Great guilds are more important than great raids

Not too long ago, Doone made his list of the top five raids in WoW. I tried to make my own little list, but I was hindered by a few things. First, while I've seen and finished all but one pre-Cataclysm raid, I'd done many of those during the next expansion and therefore with a different experience. Naxx at 70 is not the same as Naxx at 60, and of course neither are like new Naxx at 80.

Why wasn't I in those raids? Because I wasn't in guilds that were doing them. In Cataclysm I was almost never in a guild and consequently did almost no raiding. Ditto for Pandaria. LFR was raiding in visuals only.

If asked about the greatest raid ever, of all time, I will answer Karazhan. Why? Well it certainly was a great raid. The bosses were varied. Some were made-up for the raid, but many were straight out of the stories we'd hastily clicked past to get our quest reward or the games that made Warcraft a title that could sell millions of copies of a game in a completely different genre. Kara introduced many innovations such as tokens that reduced the tendency to get completely screwed by the RNG; a small, accessible raid; and polite ghosts.

Yet, why don't I say Ulduar? That was a place with a nifty story, varied bosses, and all manner of neat new tricks such as getting to punch a tank. It was perfectly tied into Storm Peaks and if there is one thing I love it is when instances are tied to their locations. The short reason is that I was in a different guild. I still enjoyed their company and stuck with them for a while after, but it wasn't the guild that I ran Kara with. I ran Kara with my guild, founded by my friends and me, filled with people of a similar mindset. Ulduar was someone else's guild that I was let into. Though in retrospect, when I took another shot at playing again in Cataclysm they were the ones I ran with, even giving up playing my paladin (it was on another server, this wasn't one of those "I quit my main to get into a raiding guild" stories). Just writing that was enough to make me start looking for them again. This is a dark road. :)

Anyway, there's the general trend: While Ulduar was on par with Karazhan, even a little difference in guild attachment can dramatically tip the scales. There is another issue though: I never finished Ulduar. We were stuck so close to the end, and I think slowly getting there and I would have gladly fought it out. Then someone set up a circus in Icecrown and we were off for some of the most forgettable bosses since Molten Core. My WoW experience was downhill from there, struggling through ICC, with Ulduar still bugging me, all because Blizzard yanked guilds away.

That brings me to my happiest time in Cataclysm. It wasn't a long time, but for a few brief moments I was back raiding with them again. I wasn't on my paladin. I don't think Dragon Soul was all that great of a raid. But I was with friends. About a week and a half ago I went looking for them, eventually going with the straightforward method of resubbing. Sadly, many of them are inactive now (not gquit), but a few are around and maybe more will come back. In the meantime, some low-key MoP is fun.

But about my top five raids...
Molten Core
Karazhan
Zul'Gurub
Gruul's Lair
Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj (20-man)
These are in no particular order. Nor do I suffer from the delusion that these are the Top Five Raids. They are only mine and are almost entirely due to my situation at the time.

Molten Core was my first raid. I have fond memories of fighting Garr, a fight which required many warlocks, and during which I demonstrated my creativity, figuring out, in a time before many guides were around, a better way to banish. Perhaps it was a small thing, but it was fun. While it was an amateurish raid design, it was also perfectly integrated into Blackrock Mountain, a place filled with instances and raids, all connected in one way or another, making it a prime destination for players 50-60. That made it a fun, or frustrating, place on a PvP server.

Karazhan was a hard-earned victory, fought through with my own guild of friends. It was there that my paladin went from alt to main, a position that would only be lost because of The Great Betrayal. There was such variety, such strange things to find.

Zul'Gurub was strange place. There are multiple optional bosses. One boss was different depending on the week, and somewhat difficult to summon, needing an alchemist and some odd ingredients. Another boss was fished up. Where MC was dull, ZG was bizarre and outlandish. Players could loot voodoo piles for a chance at voodoo dolls, needed for trinkets, a rare thing in those days, but they'd be mind-controlled for a while. The 'correct' response was to CC them, but why not kill them instead? In an era of 40-man raids, ZG only needed 20. Its loot was an unusual mix of purples and oddly-powerful blues, seemingly scattered at random. Even that long ago Blizzard was doing strange things with its raiding.

Gruul's Lair consisted of one incredibly hard pull and a somewhat pushover final boss. The Council was based on a good pull: get the mobs where they needed to be, attacking the right people, and things could go fairly smoothly. Screw it up and it's a horrible mess of everyone dying. The final boss, Gruul, was a fight about spreading out: he'd slowly turn players to stone, then shatter them, hurting those nearby, so spreading out 25 people just right was sometimes difficult. I'd recently joined a new guild, merging our fading one with another that needed a boost. They reluctantly let me tank Gruul, but called for a lot of misdirects, because "paladins have trouble with aggro." I proceeded to double everyone else, at a time when aggro wasn't a matter of sneezing with righteous fury on. That was a source of endless amusement for me. Even beside that, those were still days when paladin tanking was still in doubt, it wasn't that long ago that paladins were mostly just exceptionally mana-efficient healbots. Of course we were recognized as good trash and five-man tanks, with our mechanics perfectly suited to holding aggro on unlimited enemies, but handling just one was apparently in doubt. And, of course, I always pulled with my goblin rocket launcher, because if you're going to make a tank, why not do it in style?

Buying a Bullshit-Ender in the Store

This post is inspired by Rohan's post, Money is Not Time.

Bullshit is subjective.

Once upon a time a Binding of the Windseeker dropped. Being surrounded by friends who clearly harbored a secret hatred for me, they all insisted that I take it. I spent the next year struggling to put together half-competent pugs of MC, since said friends had thoroughly burned themselves out on MC or had quit.

Back in BC we only had ten extra levels, so soloing MC wasn't something you just did. You needed help. Yet the perception was that MC was old and therefore easy. The effect was rather like putting on a seat belt and deciding that it was therefore safe to drive straight into walls while completely sober; being drunk would actually help to relax and reduce the damage. We could still die, to trash, if people were careless enough, and they often were.

This all had the effect of creating one hell of a sense of entitlement. Surely after enduring all this bullshit I had earned my binding. I'd put in my time. I'd had some flow and fiero. Eventually I was a bit sick of it and torn between wanting the binding and the badass-looking sword and wanting to not have to herd cats through a land of lava and laser pointers.

I saw the appeal of a cash shop. Once I'd put in the time to feel the sense of ownership and reward, a bit of money wasn't going to ruin anything. Certainly just buying a second binding the moment the first dropped would have been rather lame. Yet after months of weekly runs, or more than weekly since they didn't always succeed and needed a second attempt, I was ready to trade some money for time. At that point the issue was not time, but frustration. I had already shown great willingness to burn time, and I still don't much mind grinds, regarding them as part of the genre.

Yet this was no mere matter of time. I got the first binding on my first ever run on a character that could use a binding. That was clearly not a time issue. Nor would the second one be a time issue. One year or a dozen, such a low drop rate cannot be dependably countered with time. I could only up the odds, never beat them. Ultimately it was out of my control and that's what made it bullshit.

I'd have gladly bought a bullshit-ender in the store. If anyone asked, I'd say that I got lucky on the first one and spent a year grinding for the next one. Those words. At that point I'd see no distinction between "getting lucky after a year of runs" and "not getting lucky after a year of runs and buying it in the shop" except for whatever the second binding cost. The mental earning would have already happened, but sometimes the RNG needs a few dollars to convince it of that.

But what if the second binding had been in the store from the moment I got the first? Might I have just bought it then, unearned, and consequently of less importance? There's the whole problem. For all my writing about how I'd played and struggled for the year to earn it, there is no way to track or prove that, so any cash shop can dispense ill-gotten gains. Maybe another player would feel that sense of earning in a month and would hate the implementation of a one-year/50 runs counter. Someone else would need two years and would be short-circuiting after the one-year purchase.

Leaving it up to us sounds insane. Surely you'd call someone crazy if they said that they were going to annoy themselves for no less than a year before using the cash shop. We'd tell them to just buy it and save the time. And then they would and not care in any way.

A cage is only as small as the reach of your mind

My post the other day about quests received an interesting comment:

Such is the sorry state of our virtual world of Azeroth now. I have a pandaren level 10 stuck forever on the back of a turtle because she can't bring herself to help the Tauren invaders just because some mad old fool asked her to. She wants to go and heal the humans who are engaged nearby in a fight with her enemy, the lizard-men; but in their infinite wisdom, the gods have changed the nature of the medical supplies she can see on the ground, so that her fingers pass through them as she tries to pick them up.

When the world we explore is nothing but a backdrop for a series of quests, that are themselves nothing more than a meaningless series of button-clicks required for our guaranteed reward, our virtual world is gone, replaced by a games lobby and an internet chat tool; and then we may as well be on Facebook instead.

 I may be placing too much emphasis on the presence of the word "now", but its use suggests that something has changed.  In my reply I note that in terms of the game itself, almost nothing is different.  If anything the world is a little bit more interactive.  The quests which currently act as gates in the form of phasing once acted as gates in the form of prerequisites (and are still prerequisites).  The change is visual, but that's all that changed: it became more visible.

I could chalk this up to the usual blend of nostalgia and burnout, with a dose of old-fashioned Perpetual Downfall of Society.  That last one is, as I suggested, not new.  Just the other day I had to tell off an old man who attacked my generation, pointing out that PDS is nothing new: from the moment we invented the written word our memories have suffered, as if a single cognitive measure, taken in isolation, matters.  I refrained from throwing some Camus at his Dante because I had to get to work.  My point is that I think people take a sort of comfort in thinking that they were the correct generation, smarter than the ignorant previous and smarter than the impaired next.  This requires one to interpret old change as good and new change as bad, and to generally misinterpret and disregard anything that is new and good, or even old and good but retained by the next generation.

In the beginning Azeroth was a vast world.  It seemed limitless.  Now it does not.  This was not a matter of size; it has grown larger since then.  Nor can I attribute it entirely to transportation changes, for while faster travel reduces the perceived size, the actual land area to discover remains intact.  I could go anywhere (with frequent death) and do anything I could think of.

That last part is the key: anything I could think of.  Early on I did not imagine what else I could want to do in this world.  I'd done only a tiny fraction of what I could.  This had two effects.  One was that I had not run into a limit yet.  The other was that I could not imagine a limit.  I did not imagine that the sky ended, that the quests ended, that the raids could all be done.  These were all true, but since I did not know them and did not even imagine them, they were irrelevant.  I was running the infinite distance of a circular path.

Since then I've learned and my behavior has changed.  I do not run in circular paths.  I run out, find the edge, map it out, and then fill it in.  This means that very early on my mind has already filled the size of the world, so that all that can happen after are details, with nothing big to be revealed.  In my mind it looks like two strategies for filling in a circle.  Both start at the center.  One draws a line out to the edge and now the radius is known.  It then spirals inward, knowing exactly where it is headed.  The other starts the spiral at the center.  It will cover the same area, but it will do so not knowing where the edge is, what the limits are, until it reaches them.

This is part of why I like new genres of games (that is, when I can pull myself away from habit).  I don't know the limits.  I don't even know if it is a circle, so I cannot easily dart out to the edge and cut it off.  My meta-gaming is temporarily disabled and I regress to a simpler state of simply playing the game.  Eventually I may start to figure it out and move to the different fun of meta-gaming, but not yet.  It's a two-for-one deal with a new genre or significantly new game.  I haven't yet made rules for myself, so I get to break them.

Expansions are a blessing for nostalgists

It is my experience that old content is itself a form of new content.  It's diverse content.  Sick of dailies and LFR?  Here's something else to do.  Thanks to transmog, everything is of the latest tier, of appearance.

That's merely the situation for a normal player.  A nostalgist gets a bonus!  With every expansion there is new content.  But who cares about that?  They do, but I'll explain why later.  First, new content means that there is old content.  Old content that "no one does anymore".  Old, unused, ripe for nostalgia.  Get the clock ticking on forgetting the thousandth wipe and on remembering that first kill.  Ah... that's the stuff.

The new content, thanks to the typical vertical progression systems, means new power.  I couldn't solo Forge of Souls at 80.  But I could at 85.  At 90 it became easy.  New content makes the old content more accessible, at least in terms of how easily the content will kill you.

On the other hand, it reduces the pool of players.  All the people who want loot and rewards are gone off to purpler pastures.  And good riddance!  The people left are fellow nostalgists, a little community of oddities.

Taken together, there is a rolling effect.  Each expansion makes more old content and each time the power level of players increases, so to does the ability of players to run old content.

A better future doesn't mean the past was a hellhole

There is nostalgia, the biased view that the past was better.  And then there is the opposite, the biased view that the past was worse.  Note that I am not talking about analyzing past and present and picking the better one, but the biased process of picking one first and then shaping everything else to fit it.

Is WoW a better game than EQ?  I can't say for myself, but it seems so.  Is current WoW a better game than previous incarnations?  For me, no, I preferred BC.  That doesn't mean that I think BC was the perfect game.  It had problems.

Similarly, if you prefer the current WoW, that doesn't mean that all past versions of WoW were terrible hell-scapes of misery.  Nor does it mean that every single change to WoW was perfectly wonderfully better in all ways.

"Everything is better" is just as absurd as "everything is worse."

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.

Those were horrible times

As we all know, people used to be better.  They had values.  For example, there was the Greatest Generation and small towns.  Though slightly before that there was the generation that helped Hitler rise to power and slightly after that there was the generation that invaded Vietnam based on complete lies.  Some things never change.

In that spirit of retro-pessimism or Retrimism, I have some screenshots from vanilla WoW.  You know, the greatest time ever.

Here we have my shaman getting called a loot hogger for rolling need on a dagger he then proceeded to use for quite a while.  I don't think I reported him for calling me a bitch, but I recall being a bit pissed off about being called a ninja for a perfectly legitimate roll.  Uncontested, if I remember correctly.

Later on this is him getting called a fag for getting a shield.  In defense of the homophobic asshole, he was a tank, a shield with fire resistance on it was pretty damn important, and the boss we just killed took a while to get to.  On the other hand, I never in any way indicated that I wanted the shield and master looter was on.  Someone just gave me the shield for no apparent reason.  Perhaps they knew that the other guy was an asshole who blames the wrong people when there's nothing to be done about it.  I did end up using the shield quite a bit, since fire resistance was hard to find.

 

Coming up next is the amazing interactive experience which is a vanilla paladin.  See that bottom hotkey, fourth one over, with the ten over it?  That's judgement, with a ten second cooldown, and that's all I have.  At a higher level I could get repentance, which is like sap that can be used in combat, but back then only lasted ten seconds with a minute cooldown.  Or maybe it was five.  Pretty sweet, am I right?  I planned to branch out into Holy, so that I could pick up Consecration, you know, that spell that was pretty handy for paladin tanking and AoE DPS in general since, it was an 11 point Holy spell.  Holy Shock was the other controllable damage spell at it was up at 31 points.

 

 This here is a pretty great moment.  That's right, an epic staff.  A really, really low drop rate epic staff.  This story has a good ending, actually.  Earlier in the run I'd passed on a staff to the priest in the group and he was really excited about it.  He was very insistent that I take this staff, and I did, and I loved it.  So that was pretty awesome.  Oh, and that Scourgestone, that was how you got rep past revered, because mobs actually stopped giving rep after certain points, so I hoped you saved up.  Even better, you couldn't even roll on it if you didn't have a particular trinket equipped, which actually wasn't such a bad trinket, but there was a tendency for there to be a sudden spike in roll competition after the first boss died and everyone remembered to equip them.

This is the boss fight in Stratholme.  The gate can shut, locking out players if they aren't paying attention.  This isn't a new problem; many bosses still do this, so maybe this is more of a "why hasn't this been fixed yet?" type of problem.

You might hear now and then that a particular BG is biased toward one side or another.  Whatever.  Horde had their graveyard camped by boss-level NPCs.  BIAS THAT!

Actually it's just a bug while the mob was resetting, but it made me laugh.

Summoning was super-convenient.

This is me trying to get to Swamp of Sorrows as Horde.  The one path was through a hostile Alliance town.  Which was awesome.

Something Cataclysm Didn't Destroy

Did you know that when I run Scholomance, LBRS, UBRS, and Dire Maul East I get to fight an extra boss if I want? That's right, I do. You might wonder why. Or you're just wondering what I'm babbling on about this time. Well here are the bosses.

Isalien
Kormok
Mor Grayhoof
Lord Valthalak

To summon them you need this item, Brazier of Invocation, no longer available, thanks to a really great quest chain being removed.
And there used to be two additional mobs, Jarien and Sothos, but they were removed for being too high of a level, despite being in an instance a little higher than the ones with Kormok and Isalien.

I don't think they did much with LBRS/UBRS, so it's not surprising that those are still active. Dire Maul and Scholomance were reworked somewhat, which would give a chance to remove those bosses. Maybe removing them takes effort, since my guess is that the instances truly were retuned rather than remade, meaning that all the old triggers and whatnot are still in place. Though the anti-fun team always has time...

None of these really matter. I mean, the loot isn't anything great, particularly if you need a friend who would be level 60 to have the quest, meaning that even if they'd done nothing since vanilla, they'd still be heading off to Outland, not farming strangely-itemized gear from obscure bosses. But in a way, that's what makes them actually matter. It's easy to justify putting time into the middle of the road loot grinds and reputations. But to have something off the path, in a corner, where not everyone will see it or even know it is there (their fault for not reading this blog), that shows some dedication to having a world rather than just a themepark.

It gets better! Not, not in that way. Sorry, you're still going to be deined marriage, visitation rights, and a seat at Thanksgiving.

But in WoW, there is a trinket, Spectral Essence, which allows the player to see the ghosts outside Scholomance. One sells bread and water. Another is a blacksmith, which I may have to investigate further as a source of profit off obscure plans, and who I used to use when I farmed Scholomance, as a trash dump, not sure where he got the gold or put the stuff. Well, I'd deleted it, because when I needed it, I could ask for it, and with all my old stuff, I was low on space. And then Cataclysm hit.

Thankfully, it seems that Blizzard also left that ability in place, to ask for a new trinket. I just need to zone in now. Why was I, at level 85, in Scholomance? To test the bosses of course. Science!

But wait, there's more!

Blizzard stole all my keys and gave me a few measly gold for them. At this point it has crosses the Incompetence-Malice line into them clearly just being asses about it all. But I beat the system. A little. In a very minor way. I talked to Khadgar about losing my key to karazhan and would you believe it but... absolutely nothing happened. But I wasn't going to give up. I was going to fill my bags with unnecessary keys, dammit! I was not going to be set back, nor would I compromise my principles, at least not these ones. So I talked to the windchime and BAM, key to the arcatraz, sitting in my bag, taking up a bag slot for absolutely not use whatsover! TAKE THAT, BLIZZARD! I HAVE BEATEN YOU AT YOUR OWN GAME. Not even figuratively, I mean, it literally is your game. So booya.

One of these days you're going to get all mixed up and accidentally close the gates to Ahn'Qiraj and I will BE THERE with my The Scepter of the Shifting Sands and you're going to have no idea what hit you. And neither will I, because first I'd need to gather ten skrillion linen bandages for the war effort.

And then you'll try to have a Scourge invasion to stop me, but I'll have my Blessed Battlegear of Undead Slaying as well as 233 Necrotic Runes, which I'm sure by then will be used to purchase tier 57 and I will have beaten your system, exactly as intended. According to a bear.

It's not all good news. Barov Peasant Caller shares a cooldown with the Barov Peasant Caller, and for some reason, the new, lower-level version has an every so slightly higher vendor value than the level 60 version. SLAP IN THE FACE.

And as of writing, a sunflower just went chasing after a bird through the bank.

Memories evoked by music

Lately I've been listening to music from WoW. Some of it is beautiful. This might explain why I've also been writing a bunch of WoW posts. I'm spacing them out a bit, because otherwise there would be ten in a day.

I have a habit of linking music with what I'm doing at the time. Consequently, the Coldplay album Rush of Blood to the Head is linked to a few of the Ender novels. The soundtracks for the Lord of the Rings are a slow wake up before I go to high school. Muse takes me all over the worlds within Warcraft. And of course, the music from WoW itself reminds me of what I would do as I heard it.

The Dalaran music, as impressive as it is, merely reminds me of being quite bored while I fished for coins in the fountain.

Zangarmarsh also makes me think of fishing, as I fly around looking for certain pools, as well as the occasional bit of mining. It is leveling music and I've found that leveling music is often my favorite. Elwynn and Barrens music are both very calming to me. But Zangarmarsh is not merely fishing and mining. It's also nervousness, wondering what is just over my shoulder. The habits of a PvP server, rather than a neutral city.

Grizzly Hills makes me think of trees and beautiful scenery, sometimes flying, sometimes riding. It was a place worth riding through, not like that ugly Borean Tundra or the initially pretty Howling Fjord, which rapidly lost its charm.

Nagrand may be my favorite of all. My brain adds to it the clatter of a Turbo-Charged Flying Machine and all the swooshing swinging of me beating up people fleeing the burning wreckage of Halaa. I see myself flying over scenic vistas, swooping down for a mote cloud or adamantite node. Or, inching closer and closer to the edge, trying to get the range for one of the misplaced clouds that players couldn't actually gather from. I wonder if they ever fixed those.

I didn't listen to the game music as much back then, so I don't have any memories of vanilla music beside the Barrens, Elwynn, and Molten Core. The last one evokes a sense of epicness and a total inability to fully comprehend how damn tall the boss is, as well as epic failure, as I did not know that I was not supposed to talk to Domo, so now Ragnaros is slaughtering the raid, to a grand soundtrack.

Do you have any particular memories or feelings linked to game music?

What can we do with all this stuff we have laying around?

If you've wasted any amount of time reading about PC gaming, you've probably read at least something about this or that game having old code and content, not active, but left in the game. Half of it doesn't work and never will because it's incomplete. But sometimes there are useful bits left in there. Modders love this stuff, because it's a jump-start on being able to add new content. Re-enable a disabled enemy type, give it some spawn points, fix the hit box, and bam, you've got more content. I've not yet tried it, but KOTOR2 had a lot of this stuff left over, cut by a rushed schedule, leaving modders with a lot of material to work with. How glad we should be that they didn't prune it!

WoW had this as well. As expansions accumulated, so did the random stuff with no apparent purpose. Quest chains that seemed to end too soon. Ominous bosses. Factions which increased, but for no apparent benefit. Nooks and crannies in instances. Why was it there? For some grand plan? Were they setting it up for a Soviet-style five year plan to use it in five years and then send it to a work camp? I doubt it, and not just because of the image of a Blue sending a cut troll boss to Siberia.

Instead, I think they were just being thorough and sloppy. Why did Shendrelar have a reputation? Maybe it adds some sense of consistency, of "thanks for bringing us books, bring a hundred more for a discount on things you'll never buy*". It was consistent in the way that slapping a reputation on everything is consistent. And utterly nonsensical. The result was a faction that existed for basically no point at all.

Ravenholdt Manor was similar. Rogues needed some place for a class quest, so they got it. And then for no apparent reason, the guards there were a faction. Maybe it's a coding thing, that guards need a faction to properly kill you for misclicking on a PvP server. Or it's just insanity, a theory which is supported by the existence of not one, but two grinds for increasing reputation, both based on rogues, and none of them giving any material benefit. Though the guards are nicer.

WoW ended up with a lot of shit laying around.

If they were truly polishing everything, they'd get rid of it. What is it doing? Taking up space? Wasting space in the intertubes for one more mob, one more zone, one more pixel of pointless existence. These are all shit left around by developers who clearly could not be bothered to go back and clean up the mess they left.

And good thing they didn't!

Going back to Insane in the Membrane, what was that achievement? It was the cobbled-together pack of utterly pointless reputations along with one essential one for the well-dressed pirate. Can you imagine trying to create that these days? There just aren't enough useless, left-over, backwater nothing factions to work with. There are no bits of scrap laying around for the found art project which is this achievement.

But that's not all!

Reduce (didn't happen), reuse (coming to that), recycle (lol, every boss in MC).

Blizzard was a strong practitioner of the Reuse model. They created the Dungeon 2 set, which all the cool people called tier .5, since of course the dungeon set was tier 0. If you're unsure what I'm talking about, imagine if the set pieces that you normally purchases from vendors in Stormwind (which is so annoying for Horde characters needing to run all the way over) were instead random drops, and they came from bosses in instances, scattered all over the place, so that running the same place a million times wouldn't get you a full set. Instead you'd need to run a dozen places a million times, because some jackass ninjaed your set piece. I also once got an epic staff on my warlock, which the nice priest passed on, thanks to my cunning plan of not ninjaing his drop earlier in the run, and then I got called a ninja for having it. Apparently I should have forced the priest to take it. But I have once again rambled on about something entirely unrelated. Maybe after a few dozen years and a touch of dementia this will be understandable behavior.

Okay, tier .5, what would you do if you wanted to add a bunch of new content and a quest chain that tells a neat story and upgrades a set of gear? Okay yes, you could tell people to run heroic ICC and trade in their tier pieces, but that doesn't have a different story and dear god, I cannot believe anyone willingly ran that place again after killing Arthas Mc Jackass the first time.

Or, you could go with the slightly less lazy route and tell a story we've never heard before. In this story a set of adventurers went off and got something awesome, then promptly found themselves cursed by how awesome it was, before finally it destroyed everything they had ever held dear to them. I think it was supposed to teach us a lesson about legendary items and guilds. These adventurers met terrible fates in the very same instances you'd farmed mere hours before. So of course you have to go back and kill them, because that's how we solve problems. Anyway, they went back through the instances and added in strange new boss fights with strange new gear. Imagine if mages and warlocks got a special set, a set whose special qualities included extra armor and basically nothing else. And it was awesome. But that's exactly what I'm trying to get at: when they needed more content, they already had all this places, some unused, some slightly used, like stuff from your garage that you'd sell on ebay, and they stitched it all together into a very nice quilt.

I'm not adequately explaining what a nice quilt this way. Across the story they manage to draw in other stories, everything from demons to undead to angry dwarves to not-entirely-mentally-stable elves. Remember those utterly pointless Shendrelar? Well there you go: They're being used again (technically the Insane used them second, but I like to tell my stories out of order). It's like a web of conspiracy we'd ask Glenn Beck to create, showing how the Argent Dawn, Orgrimmar, Silithus, Dark Iron dwarves, demons, and a whole pile of gold out of your pockets are all connected. DON'T YOU SEE? AM I JUST CRAZY OR IS IT JUST ME!?

Unfortunately, Burning Crusade failed to create quite so much random crap to work with, leaving the developers with no choice but to create new content. It was a terrible shame. Wrath of the Lich King did even worse, creating a nice clean continent with only a few stray dragon portals to tie in to. Then the Cataclysm came and all the useless crap was swept away, never to be seen again, and that made me a bit sad.

A highly polished experience is a good thing to have in a game. But a highly polished world, not so much. If we wander off the tracks and go poking around, we should find something dirty. Think of the stories. In one story the world is a perfect mess with grime everywhere. In another, the world appear perfectly clean, but if you go behind the wrong door you will find the horrifying mess. But in the most terrifying world, everything is clean everywhere, and that's how you know it's a nightmare which you cannot ever escape.

Better is Different

Are 3 and 4 different numbers? Yes. But they are still numbers, so we can line them up and say that 4 is bigger than 3 and if we're talking about money 4 is better and if we're talking about debt 3 is better. If your bank account goes from 3 digits to 4, that's better. But what if you're measuring something and it goes from 3 to D? Well sure, D is the 4th letter, so maybe we can say it is higher and depending on the perspective, better, but it is also different.

Better is different, but different is not always better.

What is better for you can be worse for someone else. Or for the same person, some parts are better, some parts are worse. This is what has been happening with WoW.

But let's not get into vague ideas like lobby vs. world. Instead, let's talk paladins.

A long while ago there was no such thing as Forbearance. This meant that a paladin could use divine shield right after blessing of protection. Back then there was no mass dispel, so beside a bug involving lag and shamans, divine shield could not be removed. And it lasted 12 seconds. Take note of that time: even with a GCD that is enough to use a hearthstone. It was pretty sweet.

On top of that, Divine Protection used to be a funny sort of spell. It was basically a bad version of divine shield. Priests had a spell like this as well, one of their heals. And of course paladins had a purify spell which was like cleanse but didn't remove magic. Anyway, Divine Protection made the paladins completely invincible just like Divine Shield, but didn't last as long, and made the paladin unable to attack. Of course they could still heal.

Now imagine, as a melee class, trying to fight someone who can heal himself, wears plate, and has three different ways to become entirely immune to physical damage. Not easy!

Over time their toughness has been nerfed. Heavily. Now the bubbles last less time and can be removed, along with triggering forbearance.

It's not all bad though. It may be better overall. Better, but different. Losing all that durability has gone along with some other changes.

Damage has gone up significantly. Paladin damage is no longer a joke. Oh sure, run your numbers and you might find it is too low (I have no clue where it is these days), but wherever it is, it's definitely higher than it was. Mana regeneration is higher. Control of damage is higher. Just plain hitting things hard is higher. If a paladin wants to DPS, they have some chance at it. This was not always the case. People wrote songs about it.

Despite the durability of a paladin, they were not popular tanks either. With almost no regeneration, since back then it mostly came from spirit and seal/judgement of wisdom, which was nowhere near adequate, especially since using seal of wisdom would mean a huge aggro loss. It didn't help that only warriors had tanking sets. Even in BC paladins were in an awkward spot in gear design, using up stats for intellect before mana generation was sorted out in LK (mostly). On top of mana problems, aggro wasn't so easy either. While righteous fury gave a major boost to holy damage aggro, it was a magic ability and could be removed. This was trouble for some bosses. Again, even in BC there was a boss that would spam dispel magic, which made him very tricky to tank, since righteous fury was expensive.

Despite the durability, a quirk of the spell scaling system meant that using a low rank of flash of light with good gear could result in incomparable efficiency. Even with the crap regen, paladin healers could go for a long time, thanks to getting a good bit of healing out of a very cheap spell. So maybe they were good healers. For one target. Spamming one ability for hours on end. While wearing a dress that was clearly not designed for them, so it was not even remotely flattering. Ugh. Terrible times. These days there is gear designed for it, so the priests don't whine so much. The spells are more interesting. Even I, a person who never quite enjoyed healing, can say that paladin healing has improved.

And yet, and yet...

It was fun to see a rogue kill himself punching my shield while feeding me reckoning charges so I could punch back twice as often. I'm not saying that the same punch was giving both, since obviously if you're blocking you aren't getting crit, so no reckoning, at least until they changed it.

A paladin soloed* a level 60 40-man raid boss. At level 60. Thanks to an old old version of reckoning. Balanced? Perhaps not. Awesome? Yes.

* I suppose you could argue it was a two-person operation, since the rogue did help.

This video is why I made a paladin, made her protection, and an engineer. This shit was the shit. For some perspective, those plans were not easy to get, coming from what was not a particularly hard raid, but it did require 40 people and had a low drop rate. My first shields were made by another engineer, who it turned out was about to drop it (my timing is incredible), because it wasn't good enough. Psh. Who needs stupid stats when they can make mind-control helms and cloaking devices? That running around he did in the place with the skeletons, that was Scholomance, back when it was level 60, and really not a place for someone to be soloing. Of course a mage did it(the entire place) because they wish they were as good as warlocks. Of whom I cannot find a video of one soloing it. I'm sure I saw it... Surely a warlock can do anything a mage can do, but better; that's the whole point of them!

Anyway, balance was a hazy concept back then. Things are better now. Better, but different, and different isn't always better.

Transmogrification and Void Storage

Short version: Allows you to make armor you have look like other armor you have and gives storage space for old armor.

It makes me laugh that a content patch does not evoke the slightest bit of interest. But this, something so utterly useless, does. I'm almost, ever so slightly tempted, to give WoW another try when this goes live. Collecting pretty dresses was one of my favorite activities. Er. I mean, collecting awesome and impressive suits of powerful armor that did not include and dresses or dress-like elements such as kilts. Never.

Every now and then I'd think "maybe I should play WoW again", but then I'd realize that my nostalgia was for places like BRD and BC heroics, not WoW as I left it. And then I'd get sad.

Ignorance was Bliss

Dying. Nostalgia. Whiny. Legitimate? No no, not it.

I think I've figured out exactly, objectively, undeniably the one thing that was absolutely better in vanilla WoW and why no expansion, raid, or tool can ever bring that back. I was a noob.

No no, it's not the "first time factor." Like I said recently, I am still a but amazed by the sight of Ragnaros. The looping ride around the lake of Caer Darrow to Scholomance never wore off. I get a slight buzz when I get to runecloth or thorium while crafting: This is it, this is the final run! It isn't, of course. That last one is probably just nostalgia, so let's ignore it.

Being a noob is a wonderful experience. Not only is everything new, but the expectations are different. Oh, other players were still elitist and rude (less so than these days though) and corpse runs from wipes I caused took just as long, or probably longer. Personal expectations are different. I didn't feel the need to get into a raid. I didn't feel like I deserved anything. After all, I'd earned nothing. Raiding was some distant, strange thing. When I finally got to MC and knew that finally, after all those months of ending BRD runs with a peek at the two giants, finally I would get to fight them! I'm pretty sure I died that first time. We wiped even. That was fine. We had lower expectations. We were all noobs. And it was glorious bliss.

Unless Blizzard has figured out those red flashy things from Men in Black, it will never come back. That is why WoW will never be as good as it ever was, even as it becomes better than it ever was.

I'll try to have some happier posts later in the week, hopefully with no melancholy or riots.

My life as a metaphor for WoW

Or should it be the other way around?

Here's the picture: across the street from my home is a park. Down the block is a school. They are linked by more park and a playground, dominating the area. A couple years ago there were four houses on our side of the alley. Then two of them emptied, the park district bought them, and now there is a field of grass next to our house. And a tall fence that they were kind enough to install. The couple next door are past the point of tip-toeing around it: they are old. We don't know how long they'll be there, but I doubt more than a few years.

That would leave my parents' house in the middle of the block, surrounded on three sides by the grass of the park. Someday, that house will be sold and torn down.

This leaves the children of the area with a large park to play in, bigger than before, with more room for soccer and baseball, with no windows nearby to worry about. For them, it is absolutely better.

But for me, it's my childhood home vanishing. I don't need to live there anymore and in many ways do not want to. That doesn't make it feel much better to imagine it gone, forever. No more ability to go back and see it. Instead I'll be left trying to remember exactly where the sidewalk was and when the stairs started, with nothing but memories left, and left with a ridiculous desire to see it again, just to know what it was, to point out the windows my brother broke, the low roof I slept under, the red curtains that left the light filtering into the basement looking like a submarine movie.

It is, of course, progress, but that doesn't mean there isn't loss.

Cataclysm makes me sad. I hope the children are happy.

P.S. My use of children is not meant to be a literal "kids are taking over WoW", but instead "the next generation." If anything, I'd bet that the audience is older, no longer being so skewed by college students with way too much time.

Could I play vanilla or BC WoW?

It's a proven truthiness that BC and vanilla were far superior to LK and Cataclym. But I'm left with a nagging doubt. Not about their superiority, but their playability. If Blizzard released classic or BC servers, would I play again? I'm certain I'd resub, but for how long?

While I had no problem with the manual group formation, I think I would now. The idea of trying to form a group and possibly not succeeding, an event which was not rare, is hard to imagine now. LFG! *crickets* Huh. Now what?

And while I find the notion of interchangeable instances to be silly, would I want to say LFG Scholomance and really mean only Scholomance? Though I don't think I was ever so specific, since there always seemed to be something to get from another place, it just wasn't my highest priority. So let's say Scholo, dead Strat, and Maraudon (need NR for AQ!), what if for some reason people are only running UBRS? Maybe I'd go there too, since my dungeon chest never dropped.

Speaking of resistance, would I enjoy it? While I like the idea, and I liked the system back then, would I actually enjoy farming specific bits of gear for one or two raids and then stashing it away forever? I am going to assume that if resistance gear stayed we'd have gotten some sort of storage system for it, so bag space won't be the ruination of the resistance concept, but it may still fail to be any fun.

On a slight tangent, I do believe that many of the flaws of early WoW could and would have been fixed up a bit. In other words, I'm not advocating or comparing to the worst of the problems, but what I feel would have been the evolution of WoW, if it had been patched and improved, but maintained a similar philosophy. So things like awful talents would have been fixed, along with class balance and some of the strangely stupid diminishing returns on reputation.

Then there's my beloved and long lost Alterac Valley. I loved the ridiculously long games. My first game turned out to have lasted 25 hours (I wasn't there the whole time) and I'd been in there for a few, which I later learned was fairly short for old AV. Would that still be fun? The futility of an instant win promoted playing just for the fun of it, and encouraged any attempt at all at creative tactics, such as when my warlock summoned half our team behind the enemy line (back before ritual of summoning). But now, I might just wonder "will this ever end so I can get my points?"

It makes me wish I had more (or perhaps any) experience in other MMOs, to see what they do over time, how they change, but also, how the player changes. Do games get worse (or better, but for a different audience)? Do players burn out? Or do they learn new expectations and those are the true problem?

You're still useful as long as things don't change too much

Remember that Starcraft 2 game thingy that came out not recently? So I first played that recently. That's how I roll. Slow. If it helps, imagine that I pronounced roll more like roww, so then it rhymes with slow.

My friends bought it slightly less recently and I played with them a few times. It made me happy. Why? Because it's not so different from Starcraft 1. Oh sure, some new units, some strange tweaks, but more or less the same game. The Zerg got a disgusting upgrade (sound effects make me want to vomit), Terran got even more anti-ground capability (banshees ftw!), and Protoss require more vespene gas. Siege tanks, bunkers of marines, and a few turrets and we're good to go with the turtle.

I wasn't a Starcraft expert, master, or even decent player. I was the sort of person who would cheat to get through the campaigns because dammit, too hard! Then I'd cheat in me vs. AI matches. Wasted away a lot of weekends. Fun times. But I did learn a bit about it. I learned what units do and a bit of the rock-paper-scissors of it all.

The fundamentals were all the same. Harassing enemy gathering with hit-and-run attacks. Peace through superior firepower. High ground. Detectors. Spamming the crap out of gathering units.

So in the few games we've played, I won most of them. I'd surprise them with surprising tactics like vikings blowing up all their SCVs when they had no turrets, then running out when the marines arrived. Or dropships, sorry, medivacs, carrying siege tanks.

And of course as Protoss I still had it all figured out, and by figured out I mean figured out very poorly, since they use a much more dynamic sort of defense than the Terrans, which I'm not very good at. But at least they still have carriers.

And zerg are still disgusting. I did notice that the Ultralisk got majorly buffed, since it seemed to be a giant waste of everything before, whereas now it's like a giant death walker of death and doom.

As I write this I'm waiting for Starcraft to download, since even if it isn't the new one, I can at least get some of the fix.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

A blogger I've never heard of, Silverspar (apparently just started), has gotten into a tiny little tussle with a podcaster I've never heard of, TotalBiscuit (podcasts are for the illiterate, true story). I can't say I have much of an opinion on their fight, since I've never listened to him and have little incentihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifve to do so. Apparently he quit WoW and as is the popular thing to do, blamed it on WoW being a gigantic pile of crap and noobs wrapped in noobish crap, to paraphrase the general claim.

So all that aside, I came across this comment on her post.

If your idea of raiding is whiping 50 times on a boss then you obviously aren't very good at the game and are probably part of the problem that in the new WoW community, players that lack skill and have to have the content nerfed into the ground so they can do it all the while not actually developing the skill that the rest of us had to do while in Vanilla and TBC, you are a disgrace to the game and you have no right to talk about this subject.

The classic damned if you do, damned if you don't. Let's leave aside the part that 50 is obviously a big, round number chosen for effect rather than accurate reflection of a raid experience. Instead, let's consider this: whhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifat if she wiped once? Never? She'd probably have a much different perspective. And there it is, the classic issue in anything about balance, fairness, challenge, or whatever other word of the week you can think up: If you have difficulty you're a noob, but if you're successful you're proof that everything is fine.

Or as I phrased it three years ago (minus a few weeks):

If you're in Kara complaining about your class/spec, you're just a noob. Get better gear and see the real game, until then, shut up.
If you're in Sunwell, what is there to complain about? You're proof that your class/spec clearly does work, at least well enough to be in demand.
If you're 1400, you're a noob and shouldn't talk like you know real PvP.
If you're 2200, aren't you proof that it can be done, that your class/spec does work?

But wait, there's more! (of the other guy, not my old post)

Also to argue the teirs mean that raiding is about gear if absolutely ridiculous, apply to any raiding gear that's worth a damn and they'll require you to show logs so that they can till have efficiant you are with your performance to your gear level, you all around have no idea what you're talking about in this blog post and it sickens mean that there are some idiots out there that'll agree with your horrendously bad points of view.

So funny story, I seem to recall a whole lot of gear-checking for raids. Let's see, during Wrath when things were all flat. But also in BC. And vanilla. Hm. I wonder if maybe, just maybe, gear is something that people are always checking, because it's a hell of a lot easier to check gear than dig through logs.

Let's go back to this bit in the first block: "developing the skill that the rest of us had to do while in Vanilla and TBC... you have no right to talk about this subject."
So obviously we're looking at a bit of generic internet asshole, mixed in with an unhealthy dose of "I played vanilla so I'm better than you" (guilty). But the no right to talk part, that's something uh... okay even beside the censorship aspect of it, let's pretend that Silverspar is incredibly bad at WoW, ungodly bad, so bad that you'd weep to see her pitiful attempts at play. Does that mean she should shut up? Well perhaps we don't particularly want to listen to her noobish opinions, but silence is risky. Silence is an undiagnosed problem. Not with her, but with the game. Let's pretend that from Wrath onward no one (or a sufficiently large portion of the population) learned to play better. That would be a very strange situation! Would it be caused by some unusually concentrated influx of idiots? Or some sort of change in the game design?

Or am I reading far too much into just another jackass? Vanilla and BC grouped together? Hm, bit of a revision there. I remember more than a little bit of how vanilla was so much harder and better than BC and how back then people had to be better. Could we be looking at a bit of fuzzy history? No, perish the thought, we all know memory is a perfect record.

Heh, earth shock used to have a massive aggro component on it. Fun times.

You're only useful until everything changes

The other day I was googling myself in a vain attempt at vanity and I found that an old guide I wrote about paladin blessings is still around. At the time it was fairly handy, or at least I thought so. With the help of the paladin forums I'd managed to explain their uses and nuances. I was damn proud of it.

Now it serves as a reminder of times past. A time when hands were blessings, when blessings lasted ten minutes (you thought I was going to say five, but this was BC). Let's look into these dark ages. Or maybe dim ages. This isn't vanilla we're talking about here. Oh man, the dresses. Don't ask.

Blessings are the primary form of buffing for paladins. There are three general categories of blessings: short, regular, and greater. The short blessings are sacrifice, protection, and freedom. The regular blessings are wisdom, might, light, salvation, sanctuary, and kings. Greater blessings are longer versions of regular blessings.

Despite my categorizing, blessings are all considered to be the same type of buff, so without exception you can only have one blessing on you per paladin. They are magic buffs so they can be removed by many spells including purge, dispel, devour magic, and arcane shot. Both spellsteal and death have an effect on blessings.

In other words, hand of freedom would remove blessing of kings. This was super-convenient.

In regard to Blessing of Might: "The ret talent Improved Blessing of Might increases the effect of this talent by 20%. For 5 talent points that gives 44 additional attack power"
44 AP wasn't a bit deal then either, though more than it sounds like now. But consider the implications of talents like this and improved Blessing of Wisdow (Might didn't always give mana/5) "The holy talent Improved Blessing of Wisdom increases the effect of this by 20% (8mana/5)." These were marginal gains, but expensive to get, so we often coordinated talents to maximize the effect. Blessing required coordination as well to ensure that everyone got the best blessing they could. Between kings, wisdom, might, light, and salvation, this got complex.

What was Blessing of Light? Well duh, it buffed Holy Light and Flash of Light. DUH! "Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing the effects of Holy Light spells used on the target by up to 580 and the effects of Flash of Light spells used on the target by up to 185. Lasts 10 min." What class doesn't have an entire buff slot taken up by a buff that only affects one third of their possible three roles and is of no help whatsoever to other classes?

If you've ever thought "how dumb is it that blessing of kings is so gret but only paladins and drudis can cast it", then I offer you this: "Ten points in protection are needed to get BoK." That's right, not only did druids not have kings, instead having a strange weaker than every other buff buff in the form of Mark of the Wild, not all paladins could even use Kings. It was a 10 point talent!

"Hunter pets, voidwalkers, and felguards are counted as warriors while buffing so do not make the mistake of buffing the tank with kings, then giving the hunters’ pets might and overwriting the tank’s blessing. Succubi, imps,and felhunters are counted as warlocks."
Super-convenient.

I'm sure you can't even believe it, that I, the most useless blogger ever, who once apologized for accidentally giving useful advance (I have standards), was once upon a time useful. But dammit, I was. Then Blizzard went and ruined it by streamlining everything. Can you imagine a blessing guide these days? It would be too simple! Too easy! Dammit, I like pointless inconvenience and arbitrary mechanical restrictions. They are what separate the awesome detail-obsessed weirdos from the people are are just weird for pretending to be owls. I'm saying druids are weirdos.

Goodbye: Zul. Goodbye, Gurub.

Yesterday I did ZG, perhaps for my last time ever. I got there many hours later than I expected.

Somehow I'd ended up selling some bijous for the guild. Then I offered other rep materials for other grinds. Somehow we ended up going to Molten Core. It seemed like a good way to gradually draw people into the madness of our guild. They needed AQ20 too, so we went there. Then we did AQ40. Why? Why not? They left and a few guildies and I went to Blackwing Lair. There I was disappointed to learn that Styleen's Impeding Scarab had been reduced from its glory to a mere boring +parry trinket. Once upon a time it was glorious:

Equip: Increases your block rating by 24.
Equip: Increases the block value of your shield by 24.
Equip: Increases defense rating by 20.

I don't remember the original values, before ratings. But I'm pretty sure that was 2% block chance, no idea on the defense. These were the BWl trinkets; items so well designed that they were often used even at 70. Or maybe it just showed that people didn't like the level 70 trinkets much. Too many procs or on-use to keep track of.

But I wanted to talk about ZG.

It dropped blues and epics and used a strange loot system, one which I don't think we could imagine these days. There were of course the usual random drops off bosses, with some loot shared across them. And then there were these strange things: bijous, coins, and paragons. The first two were sources of reputation while the last was a gear token, much like we saw in Burning Crusade. They could be used to create a set. Strange sets with strange bonuses, which make little sense now and possibly not much more back then. Oh but no mere armor. No no, trinkets! Ah the trinkets.

Can you imagine a place called the Edge of Madness? Surrounded by imps and demons and with a strange darkness in the air. Madness indeed. And on a rotating basis the troll ancestors could be called. Gurubashi Mojo Madness brought the boss, but was hard to make. This week it might be Hazza'rah. They weren't especially hard and they weren't especially generous with loot. But this one drops dream thread. And the other drops his tooth. Collect all four! And find a voodoo doll. Find the one for your class. But beware the hoodoo pile, for it is jinxed! Even says so: "Jinxed Hoodoo Pile". Touch it, take the reward, and ask yourself "Will Hakkar rule the world?" Many would say yes, and we would kill them. Put it all together and what do you have? Trinkets yes, pretty trinkets! Power, great power! Power in trinkets!

Ah, but now you have your paragon of power. But do you have the reputation you need for it? No? Then no armor for you! BEGONE! Come back with more.

It's all our faults anyway. We're the ones who brought back Hakkar. We were fools. Easily tricked. You and I did it. We brought him back. Why did we not listen to the green flight? They knew. But we found the screechers and we stole the egg and we went to the Sunken Temple and we drew him BACK. Blood. Nothing good is summoned by blood. We used the egg and put him in the egg and then we gave away the egg. For what? Not worth it. No no.

And he enslaved the Gurubashi. Or did he? Perhaps many desired the power of his presence. But the priests, they were caught. Ensnared. Oh they would bless us to free them. And so we went with the support of the Zandalar. They sent us in, brave heroes and adventurers, to invade the city and stop Hakkar before he drained the world. Five priests and priestesses under his thrall and forced to empower him. Oh you'd not want to fight him without them. Oh no. He would do terrible things to you. Worse than usual! We kill them and they thank us. What a welcome change!

Hakkar the Soulflayer. Not a nice name. He controls minds and corrupts blood. And steals your life. So we did the unthinkable and we dipped ourselves in poison and we never removed it, so that when he tried to steal our life, he stole poison instead.

We fished up another boss with the help of Nat Pagle. Or was it Pat Nagle? We were rather drunk at our last meeting.

And Broodlord Mandokir did kill many of us and the ghosts brought us back and he did level up (indeed he did!) and he did yell, "Ding!" and Jin'do the Hexxer did respond with a friendly "Grats!" And we all laughed for it was silly and we had nothing else to do while running back from the wipe. And all the while he was watching us. He was angry when we killed his raptor.

Jindo has the most frightening assembly of concubines since the brothel in Karazhan, and the flesh beasts in Medivh's bedroom. Gnomes and mummies. GNOMES AND MUMMIES.

*sigh*

Goodbye, Zul'Gurub. I shall miss thee.

But thanks for the three Razzashi Hatchlings.

Someone else also read my mind and conveniently provided an example of saying stupid shit

It's sad the way they have 'dumbed down' raids to the point where all you have to do to be COMPLETELY AWESOME is show up and stay out of fires and run away from baddies.

I wish they would make it more complicated than it is currently, but sure as (*&& there's going to be an army of spoiled raiders coming in here to rate me down just because I want to make it harder for them.

Getting epics used to mean you were good. Now all it means is that you played enough hours to get there.

That being said, this actually wasn't a bad item to have. I wish I could get the pattern on my Blood elf.

If anyone on any server gets this, Please contact Nomiconn on Turalyon-US Horde. I will see about buying it from you, and then transferring that toon to Turalyon.

This was a comment about the pattern for Flarecore Wraps.
Farming FR gear or mats for crafted FR gear required no skill. Getting epics frequently did not mean you were good, but just that the raid needed some more bodies and the RNG had blessed the raid with more class X gear than it actually needed, meaning you were good enough to be worth more than a shard.

I actually like the concept of resist gear. But let's not trick ourselves into thinking that removing resist fights dumbed down WoW, single quotes or not.