dungeons

Guild Wars 2: I don’t want your freedom, I don’t want to play around … well, I do, but …

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I keep forgetting to take screenshots in GW2, which is a shame, as one of my favourite things about the game is how pretty it is.   My very favourite thing about the game is that it’s free to play, of course.   There are no difficult decisions to be made about subscriptions.   I can log in, check my mail, do a bit of crafting and a bit of exploration, safe in the knowledge that I haven’t paid to do so.

One thing that’s nice about that, is that I don’t feel a duty to play, just to justify my sub.  I’d particularly started to feel that with SW:TOR before I left.  On the other hand, I’m finding I have a more leisurely approach to the game, just because I’m not paying a sub.    It doesn’t matter if I don’t log in today or tomorrow, because I can log in any day I like. 

Unfortunately, that has a downside.  Because I’m not in game day to day, it feels as if I lose track of what I’m doing.  I’ll log in, usually to find myself next to a crafting station.   I might have a look at my map for unfilled “hearts”, particularly trying to pick those which involve killing humanoid mobs, because I’m a tailor and need the cloth.  I might then notice that the travel costs are a bit steep and try to work out whether I’ve got the time and the bag space to make the most out of the journey.  Sometimes, I’ll log in and find myself out in the world, and from there I might travel on to the next hub, or go back and do some crafting.

This is where the lack of formal quests isn’t working so well for me.  With no clear sense of direction and purpose when I log in, I tend to focus on crafting and gathering, and every day feels much the same.   There is the personal story, of course, but I’ve left that on hold because I can’t decide which faction to join and so can’t progress the story. 

I’ve ended up being a very slow leveler.  Even more slow than usual.  I still only qualify for the first dungeon, and there hasn’t been a guild run there since I got to that level.  I’m hoping to get into PVP in GW2 instead (can you level through PVP?  I haven’t checked), as it’s possibly more easy to dip in and out of it, but I imagine gear is going to be a problem.   At the moment, I feel the levels stretching ahead of me, and I feel I haven’t done enough “homework” on my class to be effective in dungeons or PVP.   One thing that I would have loved for GW2 was a low level dungeon so that we could all get stuck in, in the first week or so, and perhaps some short dungeons.  I think that’s particularly important because it’s free to play and “casual”.  As it is, I’ve now been playing the game for several weeks, but am still pretty clueless. 

Guild Wars 2: I don’t want your freedom, I don’t want to play around … well, I do, but …

‘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

Discipline … and the rudeness ratio

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Wouldn’t it be nice if this blog was just about one character, and I could discuss the issues facing, say, mages in WoW, I ask myself?  I answer myself ‘No, it wouldn’t, necessarily’.  There are plenty of fascinating blogs there dealing with a single class in a single game, and written by much more competent players than I.   Meanwhile, I don’t see many blogs written by people’s incompetent altaholic, game-tarting parents.

I have three priest characters, so I’m not obsessed.  My highest level is in the 70s.  She leveled as shadow, then dual specced to holy at 40.  I thought I could use shadow for soloing, and holy for dungeon healing.  It worked OK, but not as well as I’d hoped.  I’m mostly out on my own soloing.  The minute I hit a dungeon I have to get used to a new setup.   If I wanted to level as a healer, I would have done better to stick to holy and queue for the dungeon finder, over and over.

A day or two ago, I decided to experiment with discipline on one of my other priests.   I had tried it for soloing before and it seemed terribly slow.  Now it seems much improved.   As a shadow priest, I always felt it wasn’t right that healing was sidelined.   I’m a priest, you know?  My low level discipline priest seems much more of a healer-killer.

I thought I would queue for dungeon finder and give it a try.  I explained to the group that I was new to this, and that they’d have to bear with me, giving the opportunity to kick if they didn’t want an inexperienced player.   Everything went fine until right at the end.  The tank ran ahead and engaged the boss in a different room while I and one of the others were catching up.  By the time I’d got round the corner, he was at half health.  I healed like mad, but sadly, it wasn’t quite enough to keep him alive.  Never mind.  I healed the rest of the team and we finished, then I ressed the tank, who blasted me for being a ‘noob’.  ‘Yes’, I said, ‘I explained that at the beginning’.

Now, who’s to say who was in the wrong?   He would probably argue that I was in the wrong for not keeping up with the tank.  I could argue that he was in the wrong for not waiting for the healer.  But in the world of Somebody’s Mum, ultimately, he was in the wrong … for being rude.  I honestly don’t care whether people I group with play well or not.  (And actually, with everybody except me using heirlooms, it’s difficult to fail even if the players aren’t that great).  I do care about them being polite.  I had explained at the beginning that I wasn’t competent.   Perhaps, given that, he could have spent a few seconds waiting for me to catch up at the end, or even doing a ready check (whatever happened to those?).   Or he could have acted exactly the same and just said nothing at the end.   I wouldn’t have minded.  But I did mind him being rude.

Does World of Warcraft bring out the worst in people?  I don’t encounter rudeness in real life nearly so often as I encounter it in game.  Is that because the fact that it’s online rather than real life encourages rudeness – it’s not like being rude to “real” people, to their face?  Is it just that I’m lucky enough to work, live and socialise with fairly polite people, and I have too rosy a view and too high expectations?  Still, although the rudeness seems a lot more common than in real life, it’s nowhere near across the board.   Out of that group of five running that dungeon, only one was rude, so 20%.  Nobody was rude in my next dungeon run, which brings the figure down to 10% rudeness.  And so on.  Perhaps only 1% of people in WoW are rude, but of course, it’s the rudeness that makes an impact, and not the quiet co-operativeness of the rest of the group.

The trouble is that I have heard people cite the attitude of other players – the rudeness – as a reason for leaving WoW.  I don’t blame them.  I can remember rude incidents from literally years ago, that have made me lose interest in the game for a while.  It’s not a case of stomping off in a huff because people aren’t playing nice.   It’s a case of not having the motivation to log in to be insulted – while paying for it.

I’m still here, off and on, paying for the occasional month and happily being rather antisocial.  I think that’s because the rudeness ratio actually is quite low – nearer 1% than 50%.  I would rather not have an ‘incident’ every few months, but I can maybe cope with that frequency.  I can leave the party, use ‘ignore’, go and get a cup of tea, and maybe, now I have this blog, write about it here.  And be grateful for the 99% of players who are polite, helpful or just silent :).

Meanwhile, I carried on and did another couple of dungeons.   Nobody died, even though we had a hunter with a death wish (who was eventually kicked from the group for incompetency and lack of English.  I didn’t vote.  As I said, I don’t mind how people play as long as they’re polite.  And it added a little extra level of challenge and practice, having to keep the hunter up).   So I did OK, although I definitely need more practice to get to grips with discipline.  I don’t have any add-ons at the moment and don’t intend to get any, so I’m using the default interface, and haven’t yet worked out if I prefer to use the function keys for targetting and the number keys to cast, or to use the mouse for one or the other or both.

Discipline … and the rudeness ratio

Dungeon finder and the new tank

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I only play WoW intermittently, so I’m still new to the Dungeon Finder tool.  (In fact, maybe everybody’s new to it?   I don’t know when it was released).    On the surface, it’s a great idea, and it does seem to be working well for me.   In this little burst of WoW time, I decided to play with my gnome warrior, giving her a shield, putting her talents in protection, and having her as a tank.    There’s no point in being a tank without a group to tank for, and that’s where the dungeon finder comes in.   I’m an extremely casual (I play for a month or two every few months, and rarely after 10 o’clock at night), inexperienced (I’m an altaholic, and so I never really get fully to grips with the different classes, and the regular changes), mainly solo player.   I have never done any end game content, ever (back in vanilla WoW, my guild raided too late at night for me).    I don’t want to jump in and sign up for random dungeons with a level 80 character who has more skills than I can fit on my toolbars.    I would be like somebody who has bought a character – coming in new with no idea of what buttons to press and when.   Except with really crap gear.

So, I thought, although I had a higher level warrior, and a paladin and a couple of death knights, I’d start a tank from the beginning, and learn to play it properly.   I might have gone dwarf, but I already had a gnome warrior who had just finished the starter area and had been sitting in Westfall for months (or possibly over a year.  Time flies).   I thought, I’ll get my skills one by one and learn each carefully.     It will be like the old days, when we edged our way carefully through the dungeons, planning our strategy, and trying to work out how to play our class.   I’ll do the Deadmines over and over, until I know exactly what to do and when.

It didn’t work out like that.   I have been getting groups.  Very easily, in fact.   It seems that tanks are in short supply.   I’m not sure why.   I can understand that people don’t want to level as a tank, if they are soloing, but now, with the dungeon finder, it’s possible to do quite a bit of levelling in the dungeons.   Solo questing as a protection specced warrior with a shield is not quite the slow grind I thought it might be – it’s actually rather fun.   And there are three possible tanking classes at the lower levels, warrior, paladin and druid (in bear form), as well as the death knight later on.    Maybe people just find it more fun to play DPS, even if their class is capable of tanking.    Whatever the reason, one of the most satisfying things about the dungeon finder has been that it gets me a group quickly, sometimes instantly.   It’s great for people who only have a short time to play.

So what’s wrong with it?

My first complaint isn’t really about the tool itself.   It works.  It does what it’s supposed to do.  But it doesn’t really do what I wanted it to do.   There has been no careful strategising.   No talking about who’s going to do what.   Not even any sharing of healthstones or food and water.   There’s no time.   I am guessing that instead of playing with a group of new players, I’m almost always playing with a group of alts using the dungeons to level up.     There is none of this one pull at a time business, or mana breaks.   It’s push, push all the way through, and I’ve come to realise that my job as the tank is to keep it going as quickly as possible.   I don’t feel I’m learning much.  If I’m grouped with higher level people I’m finding it difficult to keep aggro, but I’m not sure what to do about that.  I spend a lot of time chasing after mobs, but possibly for no good reason as people seem able to survive better anyway.   Is it worth trying to get aggro off people’s pets and voidwalkers?   Is it part of the strategy that they take some of the damage off the tank?   Or have their owners just left their taunt skill active by mistake?   There’s never really time to discuss.  And Somebody’s Mum needs to stop what she’s doing altogether to type, so no chance of chatting as we go along.

I’m not even learning about specific dungeons, as I’d hoped, as levelling seems to be so quick now, and by the next day, the dungeon I’ve just done will have dropped off the bottom of my random list.    I’m not getting the slow, careful progression through grouping that I’d hoped for.   I can see myself arriving at 80 and still being almost as clueless and inexperienced as I’m now.   Except with a lot more buttons to try to fit on my toolbar.

Apart from the drawbacks, it’s a great idea.   It’s definitely much easier to get a group for dungeons as a casual player now, and the dungeons go quickly and are almost always successful (if not, it’s easy to queue again), even with lower level players.   Once a day there is a reward for a doing a random dungeon (although unfortunately these seem to fit the same slot days in a row, so yet again I have a new set of shoulders.   And they’re tailored to the armor class but not the class – I’ve been getting spellpower and intellect rewards).    Just be aware that you might be grouping with somebody’s mum rather than an experienced player.

Dungeon finder and the new tank