Just saw the news that D3 betas have started the second round of offers; a lazy 100,000 keys – wow. As a player with an “annual pass” its fragg’n disappointing. I’m not playing wow much at the moment as I need to be distracted often, but D3 is a game where I think it would be plausible to play in small blocks (based upon D1 and D2).
Kudos to the lucky 100k folks, and to Blizzard – make with the key gents. Ta.
Here is a tale of a group of gamers who are nutty enough to play popular games in Ironman Mode – that is using only 1 life. All so that folks will be chuffed, amused, and then donate to the excellent charity called Child’s Play.
“Clueless idiots playing the best games ever made…with only one life.”
Yup, they’re gamers being gamers, for a good cause. Go read about them – Iron Man Mode. Anyone who is willing to be that self deprecating is ok by me.
I’ve made a rant about the anti-piracy bills in the USA and the SOPA movement. Its important enough that I want it shared here too so it reaches a different readership.
Now returning you to some more rants about RPG, Warcraft, and pugging as a casual with no patience.
Today’s post is a little rant to get something off my chest: Tank moving mobs too much. I hate it. A lot.
Recently in a LFD run the tank was constantly moving the creatures. Now I don’t mean slowly moving them in a reverse circle to gather them up (bears do this, it makes sense), or a tank moving so that nothing is flanking them. Or even adjusting because shitty dps don’t know not to stand in front while the baddies cleave or use flame breaths – I mean constant changing where they stand randomly.
This idiot tank walked forwards, backwards, and sideways through the monster’s hit box so that both he and mobs needed to switch facing all the time. The entire fight against multi-mobs, he walked around constantly. Showing his flank to the mobs, switching around, even bloody jumping from time to time. It was like watching a pvp battle. What made it funny (in a sad way) is that he totally ignored the two melee asking him to stay still. That request just seemed to make him spin and dance more, which made the fights longer, and I suspect he took some serious damage from it too. Yup, an idiot.
I don’t get it, and think its a sign of a bad tank and a player who does not understand the mechanics of tanking.
The tank tip: Gather the melee baddies so they are all in your face, none behind you, and preferably all your team are behind them. ie:
(Tank)–> <— (Angry mobs) <— (melee) <— (healers and range)
This way the melee can hit from behind happily, you can see when the mobs move away, your healers are protected by the melee, and nobody has to move anywhere. All cleaves and spells will only affect the Tank.
The end of the year is a time when hobbie time seems to evaporate, leaving me frazzled. This year is no different with work deployments, shopping needs, appointments, training courses, and some such all stopping online gaming from happening.
I’d not be exaggerating to say that I’ve played less than 2 hours in the last two weeks, and about 10 minutes in the last 8 days. In fact yesterday was 5 minutes, which counts the loading screen.
I’m sure that the new year will see far more regular playtime, and a few more posts. For now at least I’m enjoying reading about how much fun the raid team are having – I’ll be blogging about the game again soon.
Happy (free time) holidays.
I’ve now played each of the new 5 mans in patch 4.3 a few times and they are very reasonable; however the player base and loot mechanics are still problematic.
From a pace and visual style the new instances is excellent. The tasks needed are obvious enough that you get the idea quickly, the mechanics are not difficult to follow, but they need to be addressed properly (interrupts, fire on ground, proximity, special kill orders feature strongly). All in all, good stuff. Worth waiting for, and certainly feature rich in terms of game lore that the characters get to participate in.
However the two same aspects of running randoms remain frustrating, and they are related. Morons and rude mongrels still populate the queues just as frequently as average players. Great players are still rare. I’m an average player overall, and I have a sixth sense in detecting when somebody is a mongrel, which of the handful of runs so far I’ve seen a typical spread of douche-bags. Continue reading
I played the first of the new 5 mans last night – End Time. It’s ok. For the first attempts at these instances I’ve decided to join as dps, so that I can at least not have full pressure for the runs. As dps the job is no different than before: kill, interrupt, avoid.
The trash was actually sometimes harder than the bosses, especially the initial shadow panther things. They just keep spawning till you get to the light – I like that.
Boss mechanics are straight forward (avoid bad, move on special, interrupt when casting X) and not so stacked together that we suffered. I think our wipes were more to do with having a group with no CC, an arrogant tank, and a sluggish healer, than the mechanics.
I enjoyed it, and am looking forward to the next one in the series.
I’m not sure how I feel about patch 4.3 being here so much sooner than I expected. It certainly has not been quick for some players, but I expected it to drop next week.
Knife and fork is all that is needed now. Yummy.
Overall its not the end of the world that it is a week earlier than I planned, except I have dinner plans for Wednesday night – which means I can’t raid. Phooey.
I am looking forward to the change of pace, and while I didn’t get enough exposure to Firelands due to my (non) raid schedule, it is an exciting time in terms of Cataclysm for all raiders. This is it, lets make the big black mongrel pay for roasting half the world.
In character I’m tempted to go back and get a few of the odds and sods from the Twilight instances, and beat Deathwing to death with them.
This month is the five year anniversary of this blog. November 9th 2006 to November 9th 2011 is a long time to be standing in the corner of the web, foghorn in hand, prognosticating the future.
Its been a great experience, and there have been some fantastic and bloody frustrating events over the years. Over 400,000 views…whew, no pressure. I’m sure WoW Insider get that in a day or so.
My first post was “A Presence in Warcraft” where I declared who my toons were and just pondered how I’d get better at the game. Now most of the posts are written with a tone which sounds like I know what I’m doing, and I’m better, but still learning.
Happy blogging, reading, and killing.
The Annual Subscription is a solid offering: WoW for a year which I’d be playing a moderate proportion of anyway, Diablo 3 for free, and a few in game trinkets – clever bundle. I don’t understand the hate over this offer, as it is an option you can really ignore, and the only slight advantage is the extra mount, which is just a cheesy option anyway.
I think its too early to say that Mists will be poor, or if it will be excellent. It will be very different to what WoW is now, that’s all I know. With that in mind, and my odd game time constraints, Diablo 3 is looking like a great option. Once I decided to give D3 a good solid play the choice of how I got it was easy too. I can play on my own schedule, and be a solo player, just like when I played D1 and D2.
So the annual sub suckered me in, I took it. I’ll play Warcraft for at least another 3 months, probably more like another 6 on and off. Then D3 will be worth a look, and it now that I’ve paid for it, I get the opportunity to play both Diablo and WoW as I choose.
My only reservation is GuildWars 2 and Star Wars TOR – both of which are an unknown quantity, but I’ll take a look if they have a free demo. Out of the two TOR looks to be very solid, and frankly I’m not afraid to come into another game a few months late if it happens to be brilliant. A good game will have a life of at least a year, and playing after they fix the initial bugs is better anyway.
If you’re going to play wow for a while longer, and will buy D3 – you should get this. If you’re not going to play D3 and don’t care about silly mounts, then don’t do it. Save your money for another game, a good bottle of wine, or whatever you happen to like that week.
Happy Gaming
