It's been a while, so where's my nostalgia?

Raise your hand if you're nostalgic for vanilla leveling.  Keep it up and if you're nostalgic for BC leveling, raise it (you don't have to raise both).  Same for LK level.  Okay, who doesn't have their hands up?  Duck down and hide if you started in Cataclysm.  In my imagination, in which I get to make this stuff up (I love punditry), everyone has their hands up.  Okay Cataclysm people, you can stand up now.  Everyone hands down.  Now, hands up for Cataclysm leveling nostalgia?

Anyone?

No?

Okay.

I started in vanilla, played pretty much non-stop through the start of Cataclysm.  Looking back, and playing through again, I had fun going through the content again.  I'd even look forward to it.  This wasn't a "I want to get out of the current content", but looking ahead to what was coming.  As Azeroth wrapped up and I ran BRD, I still looked forward to Hellfire Peninsula and Nagrand.  In Nagrand I looked forward to Grizzly Hills and Storm Peaks (I'm cherry-picking my favorites).  But now that my paladin is on the verge of Grizzly Hills, I am thinking ahead to Cataclysm and neither Mount Hyjal nor Vash'jir hold much appeal to me.  Twilight Highlands sounds nice, but that's not for a while, particularly given the 90% experience nerf for previous expansions, so no sticking around Icecrown a bit longer.

I don't know why Cataclysm has not created this sense of nostalgia or fondness for what is to come.  I could try to blame it on my lack of love for the Cataclysm end-game with its heavy emphasis on randoms and dailies.  But that was the case in LK too and I look forward to the LK zones.  Perhaps it is the limited selection, with Cataclysm adding only 5 zones while Northrend contains 8 (I'm not counting Crystalsong or Wintergrasp).  This means less repetition.  Outland has 7 zones, so perhaps it fits.  But LK and Cata both have a pair of starting zones while Outland has only 1, so there doesn't seem to be much of a link between choice of starting area and nostalgia.

Maybe it's the linear nature of the Cataclysm zones.  That makes it feel more like watching a movie a second time than playing a game a second time.  Different classes will play much differently, making the play different as well.  I'll go with that.

Down the the Dictator, but not the extensive bureaucracy that maintains civilization

"There must always be a Lich King."  Lame, right?  Or is it?

The other day I watched Equilibrium, which is basically what would happen if you wanted to make the Matrix but couldn't legally do that, and replaced machine-driven illusion with drugs to block emotion.  For various reasons it irritated me, but one in particular stood out: the downside of ending the regime was never discussed.  The film of V for Vendetta had this same problem.

It might be because I'm a Stalinist*, but I'm not a fan of the pattern of "dictator falls, everyone lives happily ever after."  That's not actually how things happen.  Ever.  I can sense the objection rising up inside you, so I have these two things to note.

*according to my critics

First off, I don't think the downside to the fall of the dictator must necessarily be shown, at least not right away, but there should be at least some notion that something went wrong.  Take Star Wars for example.  After A New Hope we're all happy that the Death Star was destroyed.  Then the Empire strikes back in the appropriately-named The Empire Strikes Back in which the Rebels are stuck on a planet made entirely out of ice and wampas.  In the extended universe we learn about how just because the Emperor eventually died doesn't mean everything is great.  Instead, people go out to celebrate and are gunned down by the millions and a whole new form of civil war breaks out, which as best as I can tell, never ends no matter how many times they kill clones of the Emperor.

Compare this with real life where we celebrate the fall of a dictator, and then all go "so... now what?"  That's when every single suppressed grievance explodes and suddenly people start missing running water and streets paved with something other than unexploded ordinance.


Despite that, there is my Second thing to note: just because there is a downside does not mean it is bad that the evil regime has fallen.  Of course it's bad when the basic infrastructure is wrecked and rule of law breaks down, but that's something to consider when taking down the dictator.  This doesn't mean "oh well, things would be worse without them", but instead "let's have a plan for what happens when the Elite Guard of the Evil Government are all out of work."




The admission of a downside is part of what can make the story complex and interesting.  It makes the enemies, the villains, a little more understandable.  Sure the dictator is bad, but perhaps his supporters are just people who see stability as worth the occasional murder and rampant corruption.  Maybe they think it will be even worse without him.  This makes them people with different philosophical leanings and social predictions, rather than evil people.  That's what the world is filled with: people with different perspectives, who we may still find ourselves in conflict with, but who are not evil faceless goons.  After the rebellion they may even join the winning side, not because they are traitors or flip-floppers, but because they see it as the best way to protect what they value and to continue to do their jobs.





They are the bureaucrats.  They are the police and the army.  The judges and administrators.  Are they on the wrong side?  Perhaps.  But that doesn't mean they cannot be on the right side.  Nor does it mean that they are necessarily evil.

I remember an argument in a Star Wars novel in which the hero is arguing with his future father-in-law about smuggling.  The father was a smuggler, running Imperial blockades and bypassing their customs.  It paid well and seemed to be righteous work, sticking it to The Man.  But the hero points out that while the Empire was evil, those import taxes were what paid for roads and schools and healthcare for children.  So even as it is a blow to the Evil Empire, it is also a blow to those who are subjects of the empire and who have no choice in the matter.

Perhaps the best book I ever read that showed the downside, the cost of victory, the burden of maintaining civilization, was called The Star Conquerors.  It's an old science fiction novel in which humans are gradually getting crushed by an alien empire.  It is approximately a gagillion times bigger, which is not helped by a human population which isn't very interested in paying for the war effort that keeps them from being crushed in a week.  The hero does the sensible thing: rounds up what ships he can and goes flying off to kick some ass, which after a mix of luck and brilliance, results in him capturing the core planets.  The aliens hand over control of the entire empire, about a third of the galaxy.  Cool, right?  USA USA USA!  Er.. TERRAN EMPIRE TERRAN EMPIRE TERRAN EMPIRE!  Except for one problem: Before they leave the aliens explain that now we're responsible for administering it all, of managing the flow of trade, of preventing starvation, of keeping everyone in line so it doesn't all collapse into a giant civil war among the various species.

Should we have just given up and lost?  No.  But knowing that there is something after victory, some burden of leadership, of survival against entropy rather than war, makes the story that much more complete and interesting.

And so, when we hear that there must always be a Lich King, maybe let's go ahead and say that in the literal sense, that sounds ridiculous.  But let's not forget that there are still the Vrykul up there, who are going to wonder what happened to their Death God, who are going to need to be either crushed, assimilated, or some mix of the two, and better hope we don't get that wrong.  There are still Scourge agents, dedicated to various agendas of evil, power, and insanity.  In fact, we run into one in the Eastern Plaguelands, a spider who thinks he's going to start his own Scourge.  A joke, for now.  We should wonder, without the leadership of the Lich King, what will the mindless ones do?  What about the sentient and free agents?  What happens to the Plague?  The diseased and corrupted land?

Perhaps we should even be glad that Deathwing showed up.  Imagine the chaos, the destruction, if the greedy, amoral adventurers with incredible magical and combat powers backed with even greater magical artifacts and armor, found themselves bored.  Perhaps that's what was meant by the Scourge going on an even greater rampage of destruction.  With the Lich King, we had a target and that target was something everyone could agree on.  Without him, then what?  Perhaps he did not actually need to convert or corrupt us, merely step aside and let us do what we do: mass slaughter of anything which might be remotely profitable.

Maybe those daily quest givers aren't so bad after all.  I shudder to think what we'd do otherwise.

The sanity deadzone

Imagine if capping your badge points of winning required 20-40 hours per week. Would you do that? I'm guessing you'd probably do it once, on some really awful week, and never ever again. You'd also never expect anyone else to do it, ever. In other words, you'd accept that people would be gaining in badges at less than the maximum rate. You would consciously accept that less than optimal is acceptable. Why?

Because optimal would be insane. Remember this idea, we'll need it later.

Now imagine that capping your points of super instead required a mere one hour per week. Would you ever not do that? I'm guessing yes, during some really awful week, or possibly a really great week, but in some way a week that causes you to not devote a mere one hour in an entire week to capping points. But in general you'll get it done, because it's just that easy. If you didn't cap points you'd probably look pretty lazy. I mean, wow. You cannot find one hour? Lazy, stupid, worthless piece of crap. Why?

Because optimal is too easy to not do. Also remember this one.

Now put that time requirement closer to the middle, somewhere between 2 and 8 hours. Over a week these aren't insane amounts of time to play, barely over an hour a day. But are they trivial? Can you guarantee that you will have 8 hours in a week? Remember, that's barely an hour a day. Not much, not trivial. You could very easily not have that 8 hours, particularly if those 8 hours are in addition to other activities.

But it still sounds reasonable. It's a trap.

The 8 hours sounds reasonable, and I think it is, but it is not universally reasonable. And yet, because it is so reasonable, it may be universally accepted and expected. It is the sanity deadzone.

Somewhere between so absurd that we'd never expect it and so trivial we'd never fail it, there is the sanity deadzone. In this area the requirement is not so high that we'd think anyone cannot do it, but high enough that some people cannot do it (or don't care enough to).

Of course this post is about why BC had a much better badge system than now.

BC badges were in the insane range. Would you ever expect someone to cap their badges for the week? BC had 16 instances. Some were short. Some were not. Even if they were a mere 15 minutes each (nowhere close, except some SH runs on my paladin...), that's still 4 hours, every day. Plus a few dailies that gave badges. And Karazhan (decent-length raid, best one ever). And every raid after that. Capping badges for the week was not a reasonable expectation at all. Capping for the day was not either. I did every heroic in a day, once, and never ever again.

LK used something fairly close to the trivial range. One random heroic a day and the weekly random raid to cap the good badges, plus possibly ICC. With heroics down to 15-30 minutes, this wasn't so bad. But I didn't count DPS queue times, did I? So add another 15-45 minutes. Now we're in that (arbitrarily defined) sanity deadzone. To cap isn't insane, but it isn't trivial either.

This carried over, but worse, into Cataclysm. Heroics take longer and fail more, yet the daily expectation remains. Yet it has become less reasonable. Of course you can argue that the failure rate is a temporary condition of gear, but is that any comfort to the person who has now had his 10th wipe, 5th healer, and 20th tank?

This is a rare situation where the extremes are better than a moderate position. An insane cap can be ignored. A trivial cap is trivial. But in the middle you get conflict. This is the sanity deadzone.

Leave Cataclysm Alone!

I briefly mentioned this during the Twisted Nether interview, but I think it deserves another saying: Cataclysm was not a horrible expansion and would have been a pretty awesome game by itself. The problem is Wrath of the Lich King. Or was.

What did LK do? It gave WoW a whole lot of problems. Cataclysm, at worst, built off those, but in terms of truly creating new problems, Cataclysm didn't do a whole lot wrong (beside retaining LK problems).

Problems that LK brought to WoW:

- Taught us that heroics are meant to be trivial zerging lootfests. Cataclysm tried to fix that and make heroics more challenging and presumably more fun. But once people have been trained to expect something, especially if that something is a lot of rewards very fast, they don't like change.

- Brought about extensive use of phasing. Cataclysm extended this. If anything, Cataclysm did it better, using phasing in solo-oriented content such as leveling. LK used this anti-grouping mechanic (fall behind and the other person must wait, cannot help) for lead-ins to group quests and instances. Phasing also encourages, even requires, highly-linear quest designs.

- Random formation of cross-server groups. Your mileage will vary in terms of how much you care about the negative social effects relative to the speed gain. But I do think that BC had higher-quality groups than LK and beyond. We could blame this on a population change, but that would assume data that I don't have, whereas we can see how the devs changed incentives and social mechanics with these features.

- Everything became about raiding. Now certainly vanilla and BC had a lot of raiding going on and a lot of raiding content. But there was not an expectation that everyone would raid or must raid. Both had players who wanted to raid but could not due to this or that problem unrelated to skill, and so changes were almost certainly to their benefit. But I suspect that a lot of players who did not particularly want to raid were driven into it by the structure of the game. Late-game (not end-game) content was thinner, in favor of fast gearing to get people into raids. This causes all sorts of problems, such as players who lack internal motivation to raid and who must instead be driven purely by loot or social pressure, neither of which are long-term formulas for fun.

- Blue sets, what? BC had blue-quality late-game sets. They were not fantastic at all. But some pieces were okay. My paladin used a couple pieces for a while. Other classes had similar experiences. These were not amazing sets, but sets give some sense of legitimacy, they say that this tier is one that is okay to be at. Sets indicate that the devs think you will be here a while and are okay with rewarding that. LK had no instance sets, nor did Cataclysm. It says something: don't stick around and do not, under any circumstances, feel like anything you got here is worth remembering or keeping.

I'm not claiming that sets imply we are meant to stay at a certain level of content, since I doubt we're meant to spend months in VC or WC (both have sets). But the lack of a set does indicate that content is meant to be temporary and fleeting.

- I will do the math so I can properly blame LK for jewelcrafting (since BC is currently the best time ever in WoW, having replaced vanilla despite neither changing), but that's a bit too complex for right now. The number of gems isn't the problem (I checked).

- Time. LK gave WoW a new way of doing thing. Some was good, some was bad. It took time for people to get sick of the bad and quite, which coincidentally put it during Cataclysm. Also, if not for LK, Cataclysm would have been sooner and there would have been fewer horribly burnt-out veteran players leaving.

If WoW had Cataclysm, minus LK, it would be in a much stronger position.

Players should see content

But how much?

For $15 a month you have access to all content in WoW. With a catch. There are barriers. These take three general forms: time, skill, and organization.

Time
Time barriers mean needing more time for content than you have. These can take the form of needing large blocks of time during the content, such as multi-hour heroics or raids which take even longer, which was a serious problem before raids could be saved week to week. Or the barrier can be not one of continuous blocks of time, but just time overall. Consumables can be major material sinks, meaning time sinks, as best symbolized by the original Naxxramas where the consumable requirements were so bad that a few high-end guilds became notorious for gold-buying (to buy pots) and eventually alchemy was er, tweaked (heavily nerfed) which is where the battle/guardian elixir system came from. Repair costs are somewhere between the two categories, being incurred by the raiding but using time outside the raids to compensate.

The ideal spot for a time barrier isn't simple to figure out. While no barrier at all sounds ideal, this can instead deprive players of a sense of investment. It can also act as a filtering mechanism. While it's hard to say that farming flask materials indicates skill, it does indicate some level of dedication, a quality which is frequently as necessary as skill. It's like a guild application: the actual answers are frequently pointless, but the guy who cannot even fill out an app is probably not the person you want around for serious content.

Skill
I'll keep this short: If someone isn't skilled enough for content, they aren't going to beat it. Let's just ignore the carrying/overgearing bits because those are beside the actual point. Skill is a barrier to seeing content. No, I'm not going to define skill. Pretend I did.

Organization
This is the task of assembling the required number of competent players, with competent being a theoretical mix of skill and gear which matches the minimum required for the content. This is closely linked with skill and time, since it's harder to find players if skill matters and time constraints get ever more difficult as you add people. Think of organizing five people for an hour. Now make that forty for three hours. See why there weren't a ton of raiders in vanilla? Now add a bit of skill requirement and it's a wonder anyone even got past BWL. A big server population will help, just by giving more chances of sufficient numbers of sufficiently skilled players being on at convenient times.

All
At this extreme content requires little to no skill, not much time, and is easy to organize, or done for you. Think LK heroics. Weren't those a blast? And there we go: why a "everyone sees all content" ideology isn't so great. Or as I said yesterday: "Get rid of all this “we want players to see content” crap. It’s not working out so well. It’s fundamentally incompatible with challenging content and good community." In retrospect, I could have phrased that less in a less combative manner, but I still think it's true.

The problem with this extreme is that everything ends up meaningless. There is no challenge overcome. No sense of investment. Nothing at all to inflate an ego, and if an MMO isn't inflating an ego, what is it doing? Oh sure, there's that social angle, but if the organization part is trivialized, that's going to take with a lot of the social binding.

None
Time, skill, and organization requirements are tuned such that you, whoever you are, will not have the combination of time, skill, and personal connections to even attune yourself for the Raid of Doom. This is the second job type thing, but working overtime, with a side job to pay the gold costs. Anyone who cannot do this is free to prance around the world at level 5, hoping the Doomboars doesn't kill them forever.

This is clearly the opposite of the All ideology. In both causes and effects. Sure, you cannot possibly get anywhere in this game. But if you did, oh man, would it feel awesome. If you beat the Raid of Doom you'd have the courage to do anything, like expose your by now translucent skin the the sky-bound nuclear ball known as the sun, protected by only some wisps of assorted gases known as the sky.

Sure, it's great that the few winners feel awesome, but so few people will possibly feel awesome that no one is going to play for long. Even the winners will have no one to gloat to. Trust me, that girl over there has no clue how awesome you are for killing Doomlord of the Doom Council on heroic mode in the Raid of Doom. Or that guy. Or that guy and girl. Two guys. I don't know, whatever you're into. Beside the point.

Some
Ah yes, the theoretical happy middle. In this magical land there are time sinks to keep us busy and feeling invested. We need a bit of skill, not so much that we're hopeless, but we're pretty sure that someday with practice we can go to the Raid of Significant But Not Overwhelming Challenges. Meanwhile the Raid of Puppy Flowers is fun enough. And man will it be cool to see the Raid of Doom! Organization isn't too bad, with raids which aren't gigantic, but we're still always eager for another person to play with.

But how much content do we actually see in this magical world?

Barriers should be such that players feel confident that they can progress, eventually. Enough content should be available to keep them entertained. But there must also be content that they cannot yet reach. Maybe some that they will never reach. But they can strive for it and not feel that it is in vain. Or another way to see it is that content should block players enough to feel meaningful to overcome, but not so much that it is unable to be overcome.

This still doesn't quite answer what to do with the amazing player and the garbage player. Can they play in the same world? To challenge the better player will mean blocking the lesser player, and likely the majority of players. Content creation must be profitable, attracting/retaining players to at least cover the cost of developing it. However the simple math of "this many players saw X content that cost ~Y" is not the full story. We also have to know how exclusive content affects the rest of the players. Is it something to strive for or is it a frustration? The attitude of the game company and how it communicates will affect this. Do they create the content as something to strive for or as an exclusive gift to their favorite players?

Expectations
These are the killer.

In vanilla I did three raids: MC, ZG, and AQ20. I never even saw Naxx or AQ40 and BWL killed me on the first boss. I have mixed memories of this. On one hand I wanted to see more content, and I did feel that there was a bit too much catering to the highest tier of play, but it wasn't a game-ruiner for me. I thought that someday I'd clear BWL and maybe even make some progress into AQ40. Someday.

I also did every 5-man, and the UBRS 10-man, many times. And some of the now-gone dungeon 2 upgrade chain, a set of quests which turned my blue set into a slightly better mix of blues and epics. This chain was long and for the time, expensive, but told an interesting story and even gave some more content in the form of additional bosses that I could resummon. This was the attempt, or impression of, alternative content.

In BC I had higher hopes. I really wanted to clear through Tempest Keep. I didn't. But I did do Kara (best raid ever), Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Giant Room, Zul'token'trollraid, and a little bit of SSC. I'd also hoped to clear SSC. Alas, BC introduced a stupid problem: the 10-25 man transition in raiding, with kara being the starter raid with 10 people and then every raid but ZA (which was released very late) needing 25 people. This created an organizational problem that constantly tore apart guilds and were generally a huge headache. If not for that, I think things might have gone better. So that may be my first time when I felt I should have gone further than I did and the devs were to blame. That is not a good thing.

I don't remember what I'd hoped for in LK. Honestly, I think by then I was starting to burn out. But I was disappointed at not clearing Ulduar. Very. But next thing badge inflation set in and I was progressively pushed into an incredibly shitty excuse for a raid called ToC (I refuse to even look up or remember what the stands for, trial of the crusader? Tournament? Who fucking cares?) and then the overhyped depressing place known as Icecrown Citadel. Sure, I killed the Lich King. Didn't really care. I wanted to get going on Shadowmourne. In this way Blizzard managed to combine the depressing power of trivializing content with the depressing power of excluding players from expected rewards. These go together.

As I see it, I should have barely even seen ICC. Ulduar, sure thing, all dead. ToC, yes, but in this theoretical space it is a raid worth caring about, not a buggy (no pun intended) gimmick festival to distract us from the lack of content. In this imaginary version of LK raiding, I'd not think that I in any way deserved the last legendary in the game. But because everything was made easy easy easy have this have that and that as well, and then suddenly something is help back: not fun.

Cataclysm piggy-backed on the LK expansion to take this to a whole new level. Maybe that's why six hundred thousand people left. There's the take-away lesson from this post: do not create expectations in players that you will not fulfill.

P.S. I expect that I won't have any more super-long posts like this for a while.
P.P.S. I wonder if I can fit more tags on here.
P.P.P.S. Woo, Blogger gave me the post back!

Wrathgate in Restrospect

I noticed that Wrathgate quest chain was voted the best of the year last year over at the Pink Pigtail Inn Awards Ceremony of Awards and Honors. Pardon me, but I have to ask a painful question: Was it really that great?

Okay okay okay, put down the pitchforks. The torches too. The cutscene was cool and the Battle for Undercity was cool. But the actual chains leading up to Wrathgate, were those really that great? Riding a red dragon was fun, but I don't remember much that was particularly amazing. Kill 5 of these and loot that. Woo hoo. Did I forget something? Perhaps. But that I forgot it seems to indicate that it was forgettable.

If I had to pick a quest chain that ended well, and was actually memorable itself, I'd pick the DK starting zone quests. Who can forget the sheer joy of committing acts of pure evil? It sets the tone right away with killing another initiate, next thing I'm killing civilians, and before long I've destroyed the Scarlet Crusade. There was a clear plot running through it all, not the open-world tendency to have five stories going at once which just by coincidence happen to involve killing mobs in about the same area. The quests themselves were often more than just "kill ten rats which have Scarlet Crusade models", showing off Blizzard's new-found love of vehicles, cannons in particular. I share their love of cannons. WoW really needs more cannons.

Can you imagine calling a job great because it has a good Christmas party, but the rest of the year your pay is crap, your boss treats you like crap, and your coworkers have brains of crap?

I don't like ICC

There, I said it. Hang me up high til my neck stretches too far. I don't like Icecrown Citadel.

I'm not going to waste time trying to define fun or interesting since you'd say it's wrong anyway. But the first wing is not fun, except gunship, which is easy but at least different. Festerface and Rotgut aren't much fun either. Putricide is almost fun, definitely fun as the abomination, though also quite simple and easy.

Heal dragon fight is not fun either. Run here and kill this then runthere and kill that and nothing lasts more than a few seconds. It just feels frantic without being truly difficult. Sindragosa is a bit of fun, but frost breath irritates me as a tank.

Blood council is boring as a tank or melee. But as a nuclei catcher I've had fun. Blood queen is boring. Biting is a fun idea, but in practice is just a source of stress, or in 25 a call for addons and I'm no fan of fights that demand addons or even do more than slightly encourage their use. This is part of why I hate healing.

But at least there's Arthas. Except I don't enjoy that fight either. Phase one is boring. Phase 1.5 is boring. Phase 2 is some combination of irritating RNG and excessively precise positioning. Phase 3 is boring. It's fucking irritating staring at a release button for half the fight duration while Arthas and Tirion have a shouting match. A free last 10% doesn't feel fun, it just feels like I'm doing PvP with a rogue around.

I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment, pride, joy, or even relief when I got my first kill. I just thought "oh, I ran out of health". That's no way to feel after killing the last boss of the expansion. And I'll stick with the Insane, thanks.

I cannot blame all of this on ICC. More than a little bit, I believe, comes from having spent months longer wiping in ICC than I should have. I associate it too much with needless wipes, not from mistakes, which happen, but from players just plain not trying, not listening, not grasping basic concepts of fights or even roles. So when bosses died, it did not feel like my accomplishment or our accomplishment, but simply the eventual outcome of for once someone by accident not uttterly and completely failing.

And tanking in general has been pretty much straight downhill this expansion, with only a brief period of fun and challenge back before we overheated everything. Ret DPS wasn't much better, with T10 being a lovely source of lag-based DPS loss.

While I'm at it...
Naxxramas was a giant pile of crap.
Malygos was too soon and three dimensional vehicle fights do not fit in WoW, not the audience, not the game engine.
Ulduar was fairly fun but felt like it got cut off too much from the Storm Peaks setup due to having a raid and too much tome in between, not that I'm blaming blizzard for the delay, it just didn't work well for the immersion factor.
ToC was too hyped for being basically ICC-lite. Not much fun and somehow too short to be substantial but long enough to feel like I wasted a night.
I forgot Sartharion. 3D is brilliant for nothing else than showing exactly how ridiculous gear inflation has become.

Howling Fjord from the other side

My highest characters are all Horde. The closest Alliance is now a 73 warlock and was unplayed for months at a time. This meant that I'd mostly done only Horde content in WotLK.

Borean Tundra looks okay, but it's not beautiful or thematically catching. There's nothing wrong with it, just nothing special. However the quests on Horde side were a lot of fun.

On the other side is Howling Fjord. It looks absolutely amazing. Unfortunately the Horde quests were uninspiring. The only parts I really liked were in that Vrykul fort to the northwest. Somehow most of the quests just didn't catch me.

The Alliance seems reversed. The Tundra quests aren't especially great, though I did like the fight with the Scourge in that town near the starting point. I'm not a fan of needing crafted items for quests (I'll put more on this at the end, a muse has struck me). However the Fjord quests were awesome. Riding a harpoon? Venturing into the crypts? That part was especially fun since I'd somehow never even found them before. Training the falcon was fun and the final quest was neat. And then there's the quest to use that awful imitation of an iron dwarf construct: it had flying, it had humor, it had lore.

I'm only about half done with the zone, maybe a little more, but so far I really like it. Oh, and throwing bombs on pirates from a stolen zeppelin, that is awesome. I did feel a bit of a traitor though: as Horde I felt bad for being part of the crime while as Alliance I had too much sympathy for that goblin. Poor guy was just trying to make a mostly honest bit of gold and maybe save the world in the process.

And now to go totally off topic.

Quests and Crafting
I don't like the way WoW mixes crafting and quests. It's too halfway. Some crafted items end up very valuable, if there are enough people leveling at the time. Others stay as useless as usual. For the quester they mean a trip from the Badlands back to a main city (not so bad for Alliance, but nevertheless) or the immersion-killing act of switching to an alt to buy and send it. Sometimes the quest item is expensive for the level.

The act of getting the crafted item is annoying as well. If you're lucky you can find it on the AH for a reasonable price. If not, you will have to find a crafter willing to make it for you. This could mean trying to get an 80 to leave the sanctuary of Dalaran to port to UC and hearth back, so you'd better have a decent tip lined up. Oh and he's not likely to have mithril bars laying around, so you'll have to get those too. My point is that the item just ends up being impersonal (AH) or inconvenient (face to face interaction).

Expanding crafting and quests might help. Imagine if instead of a couple dozen quests in the entire game, imagine if every zone had a handful of such quests; spread across professions and covering a wide variety of items and crafting skill. The quests would be part of an economy rather than just a random annoyance. Crafting would be buffed without needing to add more stats to their BoPs, more BoEs to be crafted in a rush and then dumped with the first raid drop, or BoEs which are comparable (or better) than raid drops but which are so expensive and rare that crafting ends up with a few really, really rich crafters and a thousand hoping be the first to catch the next 79->80 ret paladin and maybe, maybe get a few gold tip for a titansteel destroyer.

Warlock
When I logged in for my first time in a few months I figured I'd jump into LFG and burn off some rested XP. Hm, no spec, that could be a problem. I threw together a demo spec, probably messing up horribly. Then I proceeded to be a noob: falling off the edge and trying to finish a cast with a spike under me. I've not done Nexus in a while. Oh, and I had little clue what I was doing.

Eventually I sort of figured things out, maybe. I'd get immolate up and then spam incinerate. Sometimes I'd remember a curse. Eventually while soloing I learned to get in a late incinerate so I could then kill the next mob with soulfire->incinerate (I seemed to crit often enough that this made for a dead mob and a new shardless soulfire).

Well what fun is it knowing what I'm doing? I don't play alts to know what I'm doing. If I wanted to have to know what I'm doing I'd still be raiding. So I went destruction, tried it out, and then regretted it. But aha, was the spec bad or was it just that I had no clue what I was doing?

Again, learning process, possibly learning incorrectly. Now I use shadowbolt just for the crit debuff (seems like a long fall from when all three specs used it as their primary (only) nuke). I wasn't using chaos bolt for a while because I didn't get it. It's a fire nuke with a cooldown, why not just keep using incinerate? Then I tried it and realized that it's ridiculously cheap and might be my highest damage ability (cheapest too?). Now I have that as a priority. Conflag was also bumped up to a part of my 'cycle', I use it every 10 seconds unless it overlaps with chaos bolt, which probably wouldn't happen if I used a rotation instead of a sort of priority/debuff maintenance system.

My spec is likely still not quite right. I can't decide on some talents. Empowered imp and demonic power seem good for mobs that won't die in 5 seconds anyway. Pryoclasm seems like it could be up about every other cast with some gear. Do I want Demonic Aegis once I'm higher? Or maybe it's worth it now? The mystery of it all can be fun, or frustrating.

I wasn't a slacker
Someone was in general chat trying to find where to do Saragosa's End. That struck me as stupid since it's all the way in Dragonblight. I told him it's there and it's too far for me to directly show him. Then I read the quest he linked. Oh. I asked if he'd talked to Keristrasza. Hadn't talked to... him? He clearly didn't realize the quest giver was in the little prison in his bags or the norms of dragon names. I eventually conveyed that he needed to use the prison (which I'd forgotten what it was) and problem solved. Lacking a non-insulting way to say it, I refrained from saying that he should pay more attention when talking with red-robed women from prison. I suppose that wasn't insulting, but it also makes no sense.

Final thoughts
I wish Decimation was on cast rather than on hit. It's annoying to cast the incinerate which should trigger it and automatically switching to soulfire for the next cast, only to realize that you started too soon and have to cancel and recast (you'll still save the shard, but it's faster to start over again).
I feel very expendable as a DPS (so used to tanking or sometimes healing). Yea, yea "good DPS are hard to find" but when you're in LFG there's no box to mark Good. We're all just DPS.
In a little more defense of Alliance quests in Borean Tundra: I found the gnome captive near Fizzcrank a little funny and sad, especially after the rescue.

Proof that WG is a success

I planned to go to bed about an hour and a half ago. But they were yelling about needing reinforcements. So there I go. Horde were on defense and playing a bit less well than usual, but we managed to win. I got the tower daily done for my first time.

We cleaned up some stragglers afterward. Then I decided to go look for more. I saw a low level draenei paladin. Free honor! Or it was bait for a rogue. But hey, no problem, two melee, I'm prot! Then a DK showed up and it started getting ugly. I ended up burning lay on hands and my bubble but the DK and paladin were dead. I was one hit away from dying to the rogue when suddenly he goes flying away, death gripped by a Horde DK. And then cheapshotted by the DK's rogue friend. I thanked them and went looking for more fun.

Around the fire area I found more fun, including a mage who I of course killed, though not without having to look for him after he popped invis at around 25%. Then I ran into some hunters near the eastern Alliance graveyard. They were some trouble because they kept running back to the guards who would then MS me. A ret paladin showed up and helped, resulting in them dying a lot until the mage turned up again. After these there was a consistent theme: HoJ was always just barely too slow to interrupt polymorph. In other words, almost completely wasted.

Still, we managed to get in some kills before we got sick of them running to the guards. We went back to the fire area for some more killing, found the mage, killed him, killed the hunters, killed some elementals who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then the paladin had to go, so I was alone. At this point my luck went way down as I kept ending up facing the mage and a hunter or two at the same time, and HoJ was still late. After a couple hunter kills and a few deaths which I declared to be BS, I ran around for some ore before hearthing. The hunter liked spamming emotes, but unfortunately my attempt to report it was foiled by the long queue. Oh well. If I'm lucky he's a gold-buyer and he'll be banned for that. In fact, I think I'll just believe that and declare myself the victor on all fronts. Woo hoo!

This is a great thing. The rewards I got from the PvP were minimal for the time invested: a few gold from looting corpses and maybe a few hundred honor. There was little reward, except for the fun of it. I spent at least an hour hunting Alliance and no NPC told me to or offered epics. Admittedly I was in the zone because the battle gives a ton of honor in addition to shards and gold, but why stay? The farming is safer and faster elsewhere. I stayed because it was fun. That is the best measure of success.

Apparently WG is such a huge success that the devs want people to go there less. This almost seems like a pattern for Blizzard. When WoW first launched it ended up being way more popular than anticipated and there weren't enough server resources. World PvP became popular and then the problem became worse, so they put people in BGs. Now WG is too popular, so they want us back in BGs again. I'd not mind if there was a comparable BG, but sadly AV is a shell of its former self and I hate EotS.

In unrelated news, I joined a very good Naxx 25 PUG earlier in the day. We did a full clear, I won a piece of gear for each spec: holy chest, prot wrists, ret ring. Sadly I was outrolled on both weapons that dropped, including Betrayer of Humanity. I guess I'll be using my heroic axe for a while longer. And I tanked H UK just for the hell of it. It was the daily and after spending the day seeing trade and lfg filled with desperate calls for tanks, I figured I'd help out. The healer was new and the rogues liked to hug bombs, but we did alright.

In related news, I think Stabs was right. Playing less has caused me to have a lot more fun. Granted I pretty much played all day today, but in the week before I was playing a lot less than usual. I'll talk more about this later, I think it could be interesting.

WotLK Instances

Vanilla had the super-long instances, which while full of awesome, were frequently too long for the average player. BRD was probably the peak of this, though Mara and LBRS weren't exactly short.

BC had... hallways. Some were even very short hallways like the Mechanar. Then there were the woefully non-labyrinthine Shadow Labyrinths. Don't getme wrong, BC instances weren't terrible. They had their moments. Who can not laugh at the dialog between the demon bosses in Arcatraz? Oh, and Millhouse, good stuff. Still, they were a bit dull to run, lacking anything at all to explore or discover. There was no sense of scale.

It's not that linear instances are innately bad. They just have to be done well. UBRS was linear, and yet it was one of my favorite instances. Shadowfang Keep is perfectly linear but the way it is laid out gives a sense of being a little castle, a real building, rather than just an aimlessly wandering path. SFK is probably one of the best instances in vanilla.

WotLK instances are simply amazing. They're not huge or complex to navigate. In fact they're mostly linear. But the way they are set up gives a great sense of scale. Just today I was running through Gun'drak when I looked to my left just past the snake boss room and just stood there. I was awestruck by the vast scale of the temple/fortress we were in.

WotLK instances have a ton of 'wasted' space: areas that we will never run into and never need to know exist. But these areas give the scale that was missing in BC. Ahn'Kahet and Azjol'Nerub both have large areas of wasted space and they make good use of them. The first makes you feel like you're in the middle of a city. It almost felt like in BRD when you look out over the lava and see all these homes carved into the distant walls. AN is less extravagant with space, until you do the drop before the last boss. You go past several levels of carved out city, packed with spidery architecture. After that you can't pretend it's just a hallway: you're in the heart of the Nerubian civilization, or at least the part conquered by the Scourge.

The heavy use of open sky also helps. It reminds us that we're not in some isolated bit of hallway, we're still in the world and we can see it. I'm not a huge fan of DTK, but near the end when you're doing the troll-undead pulls along that balcony, look to the left. See a troll civilization out there. Utgarde Keep makes good use of open air as well while Utgarde Pinnacle uses it sparingly, to show not the sky, but the holes in the roof and the decay which is brought by Scourge influence.

It really feels like Blizzard brought out the greatest creativity they could when creating the WotLK instances. They're practical to run, being 30-90 minutes, but give a large sense of scale and a place in the world. You can almost forget you even went through a portal. That is one of the biggest signs of a well-designed instance.

Death Knights: a class done right, except for tanking

This post is not intended to compare DKs to paladins. That's overdone and usually pretty stupid. I instead want to compare DKs to every other class, and show that in some ways they are far better. It's not about class strength (I make no claims on balance or lack thereof), it's about how well the class works with itself.

I've heard runes compared to energy. Runes are far better than energy. They're flexible. Abilities have costs, but they aren't always at the cost of each other. Rogues almost work in opposition to themselves. You need combo points for finishers and to get those you need to use special attacks, but they all use the same energy source. The result is that to be able to use a finisher you have to burn the resource you use for that finisher. Sure it regenerates quickly, but it still feels counter-productive.

No class fits together as well as DKs. Their abilities complement each other. If a talent replaces a baseline ability, it truly replaces it, without ambiguity of one spell being better here and the other there and I guess I can find another hotkey somewhere... (I'm looking at you, seal of command) Did I just say they complement each other and then say they replace each other? Oops. Back to compliments: I am a fantastic person.

I play unholy, so this may be a spec-specific thing. Frost looked weird and Blood felt too much like a ret paladin. But some of this is general. The disease-strike combination works very well. It's almost like combo points, except not so limited. You can use strikes any time, they'll just be noticeably weaker and using a different strike isn't going to ruin the diseases you built up. What other class builds up like this? Oh sure, there are things like curse of shadows (elements? What is it these days?) or the old judgement of the crusader, but they're so simple that they feel less like a synergy and more like just an opener that does no damage.

Now there is a bit that may seem confusing. The diseases generally require frost or unholy runes. My biggest strike for unholy uses both and works off diseases. This is counter-productive, right? Sort of. I have a talent which converts my blood runes into death runes (universal runes) when I use a weaker strike. Every two times I use the weaker blood-based one, I convert enough runes to use my frost/unholy-based strike. The weaker one uses different runes, so it's able to be used while I'm waiting for frost and unholy runes to come up. It's actually a great combination, while my strongest ability is down, I can use a slightly weaker one at effectively no cost and it converts new runes needed for my strong attack.

I did not emphasize that the death runes work universally and can be used as unholy. What does this mean? It means more corpse explosions!

The rune conversion reminds me a bit of the old mojo system that someone suggested for shamans. You do one sort of activity in order to fuel another and they complement each other. In the case of shamans it was healing and damage each reducing the cost of the other. For unholy it is blood attacks increasing resources for frost/unholy attacks. It also works for additional blood attacks, but if you're only using blood runes for blood attacks, why bother with the talent? It's a flexible system and quite a bit of fun.

Talents
These get a heading because of TL;DR.
There doesn't seem to be a 'correct' spec, yet. This is great because it allows people to play what they want to play, how they want. There's only one way of being ret DPS or a prot tank. There's only one shadow tree and one rest tree (okay two, but you can only pick one). DPS classes have had this for a while, this variability of choice for how to play within the same role. But they obviously have had higher and lower trees. Some specs were for PvP and others for PvE. DKs don't appear to have this problem. You play what you want and it's the best spec you could have.

I'm sure part of this is ignorance. DKs are still new. Their resource system is very complex. There are not the clear specs of other classes which have been developed for four years and simply updated each patch. Maybe there is a best DPS spec and a best tanking spec. But, we don't know and I doubt we will for a while.

Spec freedom, truly choosing how to play, that is a great thing. No other class has that. Above the synergy and lore and cool animations, this is what makes the class work better than any other.

Tanking
I don't like the feel of DK tanking very much. Hopefully this is due to inexperience and being only 63. It feels too much like when I'd tank as ret. I didn't feel like I had tank abilities, I just held aggro. DKs hold aggro. They have all sorts of activated mitigation, but I'm too used to warrior and more recently paladin activated abilities: you save them for really bad times. I constantly forget bone armor. I should be using icebound fortitude every other pull, maybe. I don't really know. The lack of a shield, or turning into a near, is what throws me off. I know that I have increased armor in frost presence. I know that I have increased health. I know that I parry more than normal. But still, where is my damn SHIELD!? Maybe I'll get used to it eventually, but in the meantime it feels weird to me.

War with the Titans? [Possible Spoilers]

It seems possible that if the Titans return, they might feel included to start killing us all. Why?

Well first off there's the Curse of the Flesh. At the least it appears that dwarves and definitely gnomes are corruptions from the Old Gods. Reversing the curse could be fatal. Or we'd fight against it, triggering a war. However I must admit to not fully understanding this. It appears that Loken and his minions are waging a war against the squishies (us) and are trying to convert the gnomes back into mechanical beings. However he's been corrupted by an Old God, and it's the Old Gods which created the curse in the first place. Maybe I misread the lore or I'm making a false assumption somewhere.

Humans may also be a part of this corruption. From quests that I've not done, but heard about, it seems that they may be deformed Vrykul. Again, this is a problem possibly caused by the old god whose name I can't spell but whose blood I make into arrows.

Elves? Trolls? They seem linked to each other, with trolls being first. So what are the origins of the trolls? Based on their extremely savage nature and tendency to summon big and evil things (Hakkar) or just do generally destructive things (killing their own gods), they may be in some way linked to the Old Gods.

The presence of Draenei and Orcs might not sit so well. Let's be honest: they're aliens.

Moving on, let's try to step back from our perspectives. The dragonflights are here to protect Azeroth, to maintain it. We have repeatedly gotten into fights with them. The black dragons are the obvious one. Despite their leader being insane and evil due to corruption by the Old Gods, the Titans might not see things so much in our favor. Then there are stories of heard of killing Malygos, the leader of the Blue flight. That's a big no no. Throw into the mix the many lesser minions of the dragonflights we've killed. Oh, and I have an important green dragon's essence in my bank.

On the other hand though, maybe the Titans will see our value. Despite the corruption, we are the ones fighting back the Old Gods. We are maintaining balance far better than might be expected. Sure we brought the Legion, but we also beat them off. Repeatedly. We're hardly perfect, but for a lot of untrained, cursed beings, we've done a decent job. Compare proto-drakes and dragons. Could that be the next step for the sentient races? I wonder if the mages of Dalaran would replace the Blue flight. Perhaps shamans could take over for the negligent Black flight.

I suppose we'll see as more content comes. Or it never happens and two years from now we invade upside-down Azeroth and we're all back in Karazhan.

Siege PvP and Icecrown

I did Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients for my first time today. Early today I had also started quests in Icecrown.

First the bad: SotA is too fast. It seems strange that a siege would be the fastest BG around. I'd have expected something a bit closer to AV, though obviously the old style of multi-day battles wouldn't go well now.

Wintergrasp seemed better. I didn't get to see much of it though since I flew over right after an instance and only got to catch the last 10-15 minutes of a Horde defense. What I did catch was a few battles between ground troops and a couple vehicles along with some shooting with the defense guns and one of the plague catapults. Apparently the cannons can be swiveled all the way around and fired through the doorway, which came in handy when the Alliance ran to the other side of the wall. I was able to still hit them with the AoE when they were fighting out of line of sight.

There looks to be a lot of potential for fun in that zone, especially since there are a few benefits to control, so it should attract more people. Afterward a ride around showed a ton of sardonite, especially rich nodes, and lots of elementals.

Moving on to PvE...
Icecrown is great. Phasing makes everything so much more real, having actions actually change the world. Flying fortresses are cool. The Knights of the Ebon Blade seem to be one of the most intelligent groups around. They just get the job done. Also they gave me new tanking boots. Jumpbots are fun.

On to something completely different: I want dual specs now, and I want my second to be holy. Healing is more fun than I remember and sacred shield is turning out to be really useful in 5-mans. I'm just frustrated with the lack of bacon, making AoE a huge pain.

Recent PUGs have been pretty annoying. Yesterday was one in Violet Hold with a tankadin that couldn't pick up adds at all and didn't even respond when I asked for BoM. The warlock was an all around moron, who I'd actually run into before and I guess my ignore list was full then or something, so I'd forgotten who he was. The shaman had a habit of eating between the boss and the tank. Guess who gets initial aggro? I eventually left, they flamed me in trade, I ignored them. Today the PUG had rogues in it, which seem to have turned into melee hunters in terms of average level of intelligence. They died from retaliation, managed to get lost, managed to get an add on their way back to the group. I'm not sure how that happens when you have stealth.

The good news was that I did manage to get a good PUG, but it was the type of PUG that is really not a PUG as much as four people from top guilds who somehow ended up with me in their group. I don't know how it happens. Somehow I manage to attract either complete idiots or the absolute top people, at least in terms of progression.

So, SotA bad, Wintergrasp good, Icecrown better. Better than better. Best zone ever.

The Little Big Improvements

WotLK look likes Blizzard took every complaint they had ever gotten and figured out how to address them, without caving in to whining.

Server stability seems to have been ruined and then fixed with the release and week or two after 3.0. That week or two was terrible, but I'm glad to have had the problems worked out then instead of now. My only complain with the servers is the queues, but that's partially due to players, both returning people and those who are on anyway playing a lot more. I imagine this will level out a bit as the numbers of 80s go up and the leveling rush slows.

Hellfire Peninsula was terrible early on. It was incredibly crowded and mobs were a pain to get. Variable respawns helped, except then you could have a mob instantly respawn on top of you. Or ten. Dead you. Now there are two starting zones. This cuts the zerg in half. To make it even better, there are scattered quest hubs, so people are spread out more. If one area is full, move somewhere else. The final big fix was with many quest mobs being summoned, eliminating the rush to tag mobs.

Questing is set up better as well. In the past quest stacking was unnatural. It required waiting around for all quests to become available for an area, often running to different quest hubs to get them all, and sometimes having to finish long chains first. Now there seems to be a short chain to introduce an area, and them up pop 4-5 quest markers for a single area.

Zones are more contained, so you can finish one and move on to the next in an orderly manner. This is great for completionists. This is also great for reducing the irritating travel times of the past. But the zones aren't totally separate. When you're done with an area, you get quests that send you to the next. It's organized, but if you're not looking for it you don't see it, you just see that you're having fun and not getting lost and constantly back-tracking.

The instances aren't so hallway-like. Azjol'nerub was really cool, which made it unfortunate that it's so short. Apparently there's another wing, which I'm looking forward to.