Being too low keeps you out of content, so does too high

I wish I'd discovered BC heroics before my mage hit 71. At that point, it just seems like cheating. So now what? She could level up more, but what's the point? I'm not going to hang out waiting on DPS queues at 85. She hit 72 and that's when it fully sunk in that it was all downhill from here. Ooh, I could make a LK twink! lol

I made a DK, considering using that for a new attempt at a BC character. It's nice that it starts so late and is in Outland so quickly. But it's a DK. That means no set for it, though there is a generic blue strength plate set: Doomplate Battlegear. The blue warrior set is usable by other classes; my paladin used a couple pieces, which despite the loss of the weak 4-piece bonus, were still better. But beyond that, it's a DK. That just seems wrong.

So I made a warrior. And then I realized that it's a long, long way to Outland. I'm almost thinking heirlooms might be worth it. On the other hand, the leveling curve is already screwed up and I'd probably run zones I haven't done before, so I don't want to ruin that even more. I'd rather enjoy the journey and have it be a little slower.

I'm not alone in this. Tesh seems to have run into this problem as well, though not quite the way I have.

I'm sometimes saddened that I outlevel the ability to LFD queue for dungeons as I go about doing my Explorer thing. I also want to Explore the dungeons, and the system doesn't want me to go back to them when I'm overleveled.

Mages need buffs

By buffs I of course mean giving them a tanking and healing tree. Frost seems like a good choice for tanking, particularly after they screwed up and made blood the DK tanking tree. BLOOD IS STUPID! Fact. Fire has a cauterization theme going for it, but I doubt that would get past committee.

While we're suggesting ideas, why not an acupuncture tree for rogues? Maybe a "shadow healing" tree for priests? I'm just saying, priest sounds like a healing class, so maybe it needs more healing options. But if I really had to pick, I'd go with arcane. It just feels right. Frost and ice are hard and slow enemies, fire blows shit up, and arcane manipulates things. For example, Slow could slow down the rate at which you die. Arcane Blast would be an excellent quick heal. Arcane Missiles are really just Penance with a different shininess.

This is obviously a pretty major change to a class that has been around, and been more or less what is currently is, for a long time. And it would create all sorts of problems such as figuring out how to make a cloth tank without needing a whole new brand of itemization. Maybe spirit could give armor, thereby ensuring that the tanks get into fights with the healers for gear, which is something WoW has been lacking ever since paladins stopped using spell power swords.

People who want to be where they are

Why would a level 70 be in a BC heroic? Or a 74? Yesterday I decided to try something different on my mage and queued for a BC random heroic.

Surprisingly, I not only found a group, but found it pretty quickly. But that wasn't the best part. The people were.

I didn't run into a single rude or "go go go" type person. No one complained about gear except for one brief mention of a tank's gear, who had a grey belt, but no drama come from it.

We had mistakes and bad pulls. People died. But no one whined or raged. Why?

They were all people who wanted to be where they were. They could get more xp and better loot in LK instances. BC randoms don't even give points, just a bit of gold and bonus xp. They would only go there if they actually wanted to run BC heroics. Maybe it was for achievements or to see what they hadn't seen before. Maybe it was nostalgia. Maybe it was for something other than the same three or four LK randoms. Whatever it was, the basic fact remained that they were not in places for some quick external reward, but for something in the instance itself.

I'd never tried this before. I didn't even know it was possible. And that may be the problem. People will run lower-reward, higher-fun (subjective, of course) content, if they know it is possible.

Maybe the most important thing I learned from this experience is that even with the anonymous cross-server grouping, putting like-minded people in the same place is possible and yields a better experience. But I already knew this!

My mage is now level 63* and has never been to Outland... He's found a handful of groups, most of which were populated by players above level 58. That means that players who could be running Outland for bags of useful items, higher xp, and short queues, are instead specifically queuing for older instances. There are players specifically choosing older content with fewer tangible rewards (in a virtual sense)... Players are specifically choosing to run these instances and are exhibiting unusually high levels of patience for pulling speed and tolerance for wiping... I have to give some credit to the cross-server group-making tool. Without it I'm not sure there would be the population needed to form groups at all.

-The Death of Vanilla has been very extremely overexaggerated to a high degree

This was the mage who, well here's the start of an earlier post

In the past I've complained about people skipping content with the obsolescence of every raid that isn't ICC and heirlooms to speed through leveling. I decided to go a step further and do that to an entire expansion of content.

My mage is now level 68. He has never been to Outland.

-Being a hypocrite in my own special way: Octonde of Azeroth

I think I might do this again on my next mage (she's the one I talk about earlier in the post). I don't like Seahorse Land much, so if Hyjal doesn't tick, that could be my plan: run BC randoms until they run out, then run LK heroics until they run out.

bbad healer

This run started off with me on the tank's side. There had been a warrior who, as I saw it, ran in and aggroed way too many mobs, then died because the tank didn't grab them soon enough. He tried to kick the tank, I voted against, and then he left (or maybe was kicked; I'd have voted for it). So poor tank, the guy has to deal with idiots like that. Well, he then proceeded to be terribly slow at getting any aggro at all on mobs that weren't his primary target. But whatever, new tanks can have that problem, particularly DKs, who are start late.

Then this happened.


Full story: He runs all over the place rounding up the back half of that room. At some point during it I lose internet for a couple minutes. I come back dead, not a surprise given what he'd done and the lack of my DPS (not bragging, just that if you do a big pull, it doesn't help to lose a major source of AoE ten seconds in). So I release and run back. When I said my first two lines, neither the tank nor the healer had released.

I wasn't sure why he'd want to kick the healer. Did he not heal well? Maybe not, but let's face it, expecting to survive that pull was asking a lot (it's not as if these were a bunch of ICC-geared people in a random heroic when we'd not even need the healer, or the DPS).

I explained that it was standard practice and basic politeness to run back if all the rezers were dead, that it is faster. The hunter (his guild member) called me a fag, because well, duh.

We moved along and the tank continued to try to kick with "bbad healer" as the reason. Considering we'd not wiped without he or the warrior acted stupidly, I just wasn't seeing the case for it. Maybe he was bad. I just wasn't seeing any tangible evidence for it. I did die on the second boss pair, but that's what happens when the warrior one is raised and the tank ignores it, regardless of what the healer does. Mages just are not good at tanking dual-wielding bosses.

Well on we went and somehow, the vote to kick passed right before the last boss. I can't figure out why the other DK went along with it. And that's the bullshit we have these days. Anonymous assholes fucking over anonymous nobodies who did nothing wrong, with no means for retribution or feedback. Oh sure, you could go to their server and yell at them, but I'm imagining that ending with a harassment report, and not in the correct direction.

On the upside, fire is really fun in instances!

It's not a pet, I just have a very long arm

I've been having a blast with my frost mage. It reminds me a lot of when I used to play a warlock.

I'm so getting in trouble for that.

No really! What really defined the feeling for me on my warlock was the sense of control from multiple angles. I had fear and death coil. I also had curse of exhaustion, the nerfing of which caused me great sadness. I ran around in PvP with a Nifty Stopwatch and a Heart of Noxxion.

One moment please. I've been reading the comments on wowhead. I need some time to cry. First they nerfed it. Now the quest for it is gone. Anti-fun police, you win this round. And probably the next one too. Dicks. Oh what's that? The other trinket got buffed? OH YEA! WOOOOOOOOOOOO! But seriously, why did you have the destroy the stopwatch? Dicks.

Being able to remove crippling poison and sprint was uh, pretty damn awesome. Then snare the rogue right back and DoT him up! Well, I guess it was just corruption since my curse was taken up by exhaustion. But I had a DoT on him! Glorious days before cloak of might as well be divine shield for how much it wrecks casters. Oh yea, so my warlock always felt in control. Fear, deathcoil, snare, seduce or spell lock or voidwalker bubble, and worst cast scenario, drop an infernal on their head for another stun.

My mage has a similar feeling. I have lots of AoE roots. My main attack is a snare. My secondary attack is instant. My random proc attack is a snare. I even have divine shield. And meanwhile there is my water elemental firing off bolts. But the control part is its frost nova. It's that long arm all over again. I don't have to let enemies get dangerously close as with frost nova and cone of cold. Anywhere: stay there.

I have the keybindings set up so the elemental plays like part of my character, not a separate being. Placing the nova, telling it where to stand, what to attack, these are things that might be viewed as add complexities, pet management. To me, they're just part of my character. It's not a pet, I just have a very long arm.mag

Don't tell, show. Don't show, drag over by the ear and MAKE THEM

My mage was in Stratholme live side. Er. Newly dead side. Scarlet? I never liked that name for some reason. Well anyway, on the side with the Scarlets, demon boss, and no Baron Rivendare.

As luck would have it, the courier and his keys were looted by that warrior. You know the one. The DPS who constantly pulls by accident. Dies a lot. Cannot follow basic directions like "don't release."

I'd managed to get postman's pants earlier, so I had some interest in summoning him again. That 50 armor two piece bonus is just simply awesome. I mean, 50 armor! I know, jaw-dropping.

I'd taken note of the keys he had and managed to steer the group toward The Unforgiven, clearing space around one of the boxes. Somehow I got him to click it despite his protests that he had no keys. One down. We pushed on to the next box, driven by my claims of a boss, which were true, since Hearthsinger Piccolo was over there. I had a leftover key, so I did that box.

Then we somehow got sidetracked by the non-mailbox parts of the instance and I was afraid that all hope was lost. Thankfully the healer DCed and the tank and warrior got themselves killed. We went back to get them, since he was vulnerable to rats and gargoyle spawns. Hope returns! I seized the moment to ask what other keys he had. None. Two. One? What's a key?

Don't tell, show. Don't show, drag over by the ear and MAKE THEM. I decided to try "proof by brute force", a technique most notable for proving something about map coloring, but in my case, to prove that he had at a minimum one key left. So click this mail box. And there we go, a trio of undead with ridiculously high spell resist. The ring dropped, the priest healer won the roll, I felt a bit sad. Then I noticed that she had a really old ring from early Gnomerganan, so then I didn't feel so bad. She told me to wait, informed me that she couldn't use the ring yet due to level, and traded it to me. I thanked her and felt happy again (woo pixels!).

She had to go shortly after. She left too soon for my advice that if her baby had woken that a bit of whiskey could fix that. Either for the baby or her. Cure-all, even if it tastes awful. Seriously, who got the idea of drinking what is essentially rubbing alcohol poured through charcoal? I guess the same people who thought to drink old milk (cheese), spoiled grapes (wine), and grain which has been rotting in standing water (beer).

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, though you can shove its head under until it gets the idea.

Being a hypocrite in my own special way: Octonde of Azeroth

In the past I've complained about people skipping content with the obsolescence of every raid that isn't ICC and heirlooms to speed through leveling. I decided to go a step further and do that to an entire expansion of content.

My mage is now level 68. He has never been to Outland. I first wrote this with the expectation that he'd get to 70 and eventually 80. But he's only 68 and now I'm bored with him. I can't think of any new or interesting way to play him and I'm not going to level him just to have him higher level. So he's 68 and I don't see him moving from there any time soon.

It began innocently enough: I don't like Hellfire much anymore and hadn't done the late vanilla content in a long time. This is my own fault, for having too often sent alts out there at 58. This time I decided to change that and not be in any rush at all. I decided to stick around in Azeroth for a bit longer, just so I could skip Hellfire and comfortably go into Zangarmarsh; meaning 60 or 61 (not that I needed to be that high, but I figured that's what I'd end up at after the zones were done). Eventually that idea stopped appealing to me, so I though I'd try for Terrokar. Then it hit me: why not skip BC entirely?

Outdoor non-elites stop at around 58 unless you go into the Silithus hives. But instances get a bit higher and if I didn't mind elites, I could keep getting XP up to the 8 level maximum range, meaning 68, so I could get all the way to level 69. If sanity abandoned me entirely, instances and raids could be found with mobs of 61, 62, and even bosses at 63. That would be level 72! I wussed out.

He went to Northrend at 66, since he could no longer queue for old world instances and there were very few mobs which gave XP anymore. Conveniently, the rhinos were nicely packed for AoE grinding and were only 1-2 levels higher as long as I avoided the bulls. From my extended stay in Azeroth I'd gotten my skinning up high enough to skin them, so that was fully taken care of. And no, I didn't go to Outland to learn skinning. Instead a level 62 mage was dodging mobs on his way to Taunka'le Village. Fishing was obviously a non-issue.

He did have two major problems which would require waiting a year and farming a year, respectively: cooking and tailoring. There's a 15 point gap between the very last vanilla cooking and Northrend. The only way to fill this outside of Outland is the harvest festival, which he missed, since at the time he wasn't yet going to entirely skip Outland. Tailoring can be done, but it requires a very rare pattern drop from MC.

Based on this tailoring search we can see a few bits of useful information. Runecloth headbands last all the way until 340. That means only 10 levels to go with potentially difficulty materials or patterns. Alas, everything else seems to end at 345. Except there's an exception: Flarecore Wraps end at 350. Given a whole lot of patient farming, AH scanning, and gold, I could reach 350 without ever needing Outland or netherweave cloth. I planned to work on this, finding bits of felcloth on the AH, farming it now and then, and trying to form MC raids. Alas, I then found that cooking was impossible unless I wanted to wait nearly a year. I decided that wasn't worth it. I'd compromise and just buy netherweave and the needed meats and recipes. I wasn't personally killing anything, so it's okay (not really).

Gear was surprisingly not much of an issue. Sure, we all know leveling is easy, but he was going to Northrend with vanilla blues. At the time his gearscore was 759, with the lowest and highest ilevel being 58 and 65, the higher being thanks to the dungeon 2 chain giving bracers. Then he got a couple crazy awesome green drops and doubled his spell power; once he hit 67 and could use them. Upon hitting 68 he was able to start the quests and replaced everything pretty quickly.

So when can I expect my title: Octonde of Azeroth?

The Death of Vanilla has been very extremely overexaggerated to a high degree

You know what bugs me? Pundits. They are so full of shit. They get on their horses of above-average height and tell us not just what to think, but also try to redefine reality to fit their preconceived absurd notions of what the world is.

They're not even limited to real life media. They've infected the gaming media, including the blogosphere, with absurd distortions of what the world is. And for once I'm not referring to Gevlon. No, I instead mean the elitist vanilla-lovers who think that Outland starting at 58 destroyed the 'great late vanilla instances' and that the game is ruined forever now. They sit up there preaching about how no one ever runs stratholme or scholomance except a very rare random instance person or level 80s looking for achievements.

Idiots. Total fucking idiots. Have they ever actually tried queuing for those places? I bet they haven't. Idiots. Ignorant god damn idiots. Fuck. I mean get a fucking clue before you run your damn mouths. Especially you, person with the fake Russian name who whines constantly that vanilla was killed by the Outland gear reset. Yea, you. Try playing around level 60 before you form an opinion.

My mage is now level 63* and has never been to Outland. Since the mid 50s he's been playing in the Plaguelands and queuing for Stratholme and Scholomance. These are no longer available as randoms at 58, meaning that if players simply follow the path of quick rewards, they will either never pop or only be populated by players under level 58. Quite the opposite.

He's found a handful of groups, most of which were populated by players above level 58. That means that players who could be running Outland for bags of useful items, higher xp, and short queues, are instead specifically queuing for older instances. There are players specifically choosing older content with fewer tangible rewards (in a virtual sense). Why? Perhaps for achievements, but not all have been lacking the achievement. Maybe they are stupid. But stupid doesn't really answer much.

Players are specifically choosing to run these instances and are exhibiting unusually high levels of patience for pulling speed and tolerance for wiping. Also unimaginably low risk aversion. The other day my mage cleared live side Stratholme with a resto shaman and hunter. It took a very long time, certainly over an hour and a half. We had deaths and wipes and a whole lot of drinking and slow pulling. The hunter wasn't great, but damn was he persistent. Same for the shaman. This wasn't an isolated incident. There seem to be a lot of people dropping either at group formation or shortly after, leaving behind a small group that would not be expected to complete the instance. Yesterday I did Scholomance with a warlock, hunter, and my mage. It was slow and we all made mistakes that killed us, but we stuck in to the end. This sort of play has been a lot more fun than what I encounter outside of this 'dead zone'. The couple times I have run with a full group have been a bit boring, since higher levels and improved talents mean that the instances aren't hard at all without some extra challenges.

Players really want to do this content. They want it so much that they will endure queues which can go past an hour, runs that go even longer, and risky pulls often without a full group.

Why?

I'm sure many are like me: they liked the old vanilla content and they don't like hellfire peninsula. Leveling speed for leveling fun is a trade they are willing to make. Maybe with more enjoyable leveling they aren't so inclined to get it over with. And maybe they enjoy the inevitable challenge of content that they might otherwise not see.

Based on the very long queues, those who choose to do this content are unusually unusual. This doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that they exist at all. But why should it? I chose to and hoped to be able to do the content. Why wouldn't others?

I have to give some credit to the cross-server group-making tool. Without it I'm not sure there would be the population needed to form groups at all. And while an hour queue is long by current standards, it's not radically longer than it might take to form a group and travel to the instance in the vanilla days. I even enjoy the longer queue somewhat as it allows me time to quest, to relax, to play at my own pace and experience parts of the world which so often seem forgotten. As for the longer instances, it's remarkable how much more fun it can be to stop and smell the bosses.

Though I still want to point out that UBRS is considered a raid, since it technically is, meaning that people in the normal lfg tool cannot queue for it, instead needing to use the raid tool. I don't imagine that helps much with forming groups, but as of writing this I've not yet had a chance to try it, still working on Stratholme and Scholomance.

I'm almost dreading the time when my mage is too high to queue anymore or when he stops getting any experience. While I'm willing to trade leveling speed for more fun, if I stopped leveling entirely, I'm not sure I'd enjoy it much then. It is worth noting that I still have my UI which for whatever reason has no XP bar, meaning that I have little awareness of leveling speed beyond knowing that green mobs and green quests and no bonus random instance xp are slower than yellow mobs, yellow quests, and a bonus at the end of every random.

I know there are a lot of other players who are nostalgic for vanilla, who miss some of the aspects of it that we preferred, or who are just sick of hellfire peninsula. I encourage you to slow down and go where you want. You don't have to chase the xp. You can chase the experience instead. Run the instance you want. The more who do it, the shorter the queues will become. Vanilla will never come back, not with this, not with a old world raiding guild. If anything, come Cataclysm it's going to be gone completely. Naxxramas is happening again.

If you weren't there for vanilla, this is your last chance. Slow down and see what's around you. What you missed before. It isn't going to be what it was. But whether you run the 5-mans at 63 or go back for an achievement raid at 80, it's at least something. You will have some idea of how things were. And that's a good thing. It gives you ideas to pick from. You can see what was better and you can see what was worse. At the very least seeing what was worse can give greater appreciation for what WoW is today. Can you imagine a time when it was most efficient to not to any quests until honored, or even revered? That's just one of many absurd mechanics which pitted logical gameplay against the reward structure.

Vanilla is dead, short-live vanilla.

Dear mages, re: hunters

You seem to have gotten a little bit upset that a crazy cat man doesn't know you have a useful community. I have a small suggestion coupled with a fact.

Suggestion: Don't worry about stupid people.
Fact: Hunters are stupid.

Have a nice day, mages.

Rage-like mechanics

They're everywhere. Why?

Let's start with paladins:
SA: Take damage (get healed), gain mana. It's a weird variant of the rage generation from taking damage.
JotW: Deal damage (judge wisdom), gain mana
BoS: Block (dodge, parry), gain mana

Rogues:
Focused attacks: crit, gain energy.
Combat potency: 20% chance for off-hand attacks to generate 15 energy.
Setup: take damage (dodge or resist), gain combo points. This one, as best as I can remember, has been around since pre-BC, at least a year before then. So I suppose it breaks my attempt to create a pattern of new rage-like mechanics. Let's just sweep this under the rug... *sweeps*

Death knights:
Dead damage (use runes), gain runic power.
Anit-magic shell: Take damage (mitigate 75%), gain runic power

Hunters:
Invigoration: gain mana when pet crits
Go for the throat: pet gains focus when you crit
Aspect of the Viper: attacks generate mana

Magi:
Incanter's Absorbtion: increased spell damage from taking (absorbing) damage
Magic Absorbtion: Mana gain from taking (resisting) damage
Frost Warding: The description confuses me, but somehow you gain mana from people trying to kill you.

Shamans:
Shamanistic Rage: Deal damage, gain mana based on AP

I might have missed some. I definitely stretched some of these a bit. But the trend is there: dealing or taking damage is becoming a normal source of regen. Previously there were three types of regen which operated much differently.
Energy was a constant regen, increased damage came from only increased damage per point spent.
Mana had scaling regen and increased damage could come both from greater damage/mana and from just plain having more mana.
Rage was all over the place, directly scaling with damage stats and also increasing damage/rage with greater stats. It was unique in also scaling with damage taken, due to its dual purpose as a resource for both DPS and tanking.

Why the spread of rage-like mechanics? Well first off, they offer a distinct advantage over pure mana: they last longer, potentially forever. Oh sure if you stand around a while you'll regen mana, but except for strange times like now with loads of regen, mana bars have generally been things which move from full to empty during combat, not the other way.

Isn't this an intended weakness of mana? Well sure, but that doesn't work so well when you try to put it in other roles. SA was critical to paladins having any chance of tanking. They somehow needed a lot of regen (tanking is expensive and the armor has poor mana, even when we had int on tier sets) which wouldn't be too powerful for the healing and DPS roles. SA did that. BoS was added because SA was scaling negatively with gear and while there is a balance to be struck between aggro and mitigation, they were in direct conflict.

JotW was a failure in a way. It was a failure to work within existing mechanics (switching between SoW and a damage seal) to create any type of burn-regen cycle, instead just sticking mana into the normal 'rotation' and declaring it solved.

Rogues? No clue why they got the mechanics. Maybe Combat Potency was to make hit and haste more popular. Maybe it was just to catch the attention of the fabled Rogue with One Dagger. Focused Attacks: it's a crit tree and eventually you can't add any more crit increases or crit damage increases and they already had combo points, so they added energy. Any similarity to rage seems unintended (not to say, "not working as intended", just that they weren't trying to give rogues rage) and ultimately these scaling regen sources still end up being less than the static regen, at least at my poor lowbie rogue's gear level.

Death Knights: I realized that DKs don't really use a rage-like system, it's really more like energy and combo points. Runes are the energy: static regen. Runic power is the combo point: a resource generated by spending energy for some other purpose, potentially scaling with talents or gear but ultimately still restrained by the static part.

Hunters: See ret paladin (except done correctly). Also see rogue (the part about running out of mechanics to add).

Magi, well, they're known for their talents which sound cool but frequently have no practical use. Woo, armor from intellect, they are going to be untouchable to melee! Oh. Well at least the absorb -> SP worked well before they fixed the exploits *cough cough* soloing Military Quarter.

Shamans: See ret, but done better.

I am left wondering something: why do shamans and hunters have scaling regen? This makes balancing much more difficult. Now you can't just lay out a rotation and see what damage it does. Now you have to consider whether they are able to sustain that rotation (scaling goes both ways) or if they're actually expanding that rotation to something more expensive which they can still sustain. It's rage-like and as a result that much harder to model.