Smores over Felfire

“It’s in about 10 minutes now… are you sure you’re ready?”

Arthur rolled his eyes and answered, for the fifth time, “I’m just turning 40 Jane… It’s not like I’m turning 80.”

“I would hope not! If you were 80 you should be at home camping your lawn so you don’t have any lowbies ganking your grass.” Jane took the frosting and sprinkles out of the cabinet and started to decorate Arthur’s cake. “Do you remember when you first met me? What were we… 19?”

Arthur grinned, “I was a PvP twink, ganking other kids in the playground and you were the Carebear they all cried to when I pwned them.” He shook his head, mildly embarrassed. “You were the only person who never flagged, so you, naturally, were the only person I trolled.”

Jane smiled and started icing the top of the cake. “And after I put in a ticket to the Grounds-Master, you were banned from the playground for a week.”

“But you were the only one who would share a table with me, so I started to think you couldn’t be that bad.”

They were both silent for a moment, thinking about how the years have changed them both. About a minute later there was a knock at the door and the familiar pitter-patter of the rest of the family.

“Hey Dad!” A blonde-haired boy, about 18, walked in and plopped himself down at the table. “I hope you’re ready for this cake. Mom spent forever getting the mats for it!”

“And I helped!” Piped up a girl’s voice. The family, with the exception of the boy, turned and waved at the newcomer, a girl in her early teens.

“Murry, say hi to your sister!” Arthur chided. The boy just raised an eyebrow at his dad and shrugged.

“Oh don’t mind him, he’s just ignoring me. He’s still angry about me “ninja-ing” his keys so I could drive the scooter around the block.”

“Murry, can you drop it for just a few minutes, it’s almost your Dad’s birthday!”

Murry rolled his eyes, and nodded. “Dad… why did you choose the name ‘Murry’ anyway?”

“One of my oldest buddies when we were both in the police academy was named ‘Murry.’ We both promised each other that if we got married, we’d name our first son after the other.” Arthur grinned, it was only half-true… He lost a bet and had to either pay up 5 g’s or give his firstborn son. He figured the name was enough though…

“Dad, what do you want to do when you hit 40?” the daughter asked.

Arthur thought for a moment. “Honestly, I haven’t thought about it. I’ll probably fly over to see my folks. Probably go to work to train up new skills tomorrow. After that, not sure.” He grinned, “But I’m definitely going to get myself a motorcycle.” He looked over at Jane who, as he planned, was glaring at him. “What?!”

Jane broke her “chastising” stare to look at the clock. “Oh! It’s almost time!” She put on a few candles, lit them, and brought the cake to the kitchen table. “In five… four… three… two… one…”

Arthur took a deep breath and blew out all the candles with the first try. As they started to smoke out, he smiled widely. “Ding!”

The family smiled back, saying in unison: “Grats!”

I read the posts, I heard the raves, but I straight-up refused to spec destro for Sunwell, Hyjal, and other late-game raids for BC. Not because I think I had a higher-performing spec, mind you, but because I hated the idea of a warlock being played as a mage.

No… I take that back… like a BC boomkin.

Agony, corruption (maybe) and shadow bolt. That was it. Warlocks just buffed the bajezus out of SB and went to town.

The early-WotLK warlock had a much, MUCH more complex rotation. Haunt/SB for the two-stack shadow-embrace, Unstable Affliction, Corruption, a curse, siphon life, immolation, and after you got all of those up, you had to minimize downtime for each DOT without clipping off the last tick of any.

It was overly complicated, had a lot of chances to mess up, and if you DID mess up, you lost a lot of DPS.

And I loved every minute of it.

The need to keep 6 DOTs up on a single boss meant I had to prioritize, think about how long each would take to cast, plan 5 seconds in front of me for every cast, and factor in travel-time for each DOT. Heck, it got more complicated thanks to the Drain Soul added bonus when the bosses hit 25% HP.

All this to say: do we, the warlock community, want more simplification in our rotation or more complexity?

With recent changes to ‘locks, Immolation and Siphon Life were removed from our rotation (SL has been “moved into” Corruption and UA/Immolation are mutually exclusive), thus knocking the Aff lock’s rotation to 4 dots (UA, Corr, curse, Haunt). While it has made a slight decrease in lock peak DPS, it makes the mental hiccups much less costly. Contrast this with Destro-rotations, which are more CD dependent than rotation dependent. Said another way:

Chaos Bolt > Conflagrate > Immolate > Incinerate > Agony  > Corruption

If CB is on cooldown, use it. Same goes for Conflagrate. After Immolation, the DOTs take a fairly significant dip in importance, pretty much regulating them to “if I only have 2 seconds left for my CB cooldown… I might as well use Agony.”

Simply stated, rotation complexity makes the class much more interesting to play!  It makes fights like Patchwerk more challenging (as you only have your rotation to worry about) and allows more dps during movement-intensive fights (as more of our spells are instant-cast). The only drawback (which doubles as balancing) is the amount of DPS lost if we don’t have everything working perfectly as well as the increased chance of DOT clipping.

And, most importantly, it epitomizes the differences of mages and locks: Mages are great for burst damage. Locks are there for the long haul.

Guild leaders get tired, Raid leaders lose interest, Role-leads don’t read up on the latest patch, there are any number of reasons why the officers of a guild decide to throw in the towel. The mark of a good officer, however, is doing so without causing a bunch of unneeded drama.

That being said: there IS going to be drama. The trick is minimizing it.

Firstly: The guild leader should have just one job: admin-ing the guild. Having the Glead raid-lead as well tends to cause trouble as far as drawing comments from the rest of the guild goes (ie: if my raid leader is the guild leader… who do I talk to when criticizing the raid leader?). If the guild lead is stepping down, make sure whoever is replacing them doesn’t have another job. Or if they do, have them give it up (or just switch with you, either way works)

Second: Step back. Whenever someone comes to you with concerns, suggestions, etc. related to your old job, give them a polite “It’s not my problem” and direct them to the current <insert position here>. This tells everyone who asks that you aren’t going to work from the shadows. Your replacement really is your replacement.

Third: Stay in the game. Having someone else take over for you is very important when you’re getting burnt out, but you may take it a step further and stop playing the game entirely. Assume you want to keep playing, but “raid content just isn’t interesting right now.” That’s fine, pick up an alt (or log on just for chatting). I say this because stepping away from the game, even if only for a month, will distance yourself from the rest of the guild. So when you come back after your 30-day hiatus, you might not get your old spot back (We thought you had quit the game completely!). Rolling an alt is a great way to blow off raid-steam (and, incidentally, a great way to use old badges).

Fourth, and lastly (and shortly): Air out any frustration you have before you step down. If you have a beef with the Glead, bring it up. With the raid lead: say so. Changing management is a good time to start fresh, so take it.

I understand the appeal behind heirloom items… I really do. Heck, because of the buff to XP I don’t level an alt unless I have the shoulders, period. I recently got the SP hammer for my paladin and I love how I’m able to do immense amounts of damage because, frankly, I’m rolling more SP now than I was on my main when he was 60. Combine these two items with the new heirloom items when 3.2 hits, I’ll likely be sitting on at least 4 pieces of heirloom gear that’ll switch from toon to toon as each hits 80.

But then I got to thinking… if I were to create a brand new level 1 character and hand them all the heirloom items I could (shoulders, trinket, weapon, chest-piece), how would it affect the rest of the game? I mean, sure, I still have a slew of other slots I need to gear out (neck, head, legs, feet, etc), but each will seem more-or-less useless when compared to the heirlooms that only get better with time. And since I’ve got more than enough alts to make myself the best craftable gear for the level, why would I want to group up for a dungeon when I can level faster by myself?

In short, while I appreciate the additional XP gained from the items, I’m somewhat curious as to why WoW insists that we grind up levels from 1 when the path to 80 gets shorter and shorter. Heirlooms, numerous nerfs to the amount of XP needed per level, recruit-a-friend craziness, all of these are ways for players to get to 80 as fast as possible and, frankly, it’s tedious. I know, I know, if we take out leveling altogether, then we’ll have a bunch of idiot-80s who can’t play their class. We have that now… so nothing would change.

Here’s what I’m proposing: You have an alt. Its a level 4 druid who you think will be boomkin, but not sure. You ALSO know that mana conservation for boomies for the early levels is rough (as it is with most mana-users), so you’ll probably spend as much time on the ground drinking as you will fighting. So you jump over to your main, who happens to have an heirloom trinket called [Chromie's Cheatsheet] which takes 10% of the XP you’d gain from every kill (not quests, just kills) and “stores” it. As the day goes on (and the trinket gets tossed to all your high-level alts for their respective daily runs) and the trinket gets tossed to your level 4 druid, you have a good bit of XP stored up on this thing. You wait the all-too-familiar 30 seconds for the CD to run out once you’ve got it equipped, pop the trinket, and BAM! Your level 4 is now 14.

Does it instantly allow 1 to 80? In theory. But the amount of time you’d spend running around randomly killing things to get 10 times the needed XP on a main would be better spend… I don’t know… actually questing on the alt itself. Would it get abused? Not sure how… as leveling alts would be the only thing it would be useful for. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you get on your main, put on not only [Chromie's Cheatsheet], but the other heirloom items that up XP gains via kills.You kill something that gives 1000 XP… so it get’s bumped up to 1200. [Chromie's Cheatsheet] absorbs 120.

So you get an extra 20% of 10%… after spending days grinding the badges needed for 3 heirloom items. I think the system will somehow survive.

Regardless, this concept would make the grind MUCH easier to cope with as players are still actually required to log on and play the game and, eventually (probably around Outland or late-Azeroth), the returns for XP gains just wouldn’t be as useful as compared to actually questing around myself.

And who knows, some of my lazier guildmates might just pick up an alt if the grind isn’t so difficult.

I’m a bit of a lore geek. I think the back story and implications of Ulduar is really cool, if a bit sudden (Oh hey! We found an old god! Neat! Let’s kill him!). And, like Naxx, I’m sure there are going to be a number of PUG Ulduar runs for gear so people can gear up for the Coliseum. But with all the (ridiculously) cool stuff in Ulduar, I would go one step further and say that Ulduar will continue to be run, and often, by most raiding guilds.

The differences between Naxx at 3.1 and Ulduar at 3.2 are many, but I’ll simply hit the big ones. When 3.1 hit, the achievement-drakes for doing a few “hard modes” in Naxx were yanked. With a smattering of Ulduar gear, I’m willing to bet the amount of people vying for the Ulduar achievement drakes will only grow (Because, let’s face it, once you’ve got a good set of Ulduar gear, doing Momma Said Knock You Out isn’t going to be that difficult. Given that I’m a 10man raider, I’ll be getting items with a 232 level once 3.2 drops. 10man ulduar gave us 219 level stuff. I anticipate, because there are so few bosses, we’ll be rolling hard mode Coliseum in about a month or so after the patch, which means the discrepancy between the progression and Ulduar item levels will only increase, meaning the difficulty of things like Heartbreaker will decrease.

Additionally, who DOESN’T want a shot at Algalon?

Moving on: as of today, I’m yet to hear of any exceptional enchants, patterns, etc. that drops out of Coliseum. Not so for Ulduar. I STILL need the two enchanting recipes from Ulduar and, frankly, I’m more than willing to deal with the headache that is 25man Ulduar just for a shot at the recipes (I’m sure I can find someone to do the enchants for me… but it’s a pride thing). There is a lot of BoE stuff that can be crafted from those recipes that will take a new 80 from blues and greens to high-end epic with but a few cloth cool downs, some random mats, and time. I would love to hand a new mage a spellweave set, 2 ulduar-level crafts, and a handful of enchants right at 80 because, frankly, I’m getting a little bored with working up people from Naxx through late-Ulduar.

The last, and most obvious to me, is the Hammer. I know it’s legendary and it’s hard as hell to get, but so long as it is within 75 levels of the “high end” stuff it will be used. I’ve got one retadin who STILL uses Sulfuras in heroics (and does great dps) just to prove that these things are legendary for a reason. I would even suggest that the hammer will be better as the game goes as higher SP = bigger bubble. Sulfuras doesn’t have a scaling ability like that (then again, it’s also from vanilla wow… which gave out SP and AP sparingly at best.

With only 5 “boss encounters” for the whole instance, each is going to be either ridiculously hard or a obnoxiously easy in favor of the hard mode bosses being tiny gods. Either way, each seems to be a glorified heroic run without the trash (Which I’m all for, by the way. Ditch the trash, it’s just annoying). This being said, it’s likely that the coliseum is something to tide us over for Icecrown as this feels a lot like Sunwell: kind of hurried and not much relevance to the central story (which, at the time, was all about Illidan). I like new content as much as the next guy… but Ulduar is a really cool place and I anticipate several more runs before we’re done with it.

Also: we still need to drop Yogg… and I know we’ll keep doing it until we kill him.