World of Warcraft Journal

The news of the day is that the WoW stress test has been extended. It was supposed to end today, but now will end 3 days later, on Sunday. In celebration I add a third part to my review, just telling some stories of what happened to my different characters in this game during the stress test. This is highly likely to be totally unstructured, you have been warned. :)

My very first WoW character was a dwarven priest. I have a personal preference for healers and tanks, I feel neutral towards damage spell casters, and I dislike pet classes. A cleric in classic pen and paper D&D is healer as well as tank, so I thought priest would be a good choice in WoW. Well, that turned out to be wrong. A WoW priest is a mix of healer and damage spell caster, while being limited to cloth armor gives him very low tanking ability. He does have some unique tricks up his sleeve, a damage absorption shield for example. In other games damage spell casters often have some sort of root spell, to prevent monsters from attacking them. The WoW priest blasts them from a distance, and when they close up, he turns on his damage absorption shield, thus being able to continue casting damage spells without interruption.

Compared to other games, where healers are often unable to solo, the priest was reasonably good at soloing through the low levels like this. But in comparison with the other classes in WoW, he isn't all that good for solo play. At level 10 he receives better healing spells and resurrection, both of which are great for group play, but useless when soloing. My priest often had difficulties soloing mobs below his own level. He did join a group with a warrior and a hunter once, and there he was much more useful. World of Warcraft being very much about soloing, I don't think I will play a priest in the release version, unless I find people where I'm sure I can group with them all the time.

That being the first character, he also suffered a lot from the first-day problem of WoW: Lack of newbie level mobs. On day 1, obviously all players are hunting those, and they simply can't respawn fast enough. That produces some additional downtime where you simply can't find anything to kill. And I had to abandon some quests, because the quest mob was hunted by everybody, and there weren't enough of them around. I created a second character, a human paladin. This *was* as healer/tank, but the human newbie zone was even worse than the dwarven one. There were two quests to kill Kobold Workers, for a combined total of 22 Kobold Workers to kill per player, and only a handful of spawn points. It was actually funny to see 6 or more players standing around a Kobold Worker spawn point, trying to be the fastest to kill him when he popped up. Should have made a screenshot.

So the paladin was put on hold, and I made a night-elf druid instead. Good choice. The druid can wear leather armor, which is already a lot better in melee combat. And he gets staves to wield right from the start, which deal more damage than the priests mace (but are slower). Playing the druid in combat took getting used to. Spells in WoW not only have a casting time, but they also can have a "cooldown" period. The druid has damage spells that take some time to cast, but then can be cast again immediately afterwards. And he has spells that cast instantly, but then can not be cast again for some time. The trick is to pull with the long casting time spells, and use the others when already in melee, as the long casting time spells tend to get interrupted a lot when somebody is hitting you.

Unlike Everquest, druids do not get a Spirit of Wolf movement enhancement. But they do get different damage spells, a root spell, armor buffs, a thorns buff that deals damage to mobs hitting you, healing, and regeneration. And all that before level 10. At level 10 they then get the ability to shapeshift into bear form, which effectively turns the druid into a warrior whenever he wants. As he can buff himself first, and the buffs last quite a long time, the druid is quite powerful and independant. A great soloing class, which I will certainly play in the release version.

Next character was a Tauren shaman. I have incredibly mixed feelings about that one, it was both the best and the worst character I played. He was best from a role-playing point of view. The Tauren culture is a highly interesting American Indian type of culture. The shaman is a central point of that culture, and gets very cool quests. In one of those quests he has to drink a vision-inducing potion and then "follow his vision". The vision turns out to be a ghost wolf which you have to actually follow on foot, avoiding to get into combats on the way, to your destination where you get your quest reward. Probably the most fun quest I did in this game. The shaman also is the only class that gets an improvement to run speed, by being able to transform himself into a ghost wolf at level 20, but I never got that far.

While being interesting, the shaman was incredibly frustrating to play. One reason for that is that the plains in which he plays for the first 10 or more levels are full of aggressive and fast monsters, which attack on sight in quite a large radius. You often end up fighting more mobs than you wanted, and if you run away, you more likely than not get hunted by even more monsters. This was the character who died the most often, with me cursing loudly all the time.

Part of the problem was that while the shaman at first glance played like the druid, on closer examination he was not a solo character. Instead of the long lasting single person buffs the druid gets, the shaman is casting totems. A totem is planted in the ground, lasts for a minute or so, can be attacked and destroyed, but gives a rather powerful bonus to the whole group as long as they are in range. Kind of an area-of-effect buff. They would be great in a group, the more players the better. But if you cast them just for yourself, they cost too much mana to be efficient. And the Tauren already had about 15% less mana than the night-elf, so he ran out of mana all the time. Whether I will another Tauren shaman in the live version depends very much on with what people I'm playing with, and how grouping will evolve in World of Warcraft. If in the release version people group more, because it makes more sense to socialize when you have more than a week to play, and because it might be a good idea for higher levels, the shaman might be quite powerful. For soloing, especially in the Tauren plains, he sucks.

The dwarven priest had done fishing and cooking as tradeskills. Bad choice, because what does a healer need hitpoint-regenerating food for? The night-elf druid did skinning and leather-working, which was already much more useful. The very first thing you can do as a newbie leather worker, armor kits, is already very useful. You can patch 4 pieces of your armor, giving each a +8 bonus on armor class, and that works on looted armor, or quest armor, as well as on crafted armor. Getting a +32 permanent armor bonus as lowest level skill is quite nice. But then the Tauren Shaman became Herbalist/Alchemist, and there I was really impressed by the usefulness of tradeskills even at low level. Right from the start you can make 3 different potions, a very useful healing potion, a strength potion, and a armor potion. The armor potion giving +50 armor for 60 minutes, and the strength potion being likewise long lasting and powerful, those tradeskills are really worth pursueing, and not just a waste of time and money sink like in so many other games.

Finally I came back to that human paladin. By this time I had found out about mailboxes. These are incredibly useful, not only in a social context, but also for twinking, or exchanging tradeskill goods between your characters. The only bad point about them is that the delivery takes 1 hour. And "Horde" characters can't mail "Alliance" characters and vice versa, so my Tauren couldn't send his potions to the other characters. But my priest and druid send a lot of useful stuff to the paladin, helping him along.

That was in so far important as the paladin is very much dependant on his equipment. He can wear mail armor, thus being a real tank. And he deals all of his damage with his weapon, with an added Holy Strike magic ability. Besides that, he gets abilities that make him invulnerable for 6 seconds, which is just enough for him to heal himself with his healing spells. And he gets "auras", buffs that don't cost mana, are always on, and work on the whole group, but you can only have one of them going at any time. I found the paladin to have the best balance between solo and group play, he is useful in both situations. Okay, the druid wouldn't be bad in a group, and his buffs and damage dealing capabilities would be welcome. But the druid is more in the "nice to have" category, while the paladin borders on "must have", fulfilling one of the key roles in a group, tank, and helping out with his auras and minor healing. He can even resurrect later on.

Talking of "must have", in WoW that doesn't really exist. Groups can be formed with about any mix of characters. For example as level 9 druid I grouped with two more level 9 druids to kill a level 12 named quest mob. The mob attacked one of us, so that character mainly just healed himself, while the other 2 druids blasted the mob with damage spells, or healed the attacked one if need be. Likewise a group of several paladins would also work well, because they could turn on different auras, and change between healer and tank role as required. The disadvantage of every group mix and tactics working somehow is that it teaches you less about the best tactics. The MMORPG veterans have to thank Everquest for being the best school of MMORPG combat tactics. In EQ, if you did it in a sub-optimal way, you died, which does wonders in teaching you how to do it right. And once you had a good group going, you were reluctant to leave, and stayed together often for hours. In WoW groups often form in front of the quest boss mob, kill it, and disband. The advantage is minimum downtime for group set-up, but the disadvantage is a lot less friendships formed.

The paladin will still be played this weekend, as he hasn't reached level 10 yet. In WoW you get new abilities or spells every 2 levels, and at level 10 you often have most of your class abilities in some form or another, so that is a good level to judge a character class for usefulness. I played all other character classes and races as well, but only until level 4, where you have at least enough abilities to know what the classes are about.

The warrior is interesting for his rage ability, but I made an orc warrior and didn't like his desert starting area very much. To be tried with another race at another time. I made a gnomish rogue, which was cute, especially in stealth mode, but sneaking up on mobs and backstabbing them is usually not my style. My undead warlock was quite powerful, being the class that gets his pet the earliest. The pet is quite good as magic damage dealer, so it nearly doubles your firepower, as well as being useful as dummy target for the mobs to hit on. If the imp dies, you simply summon a fresh one. Powerful, but as I said, I'm not a big fan of pet classes. The other pet class is the hunter, but as he gets his charm animal ability only at level 10, I didn't bother to play him that far. The troll mage I played was in the same barren newbie region as the orc warrior. The mage deals more damage with spells, but has less useful other spells than the druid. He gets some summon food and drink spells which aren't all that good, food and drink being cheap and plentiful.

Another reason for continueing with my paladin is that he is also busy with mining and blacksmithing, which he received at level 8. At level 8 you should have the 20 skill points that are often necessary for learning one gathering skill for 10 points and one crafting skill for another 10. I like tradeskills. In the stress test not many people bothered with them, being too busy leveling, so resource spawn points were easy enough to find. The paladin is only level 9, but already got his mining skill nearly maxed out, and has already 45 in blacksmithing skill. He now can make not only basic copper mail, all pieces, but also the first runed copper armor pieces, which are much better. So slowly the problems of crafting become evident. *Crafting* is easy, it is finding the resources that is difficult. The paladin now needs not only the copper and stone he can mine himself, but also other resources. Some come from other lines of tradeskills, like leather. Fine thread can be bought in tailor shops. He uses linen cloth, which is dropped from humanoid monsters often enough. But he also got recipes using Malachite, which are a rare drop from mobs. In the whole week of open beta stress test with all my characters I found about 4 Malachites (and stupidly sold them, not knowing that the stress test would be extended long enough for me to actually need them).

In the stress test, there wasn't much of a player economy going on. I guess most players just sold the gems they found to NPCs, as even NPCs pay more for them than for normal loot from the same mobs. But I hope that will improve in the live version. NPCs sell expensively and buy cheaply, and have quite a limited selection, so there is a wide margin for a crafter to live on. The auction houses would be a great place for players to receive a good deal more money for their gems, and buy good equipment. The question is whether players will bother with that. Most classes can survive on the money they get for their loot from NPCs, equipped with the items they receive as quest rewards. Using the auction house would be advantageous, but it is not absolutely necessary, and it would involve special effort. The auction house sure was a lot less frequented in the stress test than it is in FFXI.

One thing no stress tester left out was to take a ride on one of the flying mounts. I still need to do the goblin zeppelin this weekend, but I already rode the gryphon and the hippogriff. The Tauren city had a windmaster, where it seemed you could ride the wind itself, but there was no route available for taking. It seems that new routes open up once you visited the other side on foot. These rides are so much fun, especially during daylight hours, where you see much better.

World of Warcraft has a unique day/night system, it is not accelerated at all. One day in the game is exactly one day in the real world. Hover your mouse over the little sun/moon icon in the upper right corner, and the time shown is the same as in the PDT time zone. Frankly, I didn't like that feature. While you can still see at night (with the help of the gamma slider in the video options) the world at night just isn't as pretty, and some things are harder to find and identify, due to lack of colors. If I played on a European server, where the time would probably be set to correspond to my time zone, I would be constantly in the dark, as during the week I only play during the evenings and into the nights. This is one reason why I will probably prefer to play on the US servers, PDT is 9 hours before my time zone, and so my usual evening play sessions are in the middle of the day there.

I'm looking forward to playing WoW another 3 days, even if my main goal, playing the game for the review, is already reached. But World of Warcraft is simply fun, and there are a million things still to do. I already pre-ordered my copy from DVDBoxoffice, to have the US version of the game. Due to their free worldwide shipping, which is obviously slower than priority express, I will probably miss the first week or two of the release version. But after experiencing a release-like situation in the open beta, I don't think I am missing much. I'd rather let the first week wave rush through the newbie zones before starting there at my leisure. See you in Azeroth at the end of the year.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:55 AM Permanent Link