidy Plates with the Threat Plates module but I’m not quite used to it enough yet to fully ditch Omen. There are a few others like Arky and Gatherer for professions (though I use Gatherer differently than most in that I don’t import the community data, preferring to have it only act as a marker for where I myself have found gathering nodes previously) but I could easily take or leave them.
  The one that kind of baffles me is Deadly Boss Mods, which I finally installed but have yet to activate. Now I’ve been reluctant to install it because while everyone and their cat seems to think it’s essential, I’ve yet to see a really good demonstration or even explanation as to what it does and what it’s good for. The best anyone seems willing to say is that it provides boss-specific timers, I guess letting you know when a boss is going to move into a certain phase of a fight? It’s possible that with my extremely limited raid experience I’m just not used to epic boss encounters and I don’t realize how much effort it would be to keep all those fights in your head. But so far I have yet to encounter any bosses, even in the Heroic Cataclysm dungeon I ran, where I felt that what was missing was a timer telling me when something specific was about to happen. Mostly it seems like the bosses are good enough at broadcasting what they’re going to do that as long as you pay a reasonable amount of attention you can prepare yourself for what’s coming.
  I guess the only example I can think where it might be useful would be the Ozruk fight in Stonecore: If there was something that popped up and said “Run, fool! Here comes Shatter!” that could be useful but it’s not like I don’t watch Ozruk’s casting bar like a hawk anyway and still manage to get caught in that blast. I suppose I’ll have to enable it and see for myself but I’m worried a bit that I’ll hate it and from what I can tell when you start getting into the higher level content and running heroics and raids, the expectation from everyone is that you are in fact running DBM. I’ve even seen raiding guilds who require that applicants prove they use the AddOn as part of their qualifications. Can it really be that effective and powerful? And if it is, how does it affect the enjoyment of the game?
• I’m starting to consider a possible computer purchase for the first time (for myself) in something like 10 years. I’ve been using either work-supplied hardware since then (not really counting the Mac mini I bought for my wife and I to share five or six years back). The last computer I bought for myself was a Dell that came with Red Hat Linux pre-installed back in 2000 or 2001 which was also intended to be used almost exclusively for work and educational purposes. So it’s been a long time since I’ve entertained the thought of buying or building a PC. But I have several reasons for thinking about this, the primary one being that I’m so wholly reliant on my work-supplied machine that it would be fairly catastrophic if I ever got laid off and had to turn it back in to it’s rightful owners. The reason I’m thinking desktop PC is because while I’m pretty adamant that my work provide me with a laptop if they have any inclination of me working outside of an office environment, I don’t necessarily need the additional expense or portability for my home computing tasks. And while I vastly prefer OS X to Windows, Apple’s desktops don’t really do much for me, not to mention whatever I got would have to have affordability as a primary consideration.
  Basically what I’m looking for is something that has a big hard drive to hold all my media, can be always on so I can implement a sound backup strategy and can run iTunes so I can sync my phone/iPod. As secondary features I’d like it to be able to run some lower-end games (or be upgradable enough to do so at some juncture) and access the VPN at work in case my laptop ever died while I was working from home so I wouldn’t have to suddenly race into the office.
  The biggest issue I have at the moment is that I haven’t purchased any hardware in so long I don’t have anything to build from, not even a monitor. It looks like I can pick up something I’ll be able to live with plus a display for around $500-600, maybe earmarking a bit of money for a video card upgrade in the semi-near future. Compared to even the low-end Mac mini that starts at $700 sans monitor that’s not too bad at all. The question really is though, how long is it going to take me to re-download the digitally-purchased Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm? Ouch.

I’m not a big forum guy. I was once, back in the wild days of my virtual youth, but now I mostly visit via external link for some amusement. Because honestly all online forums can be distilled into the following essence: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Theory and overreaction to the inconsequential. If you view them as comical, they have some entertainment value inherent but if you take them seriously for even one microsecond, you will find yourself either being a jerk because you are largely anonymous and have an audience or you will begin to care deeply and be emotionally impacted by something that doesn’t mean diddly  to your life at any level you care to examine it. So it goes with WoW forums.

However, the current inconsequential that is being overreacted to is worthy of at least a little side discussion is the notion of difficulty in Cataclysm heroics. I had a discussion late last week over Ventrilo with a guildmate about a lot of the people crying over how difficult heroic dungeons are now and clearly he fell on the side of “Why would you play a game that was so easy anyone could do it?” But as we talked and as I reflected on it afterward, I realized there was a not-necessarily-clear-cut discussion happening behind he scenes of his rhetorical question.

The interesting thing is that within the community there are basically two standpoints: One is that Cata heroics are punishing to the point of removing the fun from the game and people are liable to quit playing if Blizzard doesn’t tone down their stance that heroic instances ought to be a challenge. The other is that these are supposed to be tough: They’re called “heroics” for a reason and should require something akin to heroism to complete; if the toughest challenge in the game was no challenge at all, players would get bored and be liable to quit playing. Now obviously the sticking point is where the line on challenge blurs into frustration, but what occurred to me was that if you step back you can see where this issue of achievable versus accessible has been plaguing video game designers for years.

Consider for a moment the games from earlier eras:  Defender, Donkey Kong, Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts, Punch-Out, Nethack, Myst, etc. Many games in the industry’s halcyon days were not just challenging, in some cases they were brutally punishing. Some of that came from the arcade mindset where, for profitability reasons, games needed to be attractive and addictive but also practically sadistic so as to elicit the continual feeding of coins into the receptacle. But even early home games often had very little concern for allowing players to “experience” the entirety of the game if their skill did not permit it (as an historical aside, check out this developer standards document I found for the Atari 2600 while doing some research). Now contrast that with today’s games and ask yourself how often successful games are un-conquerable for even the most moderate player in some fashion or another. The evidence seems to suggest that games have gotten easier and easier as designers have begun not to program challenging diversionary obstacles but rather interactive spectacles that they don’t want to go to waste. If you expect a million kids to come back and buy your sequel in a couple of years, you’d better find some way to make sure they reach the end of the first game.

And for the most part, this is fine with the vast majority of players because by definition most players fall into the middling area in terms of skill. Often the potential detraction is sidestepped by providing selectable difficulty settings which allows the unwashed masses to play “dumbed-down” versions of the game while those who consider themselves elite can still access a greater challenge at their leisure. But note that this doesn’t really apply in the MMO space where World of Warcraft makes its home because for balance reasons it would be impractical (though not impossible) to have several versions of the game, each tuned to a specific type of player.

Except, when you think about it, that’s exactly what heroic dungeons are in WoW: The selectable difficulty switch. If you think about it, you can access all the gameplay content that heroic dungeons contain by simply running them on normal mode. No one that I’ve heard is complaining that normal Cataclysm dungeons are too difficult, so in essence what it seems to me is that the backlash is coming from people who might—as an example—play Call of Duty on Veteran difficulty and cry in the forums that the game is impossible.

I had an opportunity over the weekend to play through my first heroic dungeon and I can confidently report that yes, they are in fact very challenging. I did Lost City of the Tol’Vir with three guildmates and a guy who used to be in the guild (but left to start his own) until about halfway through the third boss when the ex-guildie left and we replaced him with a random LFM guy who turned out to be very cool and also very good so it was a really pleasant run all told. But even with partial ventrilo communication and a positive, “we-can-do-this” vibe from the de facto party leader, we wiped a lot. I think the trick was that we were all patient and relaxed because we were doing it as a guild and didn’t worry about it too much if someone’s DPS was below 3,000 or if the healer ran out of mana. As long as we were doing a little better each try or at least that we could identify where we had made the mistake we didn’t get too frustrated and no one was tempted to ragequit.

I don’t think I’d have any interest in doing the PUG random queue for heroics at this point because I know the issues that we avoided by having friendly guildmembers running would be rampant otherwise, but I do know that I had an incredible amount of fun. And most pertinently, the sense of satisfaction when we finally dropped Siamat was pronounced as an effect of the whole run being pretty difficult. I think all this means that Blizzard has the heroic dungeons pretty much exactly where they need to be: I barely qualified gear-wise to enter a heroic dungeon and even with the sqeaky wheel that was me and my comical efforts at melee DPS we managed to make it through with some perseverance.

So far Blizzard seems to be reacting with some level of surprise at the outcry and I’m intrigued that they haven’t seemed to yet reply with “It’s hard mode. It’s supposed to be hard. Last time out hard mode was a little on the flimsy side, sorry if you thought that was going to be the norm.” Instead they’ve over-explained with treatise on game design and balancing theory which frankly sounds kind of condescending to my ears, moreso than just saying they intend for heroics to kick your butt and pointing out that if you don’t like getting your butt kicked, they are, in fact, entirely optional.

Dungeoneering

Aside from heroic Lost City of the Tol’Vir, I actually ran a lot of dungeons over the last week, primarily because I spent the vast majority of my WoW time on my Mage and I’ve gotten to the level where the available dungeons are ones that I never did at-level with my Warrior because I was in questing exclusivity mode during those levels. I’m talking about Dire Maul, Stratholme, Scholomance, the latter sections of Scarlet Monastery, etc. I can say with a little more confidence now that Scholomance is one of my favorite dungeons in the game (that I’ve tried) and certainly my favorite from vanilla WoW. Maybe it’s the sort of Harry Potter vibe or whatever but the whole evil magic school thing is very cool to me and I like that it’s not ridiculously confusing just to navigate (I’m looking at you, Maraudon) plus it’s packed with bosses (13 of them I believe) so it’s straightforward without being dull (cough new Sunken Temple cough).

And how can I say it’s my favorite in vanilla WoW, you ask? Well, you’re looking at the owner of the achievement Classic Dungeonmaster, as I finally took the time to solo Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire with my Warrior. I really wasn’t much of a fan of either: BRS has a lot of the twisty navigation issues that drive me kind of nutty about WoW instances (and the 2D maps don’t help enough) while BRD was just long considering it required farming in-instance trash mobs for relatively rare drops to complete some of the progression and I just felt it was blah as a solo endeavor. I will say that going through some dungeons at-level with the Mage changed my opinion on them (Dire Maul, for example, isn’t as bad as I thought—especially when the Dungeon Finder tool takes out the annoyance of navigating the poorly mapped Feralas outdoor area). Maybe I’ll appreciate them more if I hit them up with the Mage in a group, I dunno.

The interesting thing about running dungeons with the Mage is that so far I have yet to meet a deliberate tank in these classic instances. Every single one has been a real cowboy, barely stopping to loot corpses before pulling the next three groups of mobs and just expecting the healer to keep them alive and the DPS to be on his or her hip at all times. I assume a lot of it is that for experienced players they’ve been through all these dungeons a zillion and a half times so it’s either a farming run or they just want to knock it out, take the loot and XP and keep grinding; the motivation to stop and read the quest text or get a sense of the area lore just isn’t there. And in a way that’s fine since I know that I’ve been taking a lot of shortcuts with this alt in terms of power leveling. By and large I leave my measured pace, lore-examining play for the Warrior since he’s got nothing but time up there at level 85. But from a play perspective I know that some of these cowboy tanks can get a little overzealous to the extent that our tank in Scholomance wiped the party in the room with all the zombies because he pulled too many for us to AoE down and overwhelmed the healer. There was a momentary heated exchange in which the healer, a DPS and the tank debated the merits of aggressive pulling but it proved to be academic since that room is the last one that’s really crowded and the rest of the instance is pretty much boss rooms with minimal trash mobs/adds.

Mage Love

At the end of the week I finished in the high 40s with my Mage, which is significant over last week because other than one night running BRS and BRD with the Warrior (actually the whole thing started by finishing up the Lunar Festival quests/achievements since a couple of the Elders are down in those dungeons and I ran them while getting the Elders because I figured I was already there) and another which included the heroic Tol’Vir run it was all Mage all the time this week. Most of the questing was limited to the Eastern and Western Plaguelands with, as I said, a lot of Dungeon queuing in between.

For a while I wondered what the point of questing even was since you can control the rep gains through tabards in instances, you get much better equipment and even the non-usable gear you collect tends to be BoE that can lead to some nice auction house scores for better cash flow. But I did a little rough comparison and realized quickly that the XP gains in dungeons are okay, but nothing compared to the blistering leveling pace you can sustain through even an hour of concentrated questing. Some of it depends on the quest hub and the types of quests you’re doing but I was averaging 1.75 (or so) levels per hour through the Eastern Plaguelands with my heirloom cloak, plus the guild XP boost and the zone-specific buff from the caravan.

Have I mentioned how much I love playing this character? There is an element of sadness to the preference I’ve been giving this guy over my main because I invested so much time and energy into maxing out that Warrior both in the leveling portion as well as ancillary aspects like achievement hunting, profession grinding, reputation gains and on and on. But then I spend some time playing as the Mage and I get ridiculously excited reading lunatic theorycrafting stuff like this breakdown of how to maximize Fire DPS and it softens the blow. I doubt some of the more esoteric achievements will ever really be a priority for me with this semi-alt (things like world event achievements are probably going to remain exclusive to the Warrior) but I really want to hurry the Mage along to level 85 because it sticks in my craw every time I have call to DPS for the guild in high level instances: I know I need to commit to gearing the Warrior for tanking but right now I need to work on the skill behind it and frankly there isn’t always a demand for a tank within the guild since there are several good ones already who are online far more often than I am. Typically guild groups are looking for healers first, DPS second and tanks last. With each passing level on the Mage I become more fully convinced that this is my primary DPS destiny which in turn strengthens my resolve to leave the Warrior’s primary function as a tank but until I get the practice in there and have a viable high-level DPS alternative, I’m stuck splitting the difference on the Warrior to the detriment of the groups I join.

If there was one complaint I had about leveling the Mage it would be that I don’t feel as though I necessarily chose the right professions for this toon. I’m an Herbalist/Alchemist which is okay I guess but I feel in a lot of ways that, having done the search-gathering/crafting combo of Mining and Blacksmithing on my Warrior this is exactly the same with all the good and substantial bad that comes along with it. The problem is I don’t want anything to slow me down in my relentless pursuit of level advancement. At this point I’ve gotten both professions up to around 250 so switching professions would mean going back to low-level zones and re-doing a lot of work I’ve already done to get up to speed. I suppose if I were to decide to try to do the Loremaster achievements at any point I could engage a do-over at that point without much risk of wasting time, I just know that these sorts of distractions and side sojourns were what crippled my leveling rate with the Warrior and made it ultimately hard to max out at all.

I know what I would do if I could do it over again: Tailoring and Enchanting. Neither requires a specific gathering profession to feed it and while I originally thought Tailoring would be dull, it turns out that it’s always nice to be able to make your own armor. The question is whether I’m better off riding out the quasi-painful gather/craft grind so at least I have a top level herbalist in my stable and someone who can transmute (which will be great for the Blacksmith eventually) or if I should take the time out to reset and let some other alt be the shmuck to grind teh herbs (as they say). I mean, for reals: Goldthorn. Am I right? Impossible to find and sells for 200+ gold per stack. It would be better if someone just punched me in the mouth.

WoW Bits

• So the heroic dungeon wasn’t my only first this week, I also had my first shot at raiding with a guild run on Baradin Hold. Let me back up a bit and explain that Baradin Hold is kind of unique in that it’s a raid that becomes available to whichever faction currently holds Tol Barad. It’s a really small instance right now with only a few mobs and one boss. It looks really cool but there isn’t much to it which is why the guild master wanted to start there. Of course, you do have to hold TB to access it and by the time we had most of a raid team together it was almost time for the PvP battle to start. So a ton of us from the guild queued for the battle to make sure we could actually do the raid without getting locked out. I will say this: PvP with a lot of people on both sides is vastly more enjoyable than low-population PvP battles. I actually had an incredibly good time (and did pretty well for once): The frenzy of spell effects and the pseudo-controlled chaos of the bigger clashes was quite epic and while I’m sure it was a massive fluke I actually got a number of performance-based achievements during the fight including 100 Honorable Kills, Towers of Power and Tol Barad All-Star. The best news was that we did in fact hold onto Tol Barad and after the fight we assembled our raid group and tried our hand at Argaloth.
  Well, we didn’t do very well which is ultimately why we split the raid into two five-man dungeon groups and went into heroic mode because the guild master decided the reason we were dying with Argaloth at maybe 75% health was we weren’t doing enough DPS because we were undergeared. I’m not sure I completely agreed with his assessment: I will grant that we probably could have been doing a lot more damage output but we really only tried the fight three or four times before giving in and we were still improving with each attempt so I didn’t see any reason to call it quits right then. Somehow or other he got into his head that all six DPSers needed to be doing about 10K in order to have a shot at it whereas I was thinking the problem was it took us at least two fights just to figure out how to have the healers deal with Consuming Darkness. Anyway, decision made and we broke off which worked out because ultimately it lead to the very enjoyable heroic run that I talked about before.
• The other thing I did with the Warrior was finally max out Blacksmithing, although I confess that after all those farming runs last week I sat at 523 and just couldn’t bear to go out and try to find 20 more Volatile Fires so I broke down and bought the 24 Elementium Bars and 10 VFs necessary and just took a net loss of 150 or so gold on the sale of two Bloodied Pyrium Shoulders so I could say I did it. Of course now I theoretically have the ability to craft some really great stuff for myself, except the mats are beastly to obtain and even just getting the plans from that ponce Kuldar requires more farming. The one bright spot is that I came out of the heroic dungeon with a Chaos Orb so in theory the hardest mats to get fro crafted epics is at least 1/3 of the way finished.
• I came out of my Scarlet Monastery with the semi-famous Whitemane’s Chapeau (“I lewt teh hat“) and promptly had to toggle the “show helm” option because while it may be best in slot for my level, it is so dog ugly compared to the rest of my fairly cool-looking gear I just couldn’t stand it. It occurred to me that it would be a nice feature if they allowed players to toggle visibility on all their secondary gear slots, including tabards. I’m rocking the Silvermoon City tabard right now, which is a fairly decent looking tabard, but it’s kind of gaudy against the rich purple of my Robes of the Lich. As with any WoW-fashion conscious player, I tolerate it for the sake of the game mechanics, but I’ll be happy to finish the Exalted on that faction and turn to something with a more complimentary color palate.
  Oh my gosh. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME?
• I should update a little on the status of the control scheme adjustment experiment: It turns out I’m getting much more used to mouselooking although I think the thing that really helped me the most was a sort of training wheels approach I used with my Mage. Since I didn’t really have enough ability slots to justify mapping interrupts to Q and E (at the time), I moved the left and right turn to those keys (instead of the usual A and D) and mapped A and D to left and right strafe, respectively. Then I turned on mouselook so I could theoretically still keyboard turn but I was equipped for mouselooking. It had the intended effect in that I found myself relying less and less on the keys to turn and now for the most part I forget that’s an option. I contribute a small portion of my accidental Tol Barad success to my improved control scheme and I think by and large it’s been a positive adjustment. I do still struggle with the Command-Click when I’m on the laptop controls, but I’ve gotten into the habit of playing at a desk with a connected mouse whenever I’m going to be doing anything significant like running a dungeon or doing some power leveling. It’s gotten to where I tend to play with a connected mouse anytime I’m doing anything more intense than wandering from bank to auction house, profession leveling or doing Orgrimmar dailies. And it works out because usually those are the later evening sessions after the family has gone to bed.