Cataclysm

‘Tis the season (to spend too much time on gaming)

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Needless to say, I’ve been unable to stick solely to levelling my tankadin.

  • I’d decided to go for the “What a long, strange trip it’s been” achievement on one of my characters, so I’ve had to log in every so often to get the Merrymaker part of that.  I have everything now except “A Frosty Shake”.   The fun thing about it was that I had to queue for dungeons in the hope of getting the hat needed for one of the achievements.  The only dungeons open to me were Wrath of the Lich King heroics.   My character hadn’t even done the normal ones, never mind the heroics.   I’ve had this character for a long, long time, and even way back in vanilla she ended up with gear problems (back then, it was because the guild dungeon groups tended to be too late at night).  She was the one that I posted about some time ago, as having crap DPS.   I haven’t retested her DPS, but the quest rewards at the beginning of the new Cataclysm areas make an enormous difference.   There didn’t seem to be any problem with doing WotLK heroics in that gear (although I can’t speak for my group skills!) at level 81.  It has been fun, and now I have more confidence I might even queue for the Cataclysm dungeons.    I do feel that I would like to get a look at these dungeons before I go there with my tank.
  • My druid had to try out one of the new Cataclysm areas.  I’d been avoiding reading about the new areas because I wanted a surprise and I was very impressed with Vash’jir.  I couldn’t resist logging on to the druid to explore more.
  • I made a new gnome to see the new gnome starting area.
  • Of course, I had to create a goblin.
  • And a worgen.
  • And another goblin.
  • I need to get round all my main-ish characters to make sure they get their presents from Greatfather Winter!
  • Meanwhile, Steam has had a sale on.  Somebody stop me!
  • I felt I had to look in at Everquest II to wish my character the best of the season.

Really, I’m surprised there’s time for anything else.   If only I could find a way to make housework feel like a game.

‘Tis the season (to spend too much time on gaming)

Paladining and kicking

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paladin (plural paladins)

  1. A heroic champion (especially a knightly one).
  2. A defender or advocate of a noble cause. (A defender of faith).
  3. Any of the twelve Companions of the court of Emperor Charlemagne.

I’m not sure what sort of cause my paladin is defending (I’m not a lore person), but it looks like I’m back in the tank business again.

While waiting for Cataclysm, I had been happily playing a priest and enjoying the relatively short dungeon queues.  But the itch to tank  was too strong and I had another look at my warrior.  I redid her talents and queued for a dungeon, and … found I’d forgotten how to play.   Somehow we got through, thanks to a nice group who didn’t rush me, but I realised that I should start at the beginning again and relearn how to tank.   I didn’t fancy another warrior, so I said hello to a four year old level 2 blood elf paladin.

Learning as a tank is great, because of the short queues for dungeon finder.  Every time I get a new ability, I have the chance to try it out straight away.   And, dare I say it?  Tanking seems to be fairly easyish when you’re always equipped with nice dungeon drops (my warrior used to do solo questing and queue every now and then.  My paladin has barely seen any of the world beyond Orgrimmar), and when the healer has heirlooms.

Protection paladins seem to be well designed to survive.  If I notice the healer is having difficulty keeping up, I can help by keeping myself up.  I really noticed this yesterday, when the healer left a group for Blackrock prison as soon as they arrived.    The group were happy to carry on regardless, with my paladin acting as both tank and healer.  We completed the dungeon and did another boss, and would have kept going if we’d had time.   The funny thing was that I really enjoyed the challenge.

You’d think that, given that my character can tank and heal, that their dps wouldn’t be great (my warrior’s wasn’t), but I often seem to top the dps meters, even though I’m not deliberately trying to do a lot of damage (except to create more threat).

I’ve also tried solo-ing parts of dungeons.   Sometimes the group has completed the part needed for the loot bag and left, leaving me free to explore.   I’ve found that, yet again, a protection paladin does very well at soloing dungeons, even sometimes (to my utter amazement) if they’re below the level of the mobs.   That’s another really fun thing to do.   The lovely thing about soloing, is that there’s time to stop and think and plan.   Those areas which are more challenging, where lots of mobs attack at once, aren’t a problem for a solo player.  I just use the ancient technique of pulling them round corners in small groups.   It’s what we used to do, all those years ago at the start of World of Warcraft, and it still works – it’s just that if there’s a group, there’s more of a rush, and because wipes are so rare, risks can be taken.  I love pulling the mobs to where I want them.  I wish I could do it in groups, but I’ve come to realise that the groups won’t stand for it.

The rudeness ratio is still much the same – just not enough to make me stop playing.   Sticks and stones, eh?   I’ve noticed that the tank gets the blame almost as much as the healer.  I remember being frustrated in one group.   They didn’t give me a chance to get aggro, and pulled a mob off me.  Not usually a problem, but with slowing spells, I was having difficulty getting to the mob to get the aggro back and took too long to notice that I wasn’t being healed.   Nobody tried to run the mob back to me, and I ended up dying, being hit in the back by the casters behind me.   The healer apologised and said that they had computer problems and hadn’t been able to heal.   It was possibly partially my fault for not noticing and self healing, but then I’d been told off for self-healing before so I tend to let the healer get on with it.   But the group said that the healer was healing fine, and it was my fault, so they kicked me.   I still have to work that one out (how could the healer have been doing fine, when I wasn’t getting healed and they’d explained why?   And why didn’t the dpsers help, if there was a problem?).   It’s very frustrating not having a chance to answer back when you’re kicked!  (At least, I assume I was kicked.  I was suddenly no longer in the group).

Sometimes the “kick” option seems to be overused.  I almost never vote to kick, although often the person will be kicked anyway (I presume it only needs a majority vote).   I think that it’s possible to carry “bad” players, to continue for a while to see if disconnected players come back, etc.   I suppose I have the luxury of getting straight into dungeons, whereas people who have waited a long time (one told me that his average wait was 40 minutes) do get frustrated more easily.

But let’s look at that situation again, in terms of fault.    Now, I don’t claim to be a great player or even a good player.   I think I have an idea of what my role is, and when to use which ability.   However, I don’t have quick reactions, I use a mouse to click on my toolbar (I’m sure I should be using the keyboard, but if I do, I hit the wrong keys too often) and sometimes I find the screen is too busy for me to see what’s going on.  I freely admit that I can make mistakes (and I don’t mind other people making mistakes).  In this case, three of us went wrong.   I didn’t create enough threat at the beginning.   The healer didn’t heal.  The DPS pulled a mob and instead of bringing it back, kept it away.

My fault.  I didn’t get enough threat.   I ran into the group, targeted a caster and used my threat-generating abilities.   A melee mob was pulled off, and I tried to chase after it, using my taunt.   I accept that I didn’t generate enough threat, but I’m not sure how to get more right at the beginning.   Maybe I should have targetted the melee mob instead of one of the casters?  I don’t think so.   I’m not sure if I could have created any more threat than I had already done with the abilities I had, so although that might have been the cause of the problem, it wasn’t my fault.   However, there were things I could have done differently.   Perhaps I should have let the DPS keep the mob he pulled, and concentrate on keeping my health up.   That would have worked.   I could also have set a skull on my target before I ran in and that might have meant that I had a little more threat on the mob the DPS had gone for.  (That would only help if I did it in advance).

The healer’s fault.  The healer said it was his fault, because he had lagged.  Again, although that was a major cause of the problem, it wasn’t actually the healer’s fault as there was nothing he could have done.  Perhaps if he knew there were going to be problems, he could have warned me in advance and I could have self-healed as much as I could.

The DPS’s fault.   The DPS guy didn’t seem to feel he had any fault at all.   However, he pulled one of the mobs that I was trying to build up threat on, meaning that I had to stop attacking, couldn’t use my AoE skills and had to try to get threat back from that one mob.   DPS overall went down (as I wasn’t attacking but trying to run towards his mob through a slowing spell), my health went down (because I was being hit in the back by the caster mobs, who weren’t being attacked), and his health went down (because he was being attacked).  It wasn’t an efficient way to do it.  Perhaps it wasn’t his fault that he pulled the mob in the first place, but there were some things he could have done to minimise damage – in particular, stop attacking the mob and bring it back to me instead of making me neglect the others and run towards him.

Three of us contributed to the cause of the failure.  I’m still not sure why I was considered the most at fault (presumably by the three DPS players – the healer thought it was his fault).   The person who could have done most to save the situation once it was happening was the DPS guy, and he failed to do it.

I think the solution is not to kick, but to all try to work as a team.   We’re supposed to be working together, not against each other.   In that situation, I think it’s best to see what will help “the team”, whether it’s me going for damage reduction rather than dps if the healer is struggling, for instance, or the DPS lowering their dps or taking mobs back to me.   (Sometimes the DPS skills really don’t help the tank to tank!  That group I pulled all together so that I could AoE them?   As they come to me, they get stunned or frozen and spread out.  The worst one is the ability which knocks the mobs back so I can’t attack them and lost threat!  The first time I saw that I thought it was a sneaky new ability of the mobs designed to them more difficult to hit!).

In other news: Cataclysm arrived a week late.  Ordered from Amazon.  Never again.

Paladining and kicking

Download Cataclysm early

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I was excited to see that the Cataclysm expansion was available as a digital download, which starts updating right away.   No trying to do it all on launch day – just upgrade your account and you’re ready to go.

I was less excited when I saw the price.  It’s £29.99 without the box.  My pre-order from Amazon was £17.99ish.   So I’d be paying an extra £12 just so that launch day might be slightly smoother.   It’s not even as if I know yet what I’ll be doing on launch day, and whether I’ll be able to play right away even if I could.   (Some of us have jobs.  And stuff.)

So I was delighted to see this article on WoW Insider.  It explains how to change your files so that Cataclysm is preloaded on launch day.  It’s so simple that even somebody’s mum can do it.

Download Cataclysm early

Hallowed be thy name

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For the first time, I’ve worked towards an achievement, and now have a title: ‘The Hallowed”.   I’ve known for a long time that completing a series of holiday achievements led to a special award of a mount, but it’s only recently that I’ve even looked at the achievement list to see what was required.

For those that don’t play or that didn’t know, achievements were brought into World of Warcraft a couple of years ago.   When you complete certain things (such as reaching level 6o, or falling a certain distance without dying, or learning lots of recipes) there’s a noise and a sign comes up, and your achievement can be seen in guild chat and by the people around you.  I heap scorn on these pointless “achievements”.  And yet, I feel a slight thrill when I hear that noise and the sign comes up, as if I’d just won my 10p back on a fruit machine.

A few of the achievements do actually lead to a bigger reward than that, such a title.  There are some meta-achievements, which involved completing a series of other series of achievements (yes, I did mean to say that, but couldn’t think of a better way to do it).  A biggie is achievement “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”, which is awarded once you’ve completed a series of holiday achievements (which are themselves made up of lesser achievements.  Phew).  It’s a biggie, because you get an actual sooper dooper mount as a reward, and according to what I’ve read, ownership of that mount will now grant the riding skill for it (meaning that you get free uber riding skill, instead of paying thousands of gold).

I was edging myself mentally towards doing this achievement at Brewfest, but didn’t really set my mind to it and ended up completing all but the “Brew of the month” achievement.  So the earliest I could finish the Long Strange Trip achievement would be by next September.  And meanwhile, I’ll have to log in and get the achievements for all the festivals in between.

Which means, of course, that I will have to pay a sub every time a festival comes up.  Clever, eh?  I’ve always been a very casual player, sometimes subscribing for months at a time, but more often just purchasing the odd month here and there.  Now that I’ve started working towards the mount, I know that any time I miss a festival I’ll be extending the time until I get it.   Now that I think of it, it’s a fiendishly clever marketing strategy.

Actually getting the achievement this month was a bit of a grind – something I was trying to avoid.   I had to log in to my “main” character every hour when I could, to talk to an innkeeper.   I queued for the Headless Horseman every day.  I did the quests up in Southshore and Tirisfal.  I went round a list of inns, collecting sweeties from candy pumpkins.

That was the part that I thought would be the most boring.  But it wasn’t.  For a start, I could do other things while flying between inns.  But most of all, I know that Azeroth is going to change, come Cataclysm, and there was something nostalgic and bittersweet about revisiting my old haunts – this time with good graphics!   I think I had forgotten just how big the world is.   My warlock was one of my very first characters, all those years ago, and I found that some of the world had changed even since my last visit.  The butcher, Dirk, in Gadgetzan seemed pleased to see me again and had a quest for me.  I found that I’d explored all of Stonetalon mountains except the part with the Alliance inn.   It was early days back then and I had no idea how to get there, so had approached from the Barrens, trying to avoid a horde outpost.   Theramore was no longer the scary, questless bleakness that I had run through with my level 20 warlock on one of her class quests (another thing of the past).  Oh, how I remember arriving in the Barrens and seeing huge dinosaurs for the first time!  Then later, looking for the flight path in Ratchet, without success (there wasn’t one).   Then sneaking past a horde outpost (as per usual) to get to Ashenvale, not realising that it could be approached from Darkshore.    It was a pain travelling in those days, and I never had any money, and was clueless.  But the sense of adventure and exploration was unbeatable.

Of course, I’ve been levelling a shaman so have been returning to old haunts anyway.  But somehow it was different going back with my little warlock, the first of my characters to explore those dangerous, difficult areas.  Goodbye Old Azeroth.  You will be remembered fondly.

Hallowed be thy name

Why do I pay to do things I don’t want to do?

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I’m playing World of Warcraft again for a while, with the aim of getting my characters ready for Cataclysm.  Not all of them, of course.    I have the full compliment of alts, but have only passed level 60 with a small number of characters, and I only have one level 80 character (after playing since just after release!).   My plan is to get one more character to 80, and to level up the 80s characters’ professions so that they’re ready to train up.

Why only two characters?  Simply because they’re the only characters with cold weather flying.   I’m sure the price of flying in Northrend is going to go down when Cataclysm comes out and I don’t want to spend the money on my other characters.   Amazingly, after playing for all those years and spending very little, I don’t have much in game cash.   Pretty much like real life.

Another thing I need to do, is make some bag space.  Those characters banks and bags are pretty full.  Of junk.

The character I’m levelling up at the moment is a druid herbalist/alchemist.   I make some potions, I have some spare herbs, I put them in the bank.  For 70 odd levels.    That’s a lot of “spare” herbs.  I don’t know what use I think I’m going to have for a stack of liferoot, but you never know, do you?  I could send them to my inscription..er (what do they call them?  Scribes?), but they “belong” to my druid.

My druid took a long time to level.  I originally started out in restoration.   I thought it would be useful in groups, but it wasn’t a huge amount of fun to level with.  She got to about 40 and then I more or less abandoned her.   At some point I decided to change to feral and suddenly it became much more fun.   I played in cat form up until I reached the Burning Crusade content.  Suddenly there was a host of new gear and I had to decide if I wanted to stay feral, and at some point I decided to change to balance.

I’ve stuck with balance for oh, about three years or so?  But you never know.   I might want to change to feral again.  Or, since I’m now able to dual spec, I might want to have a feral spec.  What that’s meant is that I’ve had to keep a complete set of feral clothes and equipment in my bags and bank.   It doesn’t sound as if that would take up a lot of space, but I need two lots, a tanking set and a dps set, because I don’t know if I might go bear or cat.  Then within those sets, I find it difficult to decide between items, so I end up keeping several dps shoulders, for instance.   And I’ve been doing that for the last couple of years.

This week, I’ve been trying to clear some of that stuff out.  Instead of spending ages comparing items, I’m going by the item level and the rarity.    I may even just go by the rarity and get rid of my stackload of green items.  Will I really need them, even if I do respec?  Couldn’t I just buy some stuff on the AH?

I may also have a purge on all those “sentimental” items, and the things that I need once, but probably don’t now.  Talvash’s Phial of Scrying that I’ve had since 2006?  Isn’t it time to let it go?

The process reminds me so much of real life.  Every so often I declutter my house and have the same dilemma over clothes that are the wrong size (but which I might wear again!), or items that I must have kept for a reason, so still feel the need to hang on to, even though the reason now eludes me.  Or things that I was given as a present, so don’t like to just throw away.

And that makes me wonder why I am paying to recreate the low level stress of sorting out my affairs, but in a game?  Or is it actually helpful for me to succeed at this task in game? Does it motivate me in real life?  I’m not sure.

It has often struck me that I lot of what I do in MMOs has a real life equivalent, and the real life version is often something I don’t really want to do.  Sometimes I don’t even want to do it in game, but feel the need to for some usually minor reward.  (For instance, fishing repeatedly to get a skill up, or killing multiple boring, samey mobs to complete a quest).  I not only do it, but (in WoW, at least) I pay to do it.   What is it about these games that draws you away from some boring household task, such as cooking, to do some boring in game task, such as cooking?

Why do I pay to do things I don’t want to do?

Playing a DPS class with no DPS

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I admit to having too many alts.   I reached the alt cap on World of Warcraft (I think it might have been 50).    I can’t wait for Cataclysm, although I’m going to have to delete some so that I can play in the new starting areas.    I love levelling.   I love starting areas.   I love trying out new classes.

So my warrior tank keeps getting neglected when I suddenly get an urge to play on some of my other alts.  It’s so confusing.  I thought it might be fun to practice playing my warlock so that I could give a go at playing a random dungeon at level 80.   I’d left her in Icecrown (what a miserable place that is), and set off to smash some skulls.   What a joy after playing my warrior!   The kills were so quick.   I felt uberpowerful.   I was all set to queue up as DPS on the dungeon finder.

Then I decided to have a look at recount.  Oh dear!   My damage was rubbish.   I had read that 900 was a terrible amount of damage at level 80, and yet I was only hitting that occasionally.  Usually I was about 800 and something.   Also my damage didn’t really kick in until the end, when my dots added up.    I could imagine that running through a dungeon with quick kills it would be even less than 800 – more like the 500 or so it is nearer the beginning of a fight.

Now, I suppose I don’t have very good gear.   It’s all quest rewards apart from my goggles (engineering), and I think my robe was bought from the Kaluak.    I thought that improving my gear might make a difference.   So off I fired up my Ultra-Safe Transporter to Gadgetzan and flew up to Darnassus to hit the Auction House.    I couldn’t see much that I wanted at a low price, but I bought a purple robe, and blue shoulders, and then some gems to put in them.   I also bought some glyphs, some spellpower thread for my trousers, and some spellpower elixir, then went back to test it all out.

It wasn’t much different with the glyphs and the new clothes.   I ended up switching back to the blue turtle robe over the purple gemmed robe, but whatever I did didn’t help much.  I fiddled around with the order of my spells, tried switching shadowbolts for drain life and so on.   Not much difference.  The one thing I haven’t tried yet is the spellpower elixir and food.

Much as I love the dungeon finder, I wish there was a way to queue up as a ‘noob’.   I could try queueing only for the lowest level dungeons where my lack of dps wouldn’t be felt so much, but I don’t really want to do a level 70 dungeon at level 80.   What I want, what I really, really want is to do a level 80 dungeon with a group of equally bad players in equally unimpressive gear.  It would be an interesting challenge, and I wouldn’t feel as if I was being boosted.

As an aside, back in the old days, I didn’t used to worry too much about DPS on my warlock.  I thought of the warlock as the crowd control class or the utility class or the bag of tricks class.    I didn’t do huge damage, but I could soulstone, healthstone, summon, seduce, buff, debuff, dot, fear and if needed, tank (with my voidwalker).   Being an engineer, I could also whip out a shrink ray, exploding sheep or mechanical harvest reaper when needed.   (The shrink ray was great!).   I didn’t really want to dps – I wanted to do all the other fun things.

Playing a DPS class with no DPS