Tier pieces or just a candle – how much does it matter what the boss drops for our willingness to wipe on him?

Is it worth wiping on Al’Akir, considering that he only drops some randomly enchanted stuff and no tier pieces whatsoever?

How many wipes does it take before you say: “screw this, let’s go and grab some more epics from the bosses we already have on farm?”

Recent discussions in my guild showed that there are many different views on this. Some players argue that it’s a waste of time, while others (including me) think that the lack of interesting loot is highly irrelevant and that we’ve never shied away from any challenge previously, so why would we now?

So far I think it’s the loot-is-irrelevant side that is winning. Last Sunday we had a wipe night in good old fashioned style, 22 in a row, without ever making it into phase 3. In my world it’s just a starter. When we’re up above 100 wipes we could start talking, and maybe playing the Benny Hill signature on vent during the corpse runs. But until then? No reason to despair.

Gear cap at level 359?
It’s a funny thing though, how much we differ in the value we put to loot – how important it is to us as motivator. One of the commenters on Ghostcrawler’s post on raid difficulties questioned the idea of constant gear progression through the tiers. Stop handing out better and better epic loot, was his suggestion. Put a cap at item level 359 so the players don’t become more powerful. The point of raiding isn’t to get loot anyway; it’s the feeling of accomplishment, of downing the boss. According to him, they could award vanity items for fluff, fun and bragging. The gear levelling curve should be capped though.

As I read it I asked myself: how many raiders would keep raiding if there wasn’t any more gear to win, if your character didn’t get more powerful thanks to it. How many would be willing to wipe o Al’Akir if it only cost you time and consumables, with no reward apart from the entertainment during the raid? My answer is: probably very few. Just look at what happens to the final tier instances during the months before a new expansion is about to be launched.

I’m pretty certain that more players would have bothered about Ruby Sanctum if it, for instance, had awarded loot that you couldn’t equip right away, but would be useful later on at level 85. Like it or not, to most players – but mind you, not all – WoW is still very much all about improving your character from a gear point of view until you hit the ceiling and can’t realistically improve it anymore.

Raiding like dancing
But does it really have to be that way? Let’s make a parallel to my other current hobby, namely historical dances. Every second week I’m raiding with my dance guild. Well, we don’t call it a raid, but actually it feels pretty much like it, especially those nights when we get a new boss to conquer, a new dance to learn, upon the ones we already have on farm. Just like in any raid there are all those moves and actions that the group of 10-20 people have to learn to master. I

Initially we wipe a lot, since there’s always one or two who miss out something completely. And our learning curves differ a bit, so we have to wait for each other. But eventually, after many wipes, and many nights of training, it clicks and we nail the dance and afterwards we put our hands in the air and cheer of relief, happiness and pride of what we’ve accomplished. Do we get any loot? Not at all. Not as much as an achievement. All we get is the sense of having learned to master something, as a group. The joy of making it well, of beating the challenge. And that’s all we ask for.

To me raiding in WoW is pretty much the same thing as learning how to dance a pavane, a branle or a country dance, with the difference that the raid group is dominated by men rather than by women, that we're in physical and not just digital contact, and that there doesn’t come any fire balls from my hands (even though they DO get sweaty sometimes)

Different motivations
I feel a confession is incoming and I know my guild officers won’t be pleased to hear this. But to be honest: most of the time when I raid I have no idea of what loot will drop from a certain boss. I know I should; I know I’m expected to plan my gear in advance and keep close track on such things. But it’s so largely irrelevant for my motivation and generally it’s easy enough for me to see weather a drop is an upgrade or not. I’d rather spend time studying the dance moves than the loot lists, which just bore me out of my mind.

For me WoW isn’t about the loot, it never was. Al’Akir could drop candles for what I was concerned. I would still have a burning desire to keep wiping on him until we’ve learned the dance.

This said: I don’t look down on loot driven players. I just note the fact that we’re not triggered by the same things in the game. I enjoy dancing and reaching the top of the mountain, and the more suffering we’ve been through on the way, the happier I’ll be once I get there. Others get their kicks from a new piece of gear or from topping the damage chart. Different players have different motivations, and I guess that’s all fine, as long as we’re working towards the same goal and do it as a team.

Friday night
Enough talk about loot. Let’s get to the essentials: a drink and a fireplace is all I ask for right now. I have no worries to share, no tears to shred, no doom or gloom or sad tidings from the world. Actually I have one thing I’d like to mention. In case you haven’t already seen it, head over the The Daily Blink and see what buffs the mages will get in 4.1. At least it gave me a refreshing laugh. Now I remember why I chose to play a mage in the first place. Under the cover of cute pink pigtails, I’m made out of evil.

And with those words I’ll bring out the toast for the week. It goes to all guilds that are currently wiping on a boss. May your dancing be enjoyable and eventually successful! May the RNG force be with you in the loot bag!

Cheers!

Speaking of trash

Razzmatazz at Planet of hats is sick of trash in raid instances. If he could decide he’d rather trash the trash altogether, since it’s boring. He doesn’t buy the idea of it as a pacing mechanism, calling it old school he argues that we should be past this by now. And he finishes asking anyone who thinks trash is fun to speak up, since he’d like to have a word with us.

So here I am, raising my arm, trash supporter as I am.

Yes, I think trash is an essential ingredient to any raid instance, and I’d be sad if they were removed altogether.

The trash free instance
Is there anyone around who remembers when Blizzard tried out the trash free concept in an experiment called ToC? Or have you tried to just forget about it? I surely don’t blame you.

I think I understand why they tried it in the first place, the reasoning behind it. Players love boss fights. They think big bad bosses are awesome. On the other hand players show very little love for trash. If anything they complain if there’s too much of it. Also: the players seem to play WoW half of half blindfolded. They don’t pay much attention to the surroundings, the beauty of the castles and dungeons and their inhabitants. All they talk about is boss abilities, strategies and loot. So why don’t we give them just that? Concentrated coolness should make them happy, right?

It’s just that this doesn’t work in it didn’t work in practice. Listening to the players is all nice, but you have to be aware of that sometimes they’re plain wrong, not realizing what they really want, not understanding the full consequences if their wishes should be granted. This was one of those cases.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone celebrating ToC for the lack of trash. It felt hollow, thin, and completely void of the atmosphere and beauty that instances such as Ulduar, Karazhan or Black Temple held. ToC reminded a bit of the seasonal bosses you finish in 20 seconds. It was not a place where you could experience adventures. It was a loot machine.

So what’s the point of trash mobs? Well, as I see it there are several.

Atmosphere and credibility
One purpose is to set the atmosphere and make setting where the fight takes place more credible. Bad guys in the fairytales rarely fight all alone against the world. They have people around to help them.

Or to make a comparison to an amusement park such as Disneyland compared to a travelling tivoli. It isn’t enough o provide awesome rides; if you just put those rides on a big empty parking place it won’t be half as fun as they are if they’re surrounded by a lovely park, with trees and houses and dressed out people. The trash makes the instance come alive, at least in the best cases.

One of the best examples is probably Karazhan, with the dancers and the dinner guests on the bottom floor. Would Moroes have been half as enjoyable if you had fought him in the empty room of ToC? I wouldn’t think so.

Pacing and variation
Another point is the pacing, even if Razzmatazz dismisses it. Think of it as a piece of classic music or a rock concert. You want variation. The most intense, high paced phases, that makes your heart beat faster, will stand out even more if they’re contrasted against periods that are a little bit slower. It’s not only more enjoyable, I think most raids also need it to recover a little mentally. If you’ve been seriously challenged by a boss fight, you need to reset your minds and get a break with something easier, if only for 10-20 minutes, before it’s time for the next peak.

And provided that it’s not too difficult, it will give the raid leaders a little bit room for thinking and making things ready for the next boss fights. You don’t have to keep the entire raid waiting when you reach the raid boss, since the tanks and healers have been able to sort some tings out during the trash.

Training and warm-up
Thirdly I think trash gives an opportunity for the raid to train their abilities and trim their coordination in a more forgiving setting than a boss encounter. Provided that the trash is varied and well crafted, and not only mindless aoe-targets, you’ll get the chance to test your tanks on pulling and your cc:ers on doing their job, sometimes with some added move-out-of-fire element. You could see it as a bit of warm-up before it’s time to perform at top. Sportsmen do it, so why not raiders?

Bad trash
I could give Razzmatazz right in one thing though, namely that not all trash is as good as it could be. Some trash doesn’t add any flavour or challenge at all, but feel more like randomly crafted standard mobs with the only purpose to delay your progression.

In some cases there’s just too much of the same thing. Take for instance the elementals right before the Twilight council. I don’t really mind the mechanisms, but is it really necessary to fill an entire room with the same kind of mobs, forcing us to go through the same manoeuvres over and over again? They’re not even interesting to look at. All you can think of while doing them is: I wonder how many there are left now?

The good trash
So what constitutes good trash according if you ask me?
Here are a few things I like to see in trash:

• A plausible reason for why they’re there at all.
• Interesting mechanisms that are more than just tank and spank, but still not as challenging as raid bosses. You should be able to wipe if you’re extremely careless, but you shouldn’t have to bring you’re A-game to manage.
• Variation. Ten pulls of the same sort of trash in a row is quite un-fun.
• A reasonable amount, meaning that respawns not necessarily means the end of your raid.
• Some little extra award to keep up the spirits in the raid, such as reputation gains or random epic drops. In this manner, even a newbie raid that doesn’t manage to kill the first boss can feel that they get a little something for their efforts in a wipe night.

Best and worst
Finally you may ask: which raid instance is my favourite when it comes to trash?

Well, again as in so many other aspects, I think it will be Karazhan. I remember it was heavily criticized for having too much trash and yes, it was disheartening if you found respawns after The Curator room. You knew that it meant the end of that raid night, even if an hour remained of your raid time. But this said, most of the trash felt meaningful and added a lot of flavour and atmosphere to the instance.

And the worst? Well, that’s obviously ToC. There’s no worse trash than the non-existing.

The window that can bring your guild together

I think we can agree on that teamwork is one of the essentials in raiding.

You won’t kill a single boss if you have 10 or 25 individuals, each one running their own show without paying too much attention to what everyone else is doing. Optimal enchants and precious gems won’t help you if the group mind is lacking.

Yet I have the feeling that many raid teams spend way more time on memorizing every little detail in Tankspot videos or penetrating the latest spellrotation discussions at EJ than they spend time thinking about how they could develop their raiding team and bring it all together.

Why bother?
I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps the theories and suggestions about group development are just too vague and therefore more difficult to grasp than the solid number-crunching figures of strategies and spec optimization. After all, it’s not your guild happiness level that literally kills bosses. It’s raw damage, point by point. So why bother about psychology?

One reason why you should is that a stable raiding team which manages to hold together overtime, not getting dragged down by a huge turnover, probably will be more successful. in the long run Handling internal conflicts (a.k.a. Guild drama) leaks a ton of energy and effort that you could use way better elsewhere. If you want to minimize that kind of crap, I think you might want to look into this field.

Some guilds actually already do. For instance Paragon, the highest ranked guild in the world, cooperates with a researcher in group psychology. They use personality types as a tool when they’re recruiting and improving their raiding team.

But you don’t have to be a world class guild to benefit from this approach. Perhaps you’re not even raiding at all. You could still have a good reason to want to bring stability to your guild, making your members get a little closer to each other. After all, I think many of us (although not all) find it nicer to play with friends or colleagues than with NPC-resembling anonymous robots.

A Johari Window
One way to develop your team is to use a Johari Window. The new blogger Stubborn at Sheep The Diamond had a post where he suggested a way to adapt the model for a WoW setting.

Basically the Johari Window is a tool that you can use to help people to discuss how they see themselves and discover how others see them. As you get to know more about it, the window will open up, which from my experience will bring a solid ground for teambuilding as well as self development.

As an example Stubborn gives us a list with suggestion of adjectives to describe you as a player and he asks us to pick a few of them that we think fit to ourselves. The next step is to ask a guild mate to do the same thing and pick the adjectives that he or she thinks describe you best. And then you compare your resaults.

You might end up getting quite surprised, seeing that your ideas about yourself are entirely different to the impression you’ve made on your guildie. The differences you find can spark a discussion that can result in a deeper understanding and acceptance of each other’s personality. But it can also highlight behaviour and habits that you were completely oblivious of and that you might want to change.

I tried Stubborn’s list on myself and ended up with the following adjectives about me: doesn’t nerdrage, signs up for raids, stays until the end, reads WoW blogs, always ready on time, worries about causing wipes and doesn’t afk.

But is that how my guildies see me? Maybe, maybe not. And if I’d ask them about it, I might learn something from it. Our windows could widen a bit and bring us together, putting oil in the raiding machinery.

Check out Stubborn’s post and try it for yourself! Perhaps you’ll get some insights. And if you don’t – at least it can bring you some laughs.

At 3 am he nukes a pizza and checks the combat logs

What’s it like to play on the bleeding edge? Kruf of Paragon, the current highest ranked guild in the world, recently shared a typical day of his life.

Here’s a sample from his blogpost. Kruf has just finished a raid that lasted eight hours straight, from 6 pm to 2 am. And yes, he holds a fulltime day job and his alarm goes off at 8:10 every morning.

“02:00. Raid ends. Now it's time to do some daily quests, maybe a random heroic if necessary to reach the Valor Point cap on either of the raiding characters and restock consumables for next raid.

03:00. Done with all the "mandatory" stuff ingame, so it's time to get some food in real life. Depending on how lazy I am, that means either cooking something or just tossing a frozen pizza in the oven or nuking something in the microwave. Most of the time, it turns out to be pizza. Check the forums and news while eating. Try to fix some addons, do some parses on combatlogs to figure out boss ability timers and such.

04:00. Finally ready for bed”

This is what his life has been like most days since Cataclysm launch, and Kruf tries to explain what motivates him:

“A lot of people would wonder "Why does anyone do something like this?", for which I have no better answer than vanity, wanting to be one of the best.”

Different worlds
I don’t normally bother too much about the competition for the world firsts, who killed what, with or without bugs. They live in their world and I live in mine and never will those worlds meet. Just because you like to play football with your friends in the backyard it doesn’t mean that you need to follow every step of the players in Champions League.

However there was something in this post that captured me. I think it was the refreshing honesty. Sometimes hardcore players claim that they play less than casuals. It’s a sneaky form of bragging, if you ask me. We’re led to believe that their godly WoW skills come from talent rather than from spending insane amounts of time on it.

The truth is probably a bit of both. Of course you can spend all day long in Azeroth, doing lapdances for gold, without improving in any aspect at all – apart from possibly becoming a good lapdancer. If you use your online time carefully, always focusing on activities that eventually will lead to your overall raiding goal, you will get a way better return on your time investment and progress quicker in the game. But you still have to invest time, even if you’re ever so talented.

Kruf doesn’t pretend that it’s easy to combine a normal life with job and family with raiding on the bleeding edge. At 3 am, when you’re done with the “mandatories”, you warm your pizza, fix your addons and check the combat logs. That’s what it’s like to be on the top. If you want to be there, you have to pay the price - either you’re WoW player, a football player or a mountain climber.

The scale of seriousness
Kruf’s post made me think about how different approaches we have to WoW. The scale of seriousness is gigantic. On one end you have Kruf. On the other you have what Gevlon calls “morons and slackers”.

Where do I find myself on this scale? Somewhere in the middle I suppose, but probably closer to Kruf than to the bleeding edge of casual players.

I do arrange my real life a bit around our raiding schedule so I can make most of our three raid nights a week. But our raids last three hours, not eight. Like Kruf I make sure to refill my bags with consumables after a raid. On the other side I won’t torture myself with mandatory dailies or running a heroic just to cap my valor points, if I’d rather go to sleep. And I don’t eat pizza at 3.am in the morning. I have dinner with my family.

Not a problem
Do I think that Kruf’s lifestyle is bad and something that therefore should be condemned? Not at all. While it admittedly sounds a bit unhealthy in the long run, I can't see any problem in it, as long as he's the only one who takes the consequences and his life choices doesn't affect someone else, as a child.

However it can be good to bear his blogpost in mind as you compare your own progression rate to Paragon’s deeds. If Kruf's guild has cleared all the heroic modes, while you're wiping on the first bosses in normal, there is a reason for it. They've paid a price that you're probably not prepared to pay.

There ain't such a thing as a free bosskill.

When the ballet boss turned into a punch-bag

Magmaw was nerfed last night. Before someone will enrage, I might add that it wasn’t Blizzard who did a hotfix in order to please entitled casuals or anything like that. We did it ourselves as we changed strategy.

No more anxious watching over the cooldown for pillar of flame, no more worries about stray parasites pestering the ranged group, spawning more of them. No more dancing, at least not for me. Our DK did it for all of us, beautifully keeping the little buggers occupied (with the help of some hunter traps) while everyone else stood in melee range, focusing on the boss and nothing else. The melee people had previously claimed that Magmaw was about as exciting as Patchwerk, and now the ranged couldn’t but agree.

From ballet to boxing
So we got our kill without a single death and we were even rewarded with an unexpected achievement for it since the pesky parasites didn’t even touch us. Needless to say this will most likely be how we fight Magmaw from now on, unless Blizzard decides that it’s not what they intended and fix it.

It’s the natural law of raiding, isn’t it? We will always find the quickest way down, like a creek of melt water will use every shortcut it can find as it flows down the mountainside. Why complicate it if you don’t have to?

And yet I couldn’t help feeling a little bit cheated on my raid experience. Just a tiny little, but still. My dance class suddenly turned into a session at the boxing club. All I was supposed to do was to stand there on the same spot and punch that bag the hardest I could, over and over again. It was like facing one of the training dummies in IF, with the difference that this one carried epic loot.

Admittedly, sometimes a tank’n’spank fight can be exactly what you need. I remember nights of slow progression, when we’ve been wiping for hours on some complicated ballet-style boss. Finishing such a raid beating up one of the dummy bosses in VoA can be a bit of a relief. Punching a boss really hard and you might get back to your senses.

I don’t say that tank’n’spank is The Evil and should be exterminated from the game. But given the choice between the two extremes, I’d vote for ballet bosses any day.

For me raiding is more about learning the dance than hitting a punch-bag.

Overcomplicated fights?
Some players think differently about this though. Keen over at Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog for instance had a wipe night in Bastion of Twilight, facing the three random dragons with intricate combinations of buffs and debuffs. Keen calls it “overcomplicated” and doesn’t hesitate on calling out Blizzard:

“When the whole raid has to orchestrate a ballet in order to not wipe in 10 seconds it crosses the line”.

According to Keen, more complex doesn’t mean more fun and he asks Blizzard to stop what he calls “the insanity”. He doesn’t make unreasonable claims, suggesting that bosses should be designed like Patchwerk. But he definitely wants them to be simpler than most encounters I’ve seen so far in Cataclysm. According to Keen, Gunship and Saurfang in ICC were examples of good fights, where there’s enough going on to make them interesting, while they’re still simple enough for you to be able to “just enjoy the content”.

I must say that I disagree with this praise, especially when it comes to Gunship. Sure, I bet Blizzard had the very best intentions as they designed that fight: they wanted to create something new and refreshing, something different from the old fire spitting dragon concept. And of course I loved the rocket jumping, is there anyone who didn’t? I hope they’ll bring them back into game and reuse it at some point, if nothing else in a quest or a five-man dungeon. Jumping makes me giddy.

But aside from that, Gunship was more than anything else annoyingly slow, something you did just to get your “free loot of the week”. The lack of challenge always left me with a hollow feeling and a bad taste in the mouth. Did I really deserve those epics? Maybe I did, but not as a reward for making an effort, but rather as a compensation for the horrendous lag we had to endure doing it. A bad night the fight could easily stretch out to 15 frustrated and painful minutes – or even more.

What about the other example, Saurfang? Well, he wasn’t bad. The mechanics were straight forward enough, but still quite challenging initially and required good execution. However, since it was very much gear depending, it became rather trivial as we geared up and the ICC buff decreased.

I wouldn’t say that Saurfang was what I consider a perfect boss fight. I want bosses to be a little more complicated than that, more steps to learn and if possible several phases. Think Yogg-Saron. Think Lich King. Were they complicated? Absolutely! It took me ages to learn them. But they were good ballets.

A nightmare dancer
This doesn't mean that I'm a perticularly good dancer myself. I won’t lie to you; if you met me in WoW you’d probably consider me a bit of a nightmare partner at first. I would step on your toes; I would mix up left and right and would bump into other couples, making you and everyone else embarrassed.

However, if you wouldn’t run away from me yelling, you’d see that I would improve over time. Eventually I would see the pattern, sense the rhythm and hear the music. My feet would move by themselves, without me having to yell commands at them “left foot, move one step forward – press button – engage”. And to me, the magic of raiding comes in those moments, when everything suddenly clicks. Ballet bosses have it. Punch-bag bosses don’t.

Magmaw turned from a ballet partner into a punch-box yesterday. But there are still many other bosses in Cataclysm who require me to learn how to dance, so I don’t think I have anything to worry about.

Enough of rambling - I think it’s about time that I wrap up this post. It’s Friday night at the inn, the dance floor will open soon and we serve some pretty good punch in the bar. There’s something for everyone, just like in the game. So go ahead and enjoy!

Cheers!

25 man raiding – how long can we defy the law of gravity?

Back in April I asked if anyone will bother to do run 25 man raids in Cataclysm, considering the announced changes with shared lockouts and loot in 10 mans becoming the same as the 25 man loot.

As someone who loves 25 man raiding, I was concerned, even though I also could understand why the 10 man raiding guilds welcomed the changes and thought it was about time. The gain of someone is the loss of someone else.

Here we are now, one month - soon to be two, into Cataclysm. How did it go? Has the world changed or were my worries unfounded? Is it business as usual?

Hitting hard
Well, I suppose that it’s still a little bit too early in Cataclysm to make the definite call. People have only been at max level for a month. Players who aren’t on the bleeding edge, but still plan to raid in Cataclysm, are still in the process of gearing up in heroics. And the post-Cataclysmic guild landscape on each server isn’t set in stone yet; it’s a process in progress. We’re only seeing the first tier of several and each one might have an impact on the social structure and how people choose to raid.

So there are a lot of reservations and maybes in this post, in the usual Larísa manner.

However, if I’m putting up my finger in the air to feel where the wind is going, I would say that Cataclysm has hit the 25 man raiding pretty hard.

I can only speak about what I see on my server, but where there used to be at least 15-20 guilds on the alliance side that did 25 man raids back in the days, there are just a handful who do them in Cataclysm, so far.

If you look at the recruitment ads on the forums, there are plenty of guilds who claim that they’ve got plans on 25 man raids. However, when you look a little closer at their raid progression, it turns out that most of their kills, if not all, are from 10 man raids.

Not everyone will agree with me. I read a post by Gavendo at Rapid Fire, who argued that the hardcore guilds such as Paragon still are rocking it in the 25 mans. He also talks about why 10 mans are harder than 25 mans, since there among other things is less room for individual mistakes. So according to Gav we were wrong to worry about the future of 25 man raiding.

And sure, I’m certain that the top class guilds of the world are doing just fine. But the world I live in is different. What we currently experience is a distinct lack of people who want to do 25 man raiding. Recruiting is harder than ever been before. For all the efforts we’ve made, we don’t get many applications, and I find it hard to believe that it would be because it’s not as if we’re not an attractive guild. We’re one of the oldest, most reliable and well organized guilds on the server if I’d dare say so, with an infrastructure that works and a solid record of progression in the past. If we can’t recruit, it’s not just because we’re not good enough. It’s something else going on.

Was it only about the loot?
Last spring we had quite an intense debate going on in the blogosphere about 10 vs 25 man raiding. There was a lot of talk about the loot aspect, where 25 mans always had been at advantage and things now would be more or less equal (although with a little more points awarded to 25 man raids.) Many argued that if loot was all that kept people doing 25 mans and that players really didn’t enjoy it for its own sake, then it was just as good if it disappeared.

And I’m sad to say it, but it seems as if this is what we see happening now. With the promise of better loot to show off in the cities gone, the gravitation towards smaller, easier-to-handle, more tightly knit raiding formats is turning out to be strong, maybe too strong.

Our guild is still determined to defy this gravitation. Loot or not, we think that 25 man raiding has a certain “something” that 10 man raiding lacks. Not that there’s anything bad about 10 man raiding. I enjoy the smaller format immensely too, with the intimacy and cosiness that a tighter team brings. However, it’s a different creature and it can’t really replace the experience of having a 25 man team climb a learning curve, click and pull it together.

But unfortunately, people like me seem to be a dying breed and the question is for how long we can keep doing this. And how much worries and stress can our officers put up with before it’s wearing them down?

History repeating itself?
The other night our officers set a date. If we can’t fill our vacancies before March 1, so we’re sure that we can pull off every raid and progress as planned, we will no more be a 25 man guild, but a 10 man guild spotting only one team, and the roster will be cut down accordingly.

No one wants it to happen and everyone’s prepared to do whatever they can to help out recruiting. Hopefully Adrenaline won’t become one of the victims of the 25 man raiding death of Cataclysm. But there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed.

If you forget about Paragon and their buddies, I think it’s a tough time for many 25 man guilds in Cataclysm. I was never around for the 40 man raiding in vanilla, but I’ve understood that the transformation for TBC, when they were removed from the game, was painful to say the least. While we still have 25 man raids in the game, I can’t help wondering if what we see now is the beginning of a repetition of the past.

And the next question that comes to mind is of course: how could Blizzard possibly motivate keeping making content for 25 man raids in the next expansion, if it’s just a small minority of the players who bother to do it? It sure carries a symbolic value, but it also pulls development resources, and the question is how much they can allow it to cost.

Again: it probably is too early to judge out the 25 mans completely. This is not my “The End is Near” post. Not quite yet.

But the situation is indeed worrying for all of us who love to raid in 25 mans, but wouldn’t qualify to do it in Paragon.

A view from the bottom of the learning curve

Two weeks away from WoW was all it took for me to tumble down all the way down the learning curve back to the sewer level, where I started four years ago.

This was obvious as I logged in last weekend after my holiday absence.

I stared in disbelief at the screen, getting more and more nauseous as the camera nervously flipped up and down. You were supposed to control this thing with your mouse, weren’t you?
Was something broken or was this how it worked? How was I supposed to move my toon? Had I ever even played this game at all?

So this was my character, Larísa. A mage apparently. Level 85, it said, whatever that could mean.

Catching up
Slowly I recalled what this was about. Oh yes. There had been this expansion coming right before my holidays. In the middle of packing and other preparations I had managed to press her up to end game level, but not much more than that.

And now I was back and within 72 hours our first 25 man raid was scheduled, and I needed not only to remember how to play WoW, but also to make Larísa raid ready. It wasn’t anyone else who had required me to be prepared to go in such a short time, but I wanted to. This would be the first 25 man raid since June last year, and you all know what it’s like to get back to school after the summer vacation. There’s something special in the air in the first raid of the season. I just didn’t want to miss it.

But where to start, what to do? I was lost, so lost. And also increasingly ill, not just because of the view of the screen, but because all those germs we escaped in India seem to have been assembling in Sweden to have a sneaky assault on me as soon as I came home.

It was a challenging task, but somehow I did it. Don’t ask me how though, because those first few days are a bit hazy in my memory, an equal mix of chain running heroics and chain running to the bathroom.

Enough to say: when Adrenaline stood at the top of Bastion of Twilight Tuesday night, ready to enter for the first time, I was there.

I was dressed up in mostly heroic gear and even a couple of epics thanks to a very wealthy and equally generous guildie. I had the reputation enchants I needed and I had even managed to level first aid to max, which was a bit of a pain, especially since I levelled my tailoring profession at the same time. (A tip to anyone in the same predicament – if the cloth is dirty expensive at your server, take a treasure finding potion that gives you extra loot and find a spot for aoe-farming. Even with a price of 200 g a pot, it pays off and it saved my day.)

Climbing the learning curve
Gearing up is one thing though, learning how to play is something completely different. You can be as raid ready as you like gear wise, but this doesn’t help much if you’ve lost the feeling for how to play WoW.

This has made me think of learning curves. I’m admittedly not the quickest of climbers, and I tend to start out horribly low as we’re learning new encounters. Eventually I will always “get it”, but not quite as fast as the quickest learners in our guild.

But if I think about this first week back in WoW, I don’t feel as if I’m just at the bottom of a learning curve I need to climb. It’s more as if I’ve fallen down into a dark pit hole, losing skills I believed I already mastered.

When you think of learning how to ride a bicycle, it’s a one-time-only. Once you’ve learned how to do it, it’s there. You won’t forget how you do it, either you practice or not. You can mount a bicycle 10 years later and you’ll still not fall.

Playing WoW is different. Apparently you can de-climb the curve and de-learn things you knew, leaving you with no choice but to start over again.

A headless chicken
Partly I figure it’s the result of the class changes. Mages have gotten a couple of new spells that need to be squeezed, not only into my action bars, but also into my mindset, habits and muscle memory. It’s not done overnight.

Another reason for my struggles is probably that the difficulty level has stepped up considerably since Wrath. Some of the heroic bosses feel more like raid bosses than anything else. This is basically something I welcome; it means that also non-raiders can get access to interesting and challenging content. So it’s not as if I’m asking for nerfs, not at all.

But the fact remains, more than once have I felt like a headless chicken – in heroics as well as in raids - and I can’t help feeling a bit let down by myself.

Why I can’t pull my gameplay together and climb the learning curves as quick and easily as my fellow guildies? What am I doing here, still crawling around in the sewer?

However, this isn’t going to be a post that ends in misery, despair and self-bashing. I refuse to give up! I’ve climbed hills like this before and damned me if I won’t be able to climb it again!
As a reminder I’ve changed my title from Merrymaker to The Patient. Even if I geared up in two days I can’t expect myself to re-learn my class with all the changes there have been to it in the same amount of time. All I can do is to keep going, spend some times at the dummies, read up, ask fellow mages for advice and then and practice, practice, practice, Eventually I’ll get it.

The juggling experience
If I have any doubts about it, I’ll just think back at what I did in India. I spent most of my days lazily drifting in the ocean or reading novels on the beach. But I had brought one project with me: a set of juggling balls. I had decided to once for all learn how to juggle, which was quite ambitious for someone who lacks any sense for ball handling whatsoever.

The balls came with a leaflet, where you were told you could learn three-ball juggling in seven steps. “Anyone can learn this within one hour”, assured the writer. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. For me it took one and a half week of daily practice before I got it. But that’s not the point.

The point is that I didn’t give up. And I didn’t care about the quizzing glares I got from other beach visitors as I publicly displayed my shortcomings in tossing as little as one or two balls.

I just kept going. Not for long periods, just ten minutes per hour, day after day. Sometimes I fell back on the learning curve, starting to fail at step five, which I previously had mastered. In those moments I went back a few steps and practiced more until I had them working properly, before taking it back to where I was.

I didn’t bash on myself, I didn’t ask why it took me hours and hours of juggle training when the leaflet said it would take just 60 minutes. I just did it anyway, my way, enjoying the learning process as such, not attempting to take shortcuts as I climbed the curve in my own pace.

I left India with a moment forever burned into my memory: the feeling of successfully doing three-ball juggling as the sun dived into the ocean at the peaceful beach in Goa. Twenty times in a row I cast the balls without dropping them once. I don’t think anyone noticed. But I’ll never forget how I felt inside.

And whenever I’ll find the view in the sewers at the bottom of the learning curve just too depressing, whenever I’ll start doubting that I can be a true asset to our raid team rather than a burden, I will think about my juggling experience.

If I could learn how to juggle, I can learn how to do anything.

Even how to play my mage properly in Cataclysm.

Cheers!

Mist's Edge revisited

There was never any doubt about where I would take my farewell of this expansion. Mist's Edge, by the deserted coast of Darkshore, the same place where I spent the last night before Wrath arrived. Not once had I visited this beech since that moment. It's not a place where you go to seek out adventures or company. It's a place for solitude and contemplation.

I always knew where to go for this ceremony, but I wasn't certain on how to schedule it.

For the longest I imagined that I'd go there the night before the launch of Cataclysm, on December 6. This was until the blogosphere exploded with posts where bloggers took a fond farewell of the old world, soon to be washed away by the tides of time, and I realized that my timing was wrong. If I wanted to come back to the same spot where TBC ended to me and Wrath took off, I had better do it at this point, before the Shattering had shaken up the world forever. Who knew if this piece of coast will even exist tomorrow? Maybe it had been replaced by a murloc heaven or a new quest hub?

I for sure didn't have a clue, since I miraculously not only had stayed out of the beta, but also managed to stay fairly oblivious about the incoming changes. I had been told that Thousand Needles would be flooded and I thought that I might have caught a glimpse of some new holiday resort looking place, probably operated by goblins. Considering the cinematic trailer I assumed that Stormwind would change. But I certainly had no idea about the whereabouts of Darkshore.

One thing was clear: If I wanted to take a proper goodbye of Wrath at Mist's Edge, I'd better hurry up.

Steady progression
There is a saying that once is a trend and twice makes a tradition, and since rituals is something to hold onto in times of change, I kept it. First I lit a campfire. Then I used it to cook a Delicious Chocolate Cake with the ingredients I had brought, including some small eggs I just had farmed from the crazy owls in the camp nearby.

Two years! How quickly hadn't they passed? It felt like yesterday I was here, thinking back on my journey which had brought me from Zul Farrak to Black Temple. It had been quite a career, with a lot of bumps and jumps on the way, including server change and guild changes a couple of times.

Wrath had been different and way more stable. Adrenaline had steadily progressed through the tiers, week after week, boss after boss until we got our Lich King 25 man kill this spring. Sure, we had had some raiders joining us in Northrend and others leaving us on the way. But we were basically a well oiled raiding machine. While many guilds on our server succumbed, split up, stopped, departed, disbanded, we kept going on. We were never in the very top of the progression chart, but always right below it. Our raiding team for Cataclysm was already set, and it was pretty much the same team as had participated in the last official 25 man raids in June. A few of us have switched classes, but the people are the same.

The good stuff
But what about the game play? I asked myself if I had enjoyed Wrath. Was it a good expansion? Yes, definitely. There was so much good stuff when I thought about it. The landscape. I really had learned to love that continent at the other side of the sea. Outland had some nice places, especially Zangarmarsh, but in comparison to Northrend it didn't stand a chance. I loved the snow theme, the wilderness, the mountains and the Scandinavian influences. It all held nicely together and it felt appropriate for a fantasy themed game where you fight with swords and spells rather than lasers.

And then there was the questing - far superior to anything we had seen before in WoW. Phasing, vehicles, nicely put together questlines, even cinematics, you name it. Gone were the days of kill-ten-pigs! And they assembled them together so nicely in quest hubs and a logical order, which made levelling guides unnecessary.

Then I thought about the raiding. It hadn't gone free from criticism in the community. According to some it had been way too easy. A faceroll. And what about the hardmodes, did they really offer variety and options for the players, or was it just lazy design, giving Blizzard an excuse not to provide more content?

For my own part I actually thought the raiding in Wrath was pretty good. I can understand if Naxx had been a disappointment for those who had done it in the original, but for me those encounters were new and fun, even if they could have been slightly more challenging. They certainly didn't feel like a step up from Black Temple.

Ulduar on the other hand was brilliant, probably on par with Karazhan in quality, and with the teleport devices which made it a much more enjoyable experience than most of the 25 man instances in TBC. ToC... well what to say of ToC? The bosses weren't that bad, but it showed clearly that for all our complaints and grumbles about trash, it fills a purpose. To only fight boss after boss in the one and same room doesn't make a good raid experience.

Finally ICC. It was a good instance and I think the LK fight beats most other encounters in the game, but one year is way too long time to spend in the same place. We were burned out on it and yet we kept going, since there was no alternative.

If anything should be criticized about Wrath it was the fact that we only did one instance at a time until the next tier was released and we finally could move on. We never had much of a choice, if you don't count the single-bosses such as Malygos and Sartharion. The menu was too short to satisfy our appetite. But I think Blizzard has listened and learned their lesson, and Cataclysm will fix it. Amen.

Goodbye and hello
I took a bite of my chocolate cake and saw the fireworks light up the sky. I smiled to myself in anticipation.

Goodbye old world! Hello new world!

I can’t wait to see what awaits us on the other side of the reset.

I facepalmed before getting the mount of my dreams

Sunday night offered a mixed bag of WoW moments.

It started with a huge /facepalm, one of the worse “I’m an idiot”-realisations that I can remember from my years of playing. However it ended with a beautiful ride where the hero rides off into the sunset. All is well that ends well, isn’t that the saying?

Facepalm moment
But let’s start on the bad side.

Have you ever felt stupid in WoW? I mean REALLY stupid, angry with yourself for being incredibly thoughtless and careless and what-not? This was one of those occasions.

It was initiated by a spontaneous application from a mage, posted on our forums, as all apps are. I had a look at his Armory profile and was a little bit concerned with one of his choices of glyphs. It wasn’t the standard one which EJ recommended, at lest last time I checked them out. But I wanted to be sure, so I went to my own profile to have a look at my glyphs. And that’s when I got the shock.

I was specked arcane, but my main glyphs were intended for a frost spec! No kidding. Where I expected to find Arcane Blast and Arcane Missils, I stared in disbelief at improvements of Frostbolt and my non-existent Water Element!

I don’t want to think about for how long this has been the case. It’s for long, that’s for sure. I remember experimenting a bit with a second arcane spec, which replaced a frost offspec that I put up with the intention to see if I was capable of aoe-farming (which never came any further than to an idea). I can clearly see why and when the mix-up happened.

Not having your main nukes glyphed is a massive downer, and I feel really horrible about it. Our guild is doing hardmodes, for crying out loud! We’re bringing pots and flasks and buff food, squeezing out every little inch of dps we can. And I make a major error like this? It’s on par – or worse – than not using the maximum rank of a spell.

However you can’t change the past by dwelling on it, sulking and hitting yourself in the head. What’s done is done and what counts is that I’ve fixed it and that I’ve learned my lesson. From now on I’ll be paranoid about checking my glyphs.

Ulduar hardmodes
Let’s move on to the pleasant part of Sunday night, the sunset.

As always on Sunday nights we were gathering a 10-man raid to go and grab some more hardmodes and achievements in ICC, where our goal is to get mounts to everyone. We have quite a few already but since especially the ranged dps has to rotate a lot, some of us still are missing out a couple of achievements.

This Sunday night first seemed to be a disappointing no-go, since one of our tanks had technical issues and couldn’t log into the game. We were left with 9 raiders, no main-spec tank and one off-spec tank. Not be best setting for ICC hardmodes, not even with the 30 percent buff.

We didn’t let this stop us though. One of our dps:ers switched to an alt paladin, geared for tanking, and off we went to Ulduar, to do some hardmodes for the Rusted Proto-Drake.

First off was Firefighter. How much hadn’t I heard about that fight? Supposedly about the hardest one you could find in Wrath. And I’m sure it was back in time before everyone was overgeared. Now we got him down on second try, and it really isn’t much to brag about. But nevertheless it was really fun to run around in a sea of fire, looking out for dangers coming from all directions. “Don’t stand in fire” has definitely got a new meaning after seeing this fight.

When we were about to face General Vezax, our ordinary tank had managed to come online, so we did him quick enough with a full group before we moved on to Yogg-Saron.

Last time I faced him was back in January in a 25-man group, when we went back to finish the legendary mace. And before that it had been ages since I set my foot in Ulduar. So it felt slightly awkward to try to remember this fight, now with added difficulty, such as not having any access to sanity wells. It turned out to be as fun and chaotic as I remembered – or even better – in this spiced-up version. We didn’t have to struggle too badly though, and after a few tries I could see him go down.

Oh, the joy! Sure, we were way overgeared and I’m perfectly aware of that it doesn’t give me any bragging rights, at least not compared to what it would have one year ago. But nevertheless – it always gives me a nice feeling to tick of another check box, to reach completion of a goal. My Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievement was finished and a brand new proto-drake was awaiting me in the mail box.

I added it to my collection, headed for the flight point in Dalaran and took of into the night. The model was the same as my seasonal-achievements-mount, but the colour was more down-to-earth, rust instead of purple.

Isn’t it a bit funny by the way? A brand new dragon that comes full of rust. Reminds me a bit of the denim trousers that are sold worn out, complete with holes and everything.

I’m totally happy about it though, and it will surely become my mount by default. At least until I get the ICC one.

My next goal
What remains now for me now is to get the hardmodes in ICC I’m missing for the mount and to kill Algalon. Yeah, and Halion. Due to my vacation I haven’t made it into any of those raids yet. After that I think I’ll consider myself pretty much done with Wrath, ready to face whatever lies ahead of us in Cataclysm.

I know one thing for sure though. In Cataclysm I’ll see to that I always have the right glyphs.

Our legendaries won’t count

We had a little discussion on vent the other night, where we were asking ourselves if the deeds we’ve done in Adrenaline the last two years will be recorded as already completed guild achievements.

I reckoned – or at least hoped –that they would. After all, when the achievement system was introduced for individuals, we got a ton of achievements recorded. Admittedly the game didn’t remember everything we had done. I remember that it felt particularly weird to have to revisit Mechanar, which I farmed so excessively in TBC, just to get it documented that I actually had completed it. But a lot of it was there from the start.

So wouldn’t it be natural if long-time guilds would get credit for our glorious past? I thought it would, but apparently Blizzard thinks differently.

I’m quoting a blue post, referred by MMO-champion:

“Dark Phoenix Mount Reward
[…] First and foremost, they must be unlocked via a guild achievement. Let's just say, that for example, you need to complete the new guild achievement "We are Legendary" in order to unlock the Dark Phoenix. That achievement requires the guild to gain access to all 6 legendary weapons currently available in the game. (note that all guild achievements start on Cataclysm launch, so anything you have now will not matter, it must be done with your guild after launch)”

As with anything related to Cataclysm I suppose that this isn’t set in stone. Maybe it will change before launch. But he does sound worryingly certain about this thing. And it makes me rather disappointed.

So far my guild has managed to get two legendaries – the mace and the axe in Wrath. Oh, and yeah, one alt got an Illidan legendary as we ran a retro raid in BT, although I’m not sure if it was guilded or not, so it might be out of our hands. That warglaive didn’t take a ton of effort, but on the other hand, the mace and axe did. And all this work was for nothing?

I can’t help scratching my head seeing this. Are you serious? Really? I know that Blizzard has good reasons to try to make us go back and relive old content and take away some of the pressure from them to produce new. But isn’t this to push it a little bit too far?

Of course the situation could be that they haven’t got any choice. There might be technical limits that prevent them from tracking historical deeds of a guild. But it seems strange to me. If guild ranking sites can track guild progression automatically, why shouldn’t Blizzard be able to do the same?

We should be half way to “Legendary” as Cataclysm is launched, or at least a third, if there was any justice. As it stands now it appears rather unlikely that we’ll ever get it.

Shadowmourne: a welfare legendary or a feat of strength?

It’s the twilight of Wrath, and many players are gone fishing or at least playing other games. But there are still a few stubborn players around who refuse to give up. They call themselves Adrenaline.

We haven’t been able to fill a 25 man raid for ages. But whenever we've managed to assemble a group of decent size - about 20 people - sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on how many out-of-guild-game friends we've persuaded to join us for the night - we've headed back for ICC 25 man. We had some unfinished business there.

The final grind

It wasn't about loot - most of the stuff that drops there these days is sharded anyway. It wasn't about doing achievements or hardmodes – with a few exceptions they're out of reach with a severely decimated group.

No, this was grind and nothing else. A collective one. For weeks we have been grinding the missing shards for our first - and most likely only – Shadowmourne. And finally, this very night, our grumpy ret paladin could complete the weapon of his dreams, an axe to match his temper perfectly. When he reached the end of the questline that takes you to the weapon, I think the guild was just as happy as he was.

Grinding can has a certain charm, as Tamarind described in a beautiful post a little while ago. But eventually it starts to get at you. As we watched the little scene before the weapon finally was handed over, we let out a sigh of relief. Done. At last. The weapon was ours as much as our paladin's. Theoretically he could of course leave the guild, taking it with him. But in reality - it just won't happen, with less than that Adrenaline will stop raiding. Which I don't think we will anytime soon. As long as Adrenaline is around there will be a Shadowmourne in it.

I tried to find some statistics on exactly how common itis, but I failed. However I stumbled upon some forum threads, and from those you sould see that some players think that this weapon isn’t quite as shiny as other legendaries.

“The most welfare legendary ever”, wrote someone, arguing that it only takes gold to get the 25 saronites you need as a starter, and that the hardest part is to convince your guild to give the shards to you.

Well, he may say so and I suppose it depends on from where you’re coming. If you’re in a huge guild with multiple raid groups, which never fails to clear ICC every week, it's probably rather trivial than challenging. And if you're a dedicated pugger maybe you can get it fairly easy these days too, especially with the ICC buff at 30 percent. But to complete it within a small guild such as ours - that's huge.

It symbolizes endurance and resilience, the ability to survive and continue, even in rough times. It symbolizes that we stick to promises and commitments. We are in this for the longterm.

A legendary achievement

I don’t know how much this weapon actually will be used before it will be replaced for something else in Cataclysm. And I don’t care, because that's not the point.

This is actually one of the very few moments when I could wish for a guild hall where we could hang up this axe as a trophy on display, once it has served out as a weapon. (No, this doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my mind about player and guild houses. I can see that some players wish for it but I don’t think it’s important enough for Blizzard to drop everything else they’re doing, putting all their resources into that. It’s just a temporary wish, OK?)

We don’t yet know exactly what the guild achievements will look like in Cataclysm. At Blizzcon last year they showed a few examples, of which one was “We are legendary”. But for that achievement you were supposed to create not just one legendary, but TEN.

Ugh. That sounds like a long term project, to say the least. I thought we were pretty outstanding, just finishing our second one (we did the Ulduar mace previously). But again: we’re all coming from different places, facing different challenges.

For some players Shadowmourne was a welfare legendary, too easily acquired to deserve the label. Maybe they're right in their universe. But honestly - I don't care.

Because for Adrenaline it was nothing less than a feat of strength.

Cheers for Eräjorma! And cheers for us!

Loot on sale

This post comes with an image, for a change. In case you use a reader and can’t see it, I can tell you that it shows a chart with a drastically falling curve.

It’s not the latest subscriptions statistics from Blizzard (although I’m eagerly waiting for Gronthe’s analysis of Blizzard’s upcoming Q2 report).

No. This curve shows how the DKP price for the best-in-slot trinket Dislodged Foreign Object has developed over time in our guild.

The top score was 161 DKP in March. Tuesday night, time had finally come to me to lay my hands on it, after consequently bidding my max DKP for it every time it has dropped the last six months. I was the only bidder this time and got it for 15 DKP, which is our minimum.

I suppose you could call it a bargain. It was also the last major upgrade I can get from ICC normal modes (which is what we’re doing with only 20 people in the raid), so it felt like coming to a closure.

To be a realist, my character progression has more or less come to an end in Wrath. This was how good Larísa became in this expansion and I’m quite pleased to be honest, at least as far as it concerns gear.

When it comes to experiences, I’m still a little sad that I most likely never will come around to even try Mimron on hardmode or Algalon. But I’ll get over it. The gear though is fine. I bet the start in Cataclysm will be smooth and hopefully it will take a couple of levels before I offer this trinket to an NPC for a couple of gold coins after getting a better one as a quest reward.

The twilight phase of WotLK
It feels as if WotLK definitely is closing down now. The DKP prices are falling rapidly since most loot is sharded or goes to off-specs. And the same goes for AH of course, where you can follow the rapidly decreasing interest for saronites. Once we’ll get a set date for the launch of Cataclysm, the drop rate will increase.

Christina wrote in a very thoughtful comment on a post earlier this week about the overall feeling that WoW is in its twilight phase.

“Summer camp has ended. Or four years of college have come and gone and staying a few extra semesters can't extend the good times from freshmen or sophomore.”

She was referring to the game in a bigger sense of course, and it’s possible that she’s right. I’ll wait until Cataclysm though before I’ll come to a verdict. I’m still hopeful about becoming super-excited over WoW again.

But one thing is for sure – dusk has fallen over WotLK. The shadows are tall on the ground; the light is old and weakened. And there are sales going on in every corner, in the few shops that still are open – I have a feeling that many guilds have closed down for this expansion already.

It’s all about emotions
I was happy about my Dislodged Foreign Object. It’s a lovely trinket – I love the name of it as much as the stats. It’s been an object for my desire for a long time and now it’s mine.

But at the same time I can’t deny that the joy of getting it was a little bit cheapened. Getting it for 161 DKP in March after some crazy competitive bidding would have made my pulse go up. Getting it in July for 15 DKP because no one else wanted it doesn’t.

It's not about rationality. It's about emotions. I know someone who frowns at this kind of stuff. But to me the emotions constitute an essential part of the gaming experience - positive as well as negative. Happiness, disappointment, despair, excitement, love and hate. Take it away and the game loses a bit of its luster.

At this point in the expansion you can't really expect to get any huge emotional kick from loot that you basically don't need for your progress (looking at You, ICC buff) and which will be upgraded within a few months.

The loot is on sale. For a good reason.

Why the nerf to deaths in Cataclysm might be harmful

We’re right in the middle of another heated debate about the death penalties in MMOs. Is it good as it is in for instance WoW or would we like to see something harsher, a death that really means something?

Psychochild blogged about it the other day, and there’s a very good, intelligent and civilized discussion going on in the commentary section. Regardless of on which side we are (I’ve previously written about why I think the death penalties are fine as they are), there’s a general agreement on that a game with a bigger risk factor never will gain a huge audience, but remain a niche. Or as Tesh puts it:

“If you *do* make a pure hardcore risk game, don’t be surprised if the mainstream doesn’t like it and shower you with money. ;)”

Well, I suppose Blizzard likes the idea to be showered with gold. (Which gives me a an opportunity to quote Tobold’s wonderful one-liner: “is World of Warcraft dying? Not unless it suffocates under a pile of money.”)

So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that they’ve decided to pull this a bit further. They’re actually planning for a pretty huge nerf to the death penalty in Cataclysm, as long as you’re playing grouped up with your guildies. You can read about it in wow.com’s summary of the planned guild perks.

The new guild perks
Some of the features perks are “nice to have” but really not anything I bother that much about. Vendor discounts. Extra gold from fallen enemies. Who cares? I never notice what sums they drop in the first place.

But there are a few things that I think will affect raiding within the boundaries of a guild quite a bit:

“The Quick and the Dead: Increases health and mana gained when resurrected by a guild member by 50% and increases movement speed while dead by 100%. Does not function in combat or while in a Battleground or Arena.”

“Mass Resurrection: Brings all dead party and raid members back to life with 35 health and 35 mana. Cannot be cast when in combat. No cooldown.”

Wow. This is a nerf so huge that it more or less makes the Painful Corpse Run to a dark distant memory from the past.

I think we all have our pet peeves when it comes to those runs. In my case I have some special feelings for the path to Archimonde, which I did way too many times to be happy about it I’ve (even though we used to accompany it with Benny Hill music from time to time to cheer us up.) The way back to General Vezax is another non-favorite. The Decent to Insanity was totally cool the first time I saw it but it grew old quickly.

I bet that we’ll be we’ll be using anks, soulstones and bubbles in Cataclysm as much as we possibly can, in order to avoid corpse runs altogether. Mass resurrection, eat and mana up and you’re ready to go in an instant. If you can combine it with the 50 percent increase of mana and health when resurrected by a guild member, it will shorten the time loss after a wipe immensely.

And as if this wasn’t enough, they’re also adding “Reinforce”, which at Rank 2 means that your items will take 10 percent less durability loss when you die. This is just gold though. The nerf to the time sinks are way more important.

Warlock complaints
If you look at the reactions at WoW.com, most players seem to be jumping for joy. The only ones who are disgruntled are the warlocks, due to another guild perk:

“Have Group, Will Travel: Summons all raid or party members to the caster's current location. 2 hour cooldown.”

OK, I can understand that locks will feel less “unique” and “needed” just like mages did when they put up free portals in Shattrath and Dalaran. But honestly – exactly how much “fun” is it to make summoning portals before a raid? If that is the major point of bringing a warlock to the raid, I think the class is in deep trouble.

Effects on raiding guilds
However, that was a sidetrack, back to the issue about the death penalties. What will it mean to raiding guilds?

Well one thing is that there will definitely be room for more tries during progression raid nights when you expect a lot of wiping. We can expect more of a trial- and error-approach to new content, especially since the information we have so far is that they’re not planning to have a lot of limited attempts in Cataclysm, apart from in really rare cases, “Algalon-style”.

No wonder that this sounds tasty. We’ll spend more time doing the fun stuff, which means fighting the bosses, experiencing the fights. And less time travelling the world as a ghost or sitting on our asses drinking and eating. More fun, less boring. Could there possibly be anything bad about that?

I’m not sure. Maybe. Because while I don’t advocate harsher death penalties, I’m not so sure I want them less strict than they are either. Of course I’ll be happy about it initially. But is it good for the game in the long run? Players don’t always know what is a good design decision when they ask for features, as pointed out by Richard Bartle six years ago.

One effect to consider is that there will be a lot less at stake every time you try to down a raid boss. This will decrease the pressure on the individuals to perform, especially in the kind of fights where one mistake can wipe-it-all (for instance Teron Gorefiend, Blood Queen, Lich King). If you’re the one blows it, you’re not cause half as much trouble as you’re doing now. This can be nice and forgiving for a new player, but it might also affect our motivation to stay focused, alert, trying to bring our best gameplay and perform.

It will probably also decrease the excitement and the adrenaline rushes you experience in a raid. If you can squeeze in 40 tries instead of 20 in a wipe night, will you really put in your heart to every try as you do now?

However painful the corpse runs have been, I think they also give a common experience that works as a sort of glue for a stable raid group. There’s nothing that brings a group together as much as going through hardships. And of course it also increases the sweetness of the victory when you finally nail the encounter. Would our Archimonde kill have been quite as fantastic if we had endured 100 mass resurrections instead of 100 corpse runs?

To sum it up: as much as I’m looking forward to this as a raider, I’m a little bit worried that it might dilute the game experience.

Pugging less attractive
A final thought: I wonder how quickly we’ll get used to the new nifty guild treats, taking them for granted. Quite quickly I’d dare say. I think we’ll feel less than enthusiastic at the thought of pugging a raid, where you’re not only more likely to wipe, but also will have much worse consequences when you do so.

They may have trashed the talent system, but I think the planned guild perks definitely will be motivation enough to bring back the game to a state where most of the raiding is done within a guild and not in a PUG. Like it used to be back in time. Not that I complain though. I’m a guilded player myself and have no plans to change that.

But now time has come to put an end to the last post for this week and call for a toast. I’m going to attend a pop festival and no Ruby Sanctum in the world can complete with that. I hope you’ll get an enjoyable weekend too.

Cheers all!

Let´s foster a new generation of raiders

Anna at Too Many Annas had a great post the other day, where she discussed how we should approach the new raiders that will enter Azeroth for the first time with the arrival of Cataclysm. How will we work with them? Are we prepared to follow the DBAD-rule (Don’t Be a Dick)?

She gives examples from her own raiding career – negative as well as positive.

As a newbie hunter she was almost scared away from raiding for ever due to the utterly dickish behaviour from a fellow hunter – who wasn’t even an officer and had very little reason to criticize or bully her, which was what he actually was doing. His constant picking on her can hardly have resulted in any improvement in her performance whatsoever.

Later on when she did her less-than-successful debut as a resto shaman, her raid leader gave her honest and constructive feedback and quickly managed to put her on the right track. Within a week she was on par with any other healer in the raid.

Two different approaches. Two different results.

My personal WoW teachers
When I look back at my soon to be three years of raiding in WoW – from my first wipes on the trash before Attuman to killing LK 25, I can see that I’ve been lucky enough to see very few – if any at all of the dick types. On the other hand I’ve been blessed, running into some absolutely fantastic veteran players who gently and generously have given me guidance on how to improve my game play and understand what raiding is all about.

I remember for instance one guy who promptly took me to Dr Boom when I just had joined his guild. (Boom was the dummie like mob in Netherstorm we used before everyone became too lazy to ever take a step out of the major cities. In case anyone has forgotten). Within the course of 30 minutes he had revolutionized my rotations.

Or that raid leader who refused to let the warlocks summon me up when I had fell down into the waters of SSC through the noob trap (a glitch that everyone who’s been around for a while knows about and can avoid). I was completely lost down there, but he refused to let the warlocks summon me up. Instead he jumped down and showed me the way, knowing that I’d never ever again get allow myself to get lost down there. I returned the favour with a loving blog post.

And then there was this game friend of mine who was a mentor, a personal trainer for me for years, until he eventually got bored and left the game. He went through the weblogs with me and didn’t hesitate to call my attention to things that were bad. He helped me to grasp the BT tactics as we watched some videos together and he commented on them over vent.

Not to speak of my missed ex guild leader who built me a brand new UI after realizing how horribly clotted and dysfunctional my current one was and how hard it would be for me to figure out a better one on my own.

To all of you who took me under your wings: I can never ever pay you back, only give you my thanks, coming straight from my heart.

Becoming experienced
Coming from this, I’ve always thought that I would like to pay it forward, help out a clueless, newbie Larísa-type of player I may encounter in the future.

My biggest problem was that I didn’t really see what knowledge I had that was worth sharing. I pictured myself as something of an Eternal Noob, doomed to be a Tourist in Azeroth, unable to grow up and become a Real Raider.

But maybe I am one after all? In her post, Anna gives a few examples of the kind of knowledge and experience that you gather and incorporate with yourself as you raid, without taking much notice about it:

“There are skills you learn, certainly, and boss fights. But you also learn group coordination, what to expect when you show up for a raid, how things usually work, what it’s like to wipe on a new boss for hours or weeks. You learn how to read patch notes, look up strategies, and learn to be effective at your class. You pick up raiding jargon (like tank, crowd control, adds, line of sight, DKP) as well as picking up on little jokes that later become Raid Tropes to refer back to and laugh about. Some jokes become universal – The Safety Dance, Don’t stand in fire, Merely a setback, IN THE MOUNTAINS, 50 DKP Minus, Many Whelps Handle It, Leroy Jenkin. […] Every one of those little jokes, bits of jargon, raiding skills and coordination skills get filed away in your brain under “Raids”, and you become an experienced raider.”

All the stuff she talks about is so very familiar to me – everything except “In the mountains”, which doesn’t tell me anything. (Explain, anyone?)

Yeah. I suppose I’ve been around a while. According to the statistics in Armory, my main has entered 294 25-man raids and 118 10-mans. I’m not sure if this includes the raids we did before the statistics page was launched. Regardless of which – it adds up.

Anna says:

“Everyone who runs raids right now in Wrath will become an “old” player – we’ll be the voices of experience, even if we don’t feel qualified.”

OK, Anna. I hear you. As long as I've been playing WoW, I’ve been the newest kid on the block. I’ve rarely been in the position to guide anyone but myself: as far as I can recall it only happened once over all those years. But if I ever get the opportunity to be the teacher and the guide again, I promise I’ll grab it.

Reasons to bother
Why you may ask? Why should you bother? Why should you make the effort to share your experiences rather than being a dick? It might take your time and energy and effort after all.

Well for me it’s simple. You get a better feeling in your stomach. It feels better to be nice than to be a dick. There are few experiences that beat the one to see someone else grow, improve and succeed, as a result of your guidance. That goes for WoW as well as for real life. Proud mentor is proud. As simple as that.

Another reason is very egotistical: I want there to be good raiders around, people that I want to play with. Older players drop off eventually and if we want decent replacements we have to work for it. They don’t spawn ready-to-raid. They come as unwritten cards, and we have the opportunity to influence what kind of players they’ll become. We have every reason in the world to grab it.

It’s time to foster a new generation of raiders.

From purples to blues - will a bit of dye bring back the epic feeling?

Blizzard are planning to restore the epic feeling to epic items in Cataclysm, according to a blue blue answer from Ancilorn in a forum thread .

The original poster did a simple search at Wowhead and came up with some numbers that speak for themselves:

Epic: 7843 items found
Rare: 5307 items found
Uncommon: 7503 items found

Ahem. Epic items are more common than greens? The writer says that he doesn't understand how to translate the word "epic" anymore , and it's hard not to agree with him.

And to my surprise, that's exactly what the Blizzard (ex) community manager Ancilorn does:

"Well, hopefully this comes as good news. We're actually working on restoring the epic feeling to epic items in Cataclysm. Epic loot should be epic, and something to be very proud of. Our plan is to try and get the Heroic -> Blue Gear and Raid -> Purple Gear balance back."

Wryxian shares a little bit more of their current thoughts on this later in the thread:

"we have the data on who's getting epics from raids and who's getting them purely from heroics for instance and we're happy with our new plans for balancing the distribution of epic gear in Cataclysm and with the number of people that will be affected by this change.

Of course, plans are never set in stone and we're not at this time announcing details concerning other routes to procure epics -- if indeed there even are any other methods of obtaining them, but it is currently our intention that raids will be the main source of the purple gear that seemed so much more epic in the original iteration of the game especially."

Apparently it's not just the player base that thinks that the epic inflation has gone too far in Wrath. Blizzard agrees that they have a problem.

You see the more epics that are handed out to the players, the less enjoyment and thrill does each one give us. Any parent could have told them this. There comes a certain breaking point at Christmas Day when the child doesn't get excited and happy about additional gifts. It leaves them indifferent or even worse - cranky and nauseous since it's gotten out of their hands.

They don't want to give us any details yet, saying: " what comparisons can be made between the quality of emblem gear and that which is obtained in raids are details that we are not quite ready to reveal. "

If we should speculate a little bit on this though, it sounds very possible to me that they're about to do a philosophy change when it comes to the badge gear equivalence in Cataclysm so that you don't get purples any more, just shiny, rare and powerful blues. And maybe, just maybe, they will ration the epics in 5-man instances as well, handing them out more rarely - if at all.

Will it work?
So what should you make of this change? Do I think it's a good idea? Yes, I think it is!

I know this sounds a bit silly, but I actually believe that just a simple color change would be enough to achieve what they want to. It wouldn't take that much superior stats; as a matter of fact they probably could be the same. A different color and a lower prevalence of the items could be all that it would take to bring back a bit of the exclusiveness, the epic feeling of the epics.

If you got your tier piece by blood, sweat and tears, spending hours wiping and learning an encounter, as opposed to pugging hundreds of faceroll 5-man instances, you want it to show - even if just by cosmetics. It won't bother those raiders that much if someone grabs their tier gear a few months later - as long as you can spot some sort of difference - even if only cosmetic. You can call it childish as much as you want to, but a little bit of "bragging rights" is - if not the core of the game - at least a part of the fun for many players.

I don't think Blizzard has much of a choice to be honest. Getting major upgrades - after going through certain hardships and frustrations -is one of the things that makes your heart leap up and gives you a thrill in game. Without it, the game feels more and more blend - not only to the bleeding edge raiders, but to everyone. They need to bring back this excitement somehow. An alternative could have been to introduce yet another "out-of-space-magnificent-godlike" item level, labeled "argent", "golden" or whatever, degrading the legendaries to a new sort of purples. But I don't think they or anyone else really wanted that.

Increase the diversity
Will someone complain about the change? Probably - yes. You can't please everyone. There will be some players who feel "entitled" to purples who will be annoyed if they can't get them like they used to do in Wrath. I can already hear the complains that they'll be "forced" into raiding to get their epic set.

But mind you, just because they'll become more rare, it doesn't mean that non-raiders will be deprived of any possibility of character progression. And it won't lock out late-comers from the chance to catch up on gear by grinding instances and crafting. The color might change, but I'm certain Blizzard will stick to the philosophy that good gear should be obtainable in many different ways.

I think it's good because it will increase the diversity among the characters - especially if they'll bother about making more differently looking gear while they're at it. I think the game turns boring when everyone looks more or less exactly the same.

And hopefully it won't take too much long before we get used to it and start to see blue gear as what it's supposed to be - really good gear to strive for and be pride about, gear that is absolutely viable for most raiding purposes if you just bother to look at the stats and not just at the color.

Raiding in blues. Maybe that's what we'll all be doing in Cataclysm? I really hope so.

Friday Emotions – and a teaser about my LOTRO experiences

I’ll warn you right away; I’m in an emo mood as I start writing this Friday night musings post. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do, to be honest.

A clash with a reader
The other day I clashed into one of my readers in a discussion in the comment section, which somehow touched on the good old elitist-casual tension.

Normally I can handle criticism pretty well, (or at least I tell myself so). Like Gevlon I keep it at a healthy distance from me, thinking “they can’t hurt me. It’s just pixels, words.” But this discussion for some reason went out of my hands. Which actually was a good thing, as things turned out.

What happened was that we decided to take our little conversation away from the public eye. We sort of sat down at a table of our own where no one could hear us, talking through emails rather than through comments. And you know what? We connected in a way that I don’t think would have been possible without that initial clash. Everything is fine on both sides I’d dare say. But I still feel a bit shaken up after the episode. Emo.

A letter from Gevlon
And here’s another story from the week. The other night I created a little mage alt and had her join Gevlon’s latest experiment guild. I don’t know if I’ll ever run a raid with her, considering that my available time is so limited. However I thought it could be fun to at least have a look at the guild from the inside while levelling her. I’d like to see with my own eyes how the chat might look in this guild where normal social behaviour such as saying “hi”, “bye” and “gz” is frowned upon, a guild full of goblin minded people.

Today I got a concerned letter from Gevlon, asking me if it was the real Larísa and not an impersonator who had joined the guild. He just wanted to make sure, which I can fully understand since he’s been a victim of such pranks himself. I assured him that I was the “real” one indeed. And somehow his question touched me. It made it so obvious that he despite his image actually cares about other things in the world than just gold.

The state of the guild
A third part of my emo state of mind is caused by the condition of our guild. I think we’re still in the post-shock phase of our leaders stepping down. There are so few of us left – 26 active raiders as it is now – that we realistically only rarely will be able to put together a 25 man group. Yesterday we finally could make one for the first time in quite a while. We were a few players short, but still managed to oneshot 10 bosses in 2.5 hours, which isn’t bad, not even with the buff. It was just so sweet to be together again, almost all of us, and the fact that we don’t know how long it will be until next time this happens only added to the sweetness of it.

It’s a rough time for all raiding guilds, but I think everyone who is left with us has a strong wish that we’ll get through this, survive, and make a glorious return in Cataclysm. Thinking about it makes me a bit emo though.

My first dip into LOTRO
As some readers have noticed, I downloaded LOTRO a week ago and signed up for a 14 day free trial. The reactions to this have been fantastic, yet another reason to get a little bit emo. All those concerns! All those comments! I’ve even got several personal letters, encouraging me to try this, suggesting servers and offering help. Thank you all! It really touched me.

Some readers who also are LOTRO fans are a bit worried about what I’ll eventually write about my experiences. Barrista wrote:

“As for your lotro post, I hope it is truly fair, although I don't expect it to be. WoW was my first MMO, but I tend to evaluate things for what they are. I did a bit of "oh blizz does this better", but to do a true evaluation I realized I had to take it as it was. Plus, this is a WoW blog.”

Well, I suppose that my impressions inevitably will be coloured by my WoW glasses. It’s impossible to disregard of them. WoW is the only game I’ve played and see all the time how it partly helps me, partly plays me tricks. I don’t know for instance how many times I’ve tried to open my bags, pressing “B”, getting annoyed when nothing happens.

I don’t think I’m the right person to write a proper full size review of this game, even if I had played it for more than 14 days. I’m just not qualified. But I will write a post in the area of “What a WoW player first will notice when she tries out LOTRO”. I think it might have some sort of interest to all of you who consider to check it out once it goes free.

I’m not ready to do it quite yet though. I need to spend a few more hours in the Shire to make up my mind.

But I can tell you one thing already: It’s hard to wind down from the pace in WoW and I have to struggle a bit with myself to do it. It’s as if you’ve been running around for a long time with tense shoulders and now are trying to relax, letting them down. They’re like stuck. I have to assure myself that it’s OK to run around delivering hot pies and solving riddles, picking the eggs in the right order. I do enjoy this, if I only can allow myself to relax and smell the flowers, watch the clouds (which are incredibly well done and beautiful by the way.)

One more thing: I love to kill mobs by music. It looks so silly that I crack up every single time. And it seems as if I can vary it; If I grow tired of my harp I can grab my flute! I don’t know if there’s any difference in how well they do their job. And I don’t care! Because I’m not planning to max out anything here except for my level of entertainment.

Who can be emo and melancholic when there’s a merry little hobbit is jumping around, playing a ballad? I can’t. So let’s cheer up a bit!

I hope you’ll all get a wonderful weekend, wherever you choose to spend it – in Azeroth, the Shire or maybe out in the real world.

Cheers!

What Matters to me in Cataclysm

So we won't see the Path of the Titan thing in Cataclysm, at least not at launch. And to be honest I'm not raging or shredding any tears over it.

Blizzard failed to explain the idea to me in the first place, and besides I think that the EJ thinkers would have thought out the Best Path for raiders anyway. So much for creating more individuality!

The second piece of major WoW news this weekend was that guilds won't get any talent points to set at their own will. They'll have to profile themselves in other ways, as they always have.

I'm not particularly disappointed about either piece of news and you definitely won't hear any the-sky-is-falling cries from your innkeeper. Those features were more in the category "nice to have" than absolutely necessary, and the lack or delay of them certainly what settles if I'll keep playing WoW in Cataclysm.

3 000 quests
There was also another piece of news that was released, something I suppose they expected the community to get happy about, but which leaves me completely indifferent. I'm thinking about the fact that Blizzard are about to add some 3 000 quests into the game.

I'm just telling you: I haven't asked for 3 000 quests. Being a mainhugger rather than an altoholic, I would probably be just fine with the few hundred that could take Larísa from 80 to 85. Yeah, like everyone else I quest if I get XP or valuable reputation. But when I don't get that, I find it pretty hard to motivate myself to quest a lot and an abundance of quests won't make me resubscribe.

I don't deny that there are many quests and questlines in Wrath were way cooler and more enjoyable than the vanilla quests. Who didn't love the battle for Undercity? Nevertheless - in my world questing is more or less a necessary evil. I don't think I've done even half of the quests that came with Wrath.

But if thousands of quests isn't a selling point to me - what is?

Why I'm still playing
The other day Ixobelle asked me a disturbing question. He is a bit bored with WoW himself and can't see any reason to stick around. So he asked me why I'm still playing.

Now, to be fair I'm not at all playing as much as I used to either. Things are really slow in the game right now and if you don't enjoy questing and other solo playing there frankly aren't many things to do, at least nothing that grabs my interest.

Last week I did some silly achievements, including leveling Larísa's unarmed skill to 400. But then I suddenly woke up from my coma-like state of mind, asking myself my life wasn't more precious to me than I would spend hours and hours on such a boring and pointless grind. I decided it was. No more junk play like that for me. Then it's better to just turn of the computer and get a life.

But yeah Ixobelle, as opposed to you, I'm still playing, still logging in a couple of times a week to spend a couple of hours online.

Take last night for instance, when we used the entire evening wiping on Sindragosa 10 man heroic. We learned to master the new twists pretty well, but didn't get any further than 18 percent. That dance has to be performed with perfection, the error margin was very slim and we weren't quite there yet. Next time. Maybe.

But even if we didn't down her, this was an entirely enjoyable night. And here's the answer to your question Ixo. It's because of nights like our Sindragosa wiping that I still play WoW, in a time when the between-expansion apathy seems to be all-time high.

I'm fine as long as I'm getting challenging raids as a member of a good team with people I know and enjoy playing with. And this spills over to my expectations for Cataclysm.

What I want in Cataclysm
My wish list for the expansion includes two things.

1. I need to have some people to play with. Not just "any" people, but good people, such as the ones in my guild. They're the real epics of this game and they'll lose interest in it and leave, I won't have many incentives to stay around either. I refuse to pug my way through WoW. To me the heart and soul of WoW is to build a great team to progress with. So Blizzard: please make sure to keep the players I care about happy. This includes my guildies as well as my blogging buddies. If everyone else will head for the Grey Havens, I'll go as well.

2. I want some good raiding. The size isn't such a big deal - I like 25 mans best, but I'll be fine to settle with 10 mans if we have to. What matters is that they put in some effort as they make the instances. Think Ulduar as opposed to the lazy ToC design. I also want them to make a good call on the difficulty level. I'd like to see something that will be a challenging but still possible-to-beat content for the top 10 percent of the guilds.

And basically that's it.

Good raid instances and a good guild. That's what I care about in Cataclysm, rather than about guild talents and Path of the Titan.

Am I asking for too much? I hope not. But the future will tell.