What to do if SOPA Passes

Now returning you to some more rants about RPG, Warcraft, and pugging as a casual with no patience.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, we all know you’re pro because cc is for wimps, the tank is too slow, and you have an alt that can do 29,000 dps so the dps doing 17,000 in this group is just slacking. Thanks, no really, you’re special. Kick.

Loot rules also still suck in 5 mans, and given that the random raid finder now has an interesting role based priority, I’d love to see this in 5 mans too. The old pattern stays – the selfish bastard who was rule all the way through the run will still roll Need on the last boss, for an item they have no business needing. It is the way of things till it gets fixed, and that alone drains my enthusiasm enough to make me log in begrudgingly now.

If I wanted to meet ride arrogant mongrels with selfish attitudes and no hygiene – I’d ride the public transport system more. Anyway, happy hunting, and I hop you get a wonderfully disproportionate ratio of wonderful players to average in your 5 man pugs. That, and the fixed loot system is all I want for Christmas.

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.

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.

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.

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

Given how long we waited for this – its good. Not fantastic, not game changing, but certainly a good model set. It is hard to know how this will look on the various character models, as that often makes or breaks the sets too. But yup, good stuff. I’ll be after the set for both the dps and model reasons.

A huge thank you to mmo-champion for mining this, its been too long a wait.

Holy golden dragon!

Also seen in the post from mmo-champ is the Chromatic Dragon mount. Now this was worth the wait.

Blood Presence Buff

And lastly the Armor contribution from Blood Presence is getting buffed.

Blood Presence now increases armor contribution from cloth, leather, mail and plate items by 55%. Up from 30%.

Think about it, you login, create your panda monk, level it and then…nothing. The announcement should have had a call to action. It is basic marketing to have a draw-card, and the audience for wow need more than this to get excited.

In an effort to post solutions as well as problems – We have no villain, but we can have goals.

1. I like the idea that the war between the factions will heat up, that is good and makes perfect sense. They should be at each others throats and trying to kill each other – especially now that you’d think that resources are that much more scarce. That is a side plot, but does not make an expansion. It is a theme that WoW has had since inception, its not enough to blow up about with out further development.
1. How about making the War have a tangible affect on the cities and realms?
2. Use phasing to make the areas either under siege, at war, or victorious based upon the player participation.
3. If each city has basically all the trainers and vendors duplicated, then allow a city to get locked out – in affect totally taken over by another faction for 1-2 days.
2. Use the Emerald Dream, and hook the mystical side of the panda lore (they have mystics and seers I assume) into using the dream to repair the damage to the world from Cata.
1. Instance to purge the remaining twilight enemies from a holy site, and have the instance change as the players succeed. A clean-up and purge can be as useful a goal as a big bad, if the setting is correct.
2. Have the dream fight back against the changes, so that we see Dreaming Beasts, which are like the defense mechanism of the realm.
3. Maybe they could add a message about the big-bad being partially us too, and we work to build and restore our world ourselves. Do we do this by raiding another place perhaps, another realm?
3. The Burning Legion. We raid the lands burnt out by the Burning Legion, for resources – but find remnants and survivors. We may also find outposts of the Legion. That is a nice way to have a feeling of striking back, and could start the prep for taking the fight to their homeworld.
4. What ever happened to fighting against the Old Gods? The creatures that corrupted Deathwing should be made to answer for what has happened, even if that answer was to permanently displace them into a dead world, rather than Azeroth.

Happy hunting.