Smores over Felfire

I know I’ve been harping on the LFG changes for a few days now, but this’ll be the last one directly about it, I promise.

I spent a decent portion of the weekend on WoW, specifically on my paladin tank, because I learned something crucial to this toon’s development. There is a mighty MIGHTY shortage of tanks in the Whirlwind battlegroup. I mean, I sit in the LFG queue for 5 seconds tops before I’m tossed into a group. No, I’m not exaggerating, I had someone sitting no more than 4 feet away from me and she heard me, repeatedly, never get beyond 5 seconds before WoW popped the “you’ve found a group” window. Furthermore, most of the dps I pug with are so very sick of waiting that they’ll happily run at my breakneck speed through the heroic (I think the median run-time for anything not scripted, like VH or CoS, is around 20 minutes per instance) and we’ll leave the healer sobbing in the corner ’cause I’m agging everything my shiny-ground-agg-maker will let me. This strategy is so effective, by the way, that I’m currently sitting on 3 pieces of t9 gear and I’m within 3 badges of a 4th. I clock in at around 12-15 badges an hour and by this time next week I’ll very likely be more geared on my paladin than I am on my warlock, which frightens me on a number of levels (But I don’t WANNA tank! I wanna deeps!).

The primary reason I got so much gear for the paladin is actually rather simple:

1) I run the paladin when my S.O., a bubble-priest, is around, and when you have a tank AND healer pre-grouped, the median wait-time for LFG is around 3 seconds. She knows how quickly I pull and compensates accordingly (read: If I’m within healing range, I likely need heals ’cause I agged the room… again…). When the healer AND the tank are both on the same page, the DPS can blow through their mana/rage/energy/runic power and before you know it, we’re standing over Loken saying “Um… what just happened? I remember buffing at the entrance, then there’s this 20 minute panic-and-pain filled blur… now I have 6 more badges and I don’t know how- Oh hey! Loken’s dead!”

2) I hate waiting for a group. As the warlock, the median wait-time is around 10 minutes, which is enough time to do 2, maybe 3 dailies, get stuck in a group where the other 4 run into walls most of the time, get 6 badges after about an hour, then repeat. Given a similar amount of time on my paladin, I’d probably pick up a piece of t9 in the same span of time.

So how do you, someone who loves their DPSer, get the same turnaround time as the tanks and healers (median healer-LFG-time is just under a minute, by the way)? The answer, as you could probably guess, is to group with a healer/tank. You get to piggyback on their preferential treatment and THEY get a dps who knows which end of a dagger/wand to hold. Assuming you don’t have a favored tank/healer to roll with, the alternative may make you a little quezy: dual spec as a tank/healer (assuming you’re not a warlock/mage/rogue/hunter. If you are, see the “piggyback” option). You don’t have to be amazing, you just have to be good enough to keep the tank alive. If the dps acts stupid, let ‘em die, your job is to keep those who passed the “is it your ass or a hole in the ground ” test. Why roll a healer/tank on your beloved meat-grinder? Because badges don’t care if you use them for that dps trinket when you earned them as a healer.

Also: no waiting.

I hate waiting.

I’m going to be very frank here: I love the new LFG system. Maybe it’s because our server is full of people who really don’t know what they’re doing, but I’ve run a lot of pugs and I can count the number of bad pugs thus far with just one hand.

The problem: I never get to run a pug group with my warlock.

I’ve got a handful more triumph badges I need and then I will be running the priest for all my heroics because, frankly, the priest is still running around in lvl 200 gear. Yeah, I know, it made me cringe too. But on the other side, every time I upgrade from, say, moonshroud robe to Velen’s  Robe of Conquest, I get a noticeable increase in effectiveness. And due to the immense amount of dailies I can run as the priest (because no one heals in whirlwind… apparently), I’ve picked up 2 t9 tokens in as many days. At this rate, I’ll be geared out in about 2 weeks without USING the priest for raids. And therein lies the curse.

Currently, I have a guild that is rather short on healers, so the best thing for me, as a guild master, to do is gear out the priest and raid with it. The course of action I WANT to take is sending my priest on the sidelines and burn some face off with the lock. If the two raid’s days were staggered, I could take the best of both words (as the one I’m leading is short on heals and the one I subbed in for the other day was short on dps), but alas, I can’t as they… well… aren’t.

Damn… I’m sounding a bit more emo these days than usual. Next week, upbeat crap, I promise.

I’m willing to work with the game on a number of issues, like continuity for raids (ie: how can I go back into ToC and kill the Twins again after I did it the first time) and the inability for players to learn how to repair their own gear (WoW has to find some way to make a decent money drain to keep the economy stable). But one thing really bugs me in the WoW world… death. I know, I know, it’s a tired argument, but I promise I’m going to take it in at least a different direction than it’s been taken in before. I’m not going to moan about how death for players is senseless, I’m going to talk about death for NPCs.

And not just any NPCs, but the nameless NPCs.

Wait… I guess that makes them “any NPCs.” So… disregard that last sentence.

ANYway, in the Pit of Saron, there are 2 scenes that end with large amounts of NPC-death. Both are done in a non-soul-sucking manner, so it stands to reason that they are not dead-dead, but just mostly-dead (ie: without outside intervention, they will remain dead). Jaina makes a big deal about how she is not pleased, at all, with the soldiers’ deaths, but presses on anyway.

Rewind with me to your mid-to-high 30s. Remember Scarlet Monastery? Remember how annoyed you were when Whitemane stunned the party and undid all your work on Morgraine?

You know… that guy you just stabbed in the face… probably a hundred or so times?

Why wouldn’t Jaina have a priest on hand that did nothing but rez the dead? Teleport them in, mass resurrection, teleport out. It would cut down training new recruits to.. um… nearly nothing.

I know this seems kind of like a cheating post… but it’s always bothered me…

I’m a CS graduate. I’m currently working in the IT field. So I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to berating Blizzard about choices they’ve made. Oh sure, whenever my favored class (warlock) gets nerfed, I’m a little annoyed, but that’s acceptable as it’s in the name of balancing.

I am, however, going to have to take a jump off the apologetics bandwagon and take some time on the “wtf were you thinking?!” soapbox.

Last week, I spent some time on the PTR and noted that I was unable to get the boss’s loot for the last encounter in HoR. In fact, no one in my 5 man team was able to get on the gunship and grab said loot. I’ll say this again from a coding perspective:

5 players on 5 different connections with 5 different sets of addons with 5 different computer configurations in (likely) 5 different area codes were not able to get on the gorram gunship. This cuts out every possible error with one exception: something is wrong with WoW’s code. And this isn’t a “if you are flying upside down inside dalaran and happen to be in guild chat and the game happens to crash” wrong, but a bug that will occur every time a party finishes the instance successfully.

I based my guess that we were going to see the patch next week, maybe the week after, on the simple fact that, historically, WoW doesn’t allow for these kind of massive bugs to get through to the live realms.

It appears that I was mistaken.

Why in Yoggy’s name would you release something this insanely buggy? Blizzard has managed to persuade (with some exceptions) their subscribers to simply wait until “when it’s ready.” Their callous attitude towards published deadlines is met with disapointment, but reluctant acceptance that, well, “we want it now, but if it’s not ready, it won’t be fun.”

Enter 3.3, Fail of the Lich King.

I pulled together a 5-man team to blitz through the heroics. The blitz turns into an agonizingly slow crawl when it takes us about 15 minutes to “find” the instance (ie: we get to the instance portal and WoW replies that “the instance cannot be found, instance aborted” message) and another 5-10 for all the players to recover from whatever crash, hanging loading screen, etc that they got themselves into prior to the instance playing peek-a-boo. We got to the scourgelord before the instance server simply told us “Nope! you’re done!” and refusing to let our tank into an instance we were already tagged to. Somehow, the game thought he was the only one who wasn’t able to find the instance (probably due to one too many hits to the head). Based on the chatter in the general channel it was something that was happening pan-server. Again, this a happy camper does not make.

I’m sure that there was enormous pressure to get IC out this week, which is why, ultimately, the decision was made to throw it on the live realms. People were getting tired of ToC because it’s a very short raid. Most people on my server don’t REALLY care about heroic ToC because, well, it’s a lot of work especially when IC will VERY CLEARLY outclass H ToC in regards to gear. But now there is even more pressure (and angry players) who will be yelling louder now than they were during 3.2.

Does the development team now have a great deal more feedback? Yes, but it’s not the positive kind.

So I finally broke down and visited the PTR for a few days. I know mmo-champ claims we’ll be getting it tommorow, but I wanted to see how the brave new world is going to treat us.

OK, so I really just wanted to see how the Quel’danar questline goes.
And how warlock DPS changes.

Regardless, having spent a handful of days in the PTR, here are my notes:

First and foremost, the Quel’Danar questline is neat. Not amazing, not awe-inspiring, but neat. I’ll definitely be doing it again when 3.3 drops on the live realms because of the achievement and the fact it is a massive upgrade, but it’s not as epic as I had hoped it would be. Currently, you can get the required quest items for the sword by doing regular (nor heroic) runs. This is particularly annoying to me, as the item is better than the gear in most raids (OS through Ulduar) and a faceroller could get it just by running the regular dungeons enough times for the first quest item to drop.  Hell, the hardest part for me was finding a group for Halls of Reflection (the last of the 3 5-mans), the actual quests themselves were simple.

On that note: the 5 man dungeons are a lot of fun. I enjoyed my time dpsing them and will probably be running them ad-nauseum for both Quel’Danar and badges (especially for my newly-80 paladin). Each one had a very different feel:

Forge of Souls: very quick dungeon, focusing on either 2-man-teams of  hard-hitting magic-hating mobs or 4-to-5 man teams of casters.  The boss mechanics have to be observed or else you can’t beat them, which makes me happy.

Pit of Saron: the largest of the dungeons and full of scripted events. Like FoS, the boss mechanics must be observered, or you die.

Halls of Reflection: take one part Violet hold (10 waves of enemies) and one part “Bran’s scripted hacking event in Halls of Stone” and you have Halls of Reflection. This was a great fight due to the panic-y feel of “Oh gods, oh gods, please dps the undead faster, Arthas is getting close!” The annoying part is that as of yesterday, the last-boss-loot was bugged and we couldn’t loot. In fact, HoR was extremely buggy, so I personally doubt the patch will drop tomorrow.

What else… oh! The LFG system! I loves it! It makes pugging much more enjoyable due to the extra dps, healing, and health (5% more), plus we are no longer limited to the “daily heroic” (which has been replaced by the “Weekly raid quest) mentality! Furthermore, if you have a good group, you can blitz through the same heroic multiple times, thus you are no longer limited by the number of instances available (though you do run the risk of getting into heroic occulus).

Overall, I’m excited about Icecrown, but I hope it doesn’t drop tomorrow. There are still way too many bugs for it to drop and not cause “I can’t get to the loot in HoR” drama.