WoW Journal - 30-May-2005

My WoW playing is slowing down a bit. Not that I am losing interest, it is more an issue of Real Life ® intruding. I'm pretty busy at work at the moment, and while I still play a lot on the weekends, I also do other things, like going swimming. Hey, it was over 30 degrees Celsius in Brussels this weekend, hot for May.

When I'm playing, I still have a lot of fun. It it nice how the different character classes each have their distinctive style, each offering new tactics to explore. I'd never had thought I would have so much fun with a pet class, but my warlock is the character I'm playing most often right now. The only grey cloud on the horizon is the realization that there *is* a limit. World of Warcraft gameplay and fun is very much driven by quests. There are a lot of quests, over 4,000, but the number isn't unlimited. You can play about 4 characters, 2 Horde, 2 Alliance, before you have basically covered all the zones. With my Alliance warlock I have a distinctive feeling of "Oh, I can't go there, I already did that zone with my night elf druid.". Still, I'm playing a lot, and I'm already playing for many months, so I can't complain that WoW is lacking content. But I sure would buy an expansion set when it comes out, although surprisingly none was announced during E3. I just hope that this is only because Blizzard doesn't need the E3 hype. A WoW expansion for christmas would be nice, and it would probably sell a million times, easy money for Blizzard.

Raslebol, my troll warrior, went to Uldaman in a group of 3, the other two being from my D&D group. We had little problem to get to the end of the dungeon, and the second half was still green to me, and the xp weren't all that bad. But at the end, the big boss fight is extremely tough, and we couldn't win it. We need a group of five for that. Afterwards I did some minor quests, which led me to Winterspring. While killing chimera there, I dinged 56. I went to Ogrimmar to train, but at these high levels you don't get any new skills any more, you just get higher ranks in old skills.

I switched to Kyroc, my undead priest, and played him just enough to use up a part of his rest xp bonus. I belatedly did his level 10 class quest, but the reward was nothing to write home about, some not-so-useful spell I don't even remember. If any class needs some love from the developers, it is the priest. Least fun, in my opinion, and least popular by any sort of census you take. And half of the priests around are played by people who just play one for the greater good of the guild, not because they particularly enjoy it. Speccing the priest full shadow helps a bit, if later for the guild you want a healing specialist, you can still change. Well, Kyroc is level 14 now, and the plan is to level him only on rest xp, through occasional play time.

So as I said, I spent most of the time since the last journal entry playing Honey, the gnome warlock. I got her up to level 27 now. And the mid-20's are fun, because there are so many instances to do at those levels. I did the deadmines for the Staff of Westfall, but just two days later we did Blackfathom Deeps. And while my druid on the US-servers had to do BFD six times before he found the Rod of the Sleepwalker, Honey got that staff on the first try. Plus the quest for killing Lord Kelris gives a blue wand, so she has two very good blue weapons now. Of course she doesn't rely much on weapons, she has her spells and pets.

One interesting aspect of playing a warlock is the curses, because you have to chose, you can only put one type of curse on any one enemy. I have three of them now: one to do damage, one to decrease damage done, and one to decrease spellcasting speed. And while I first used the damaging curse of pain a lot, I now often use the curse of weakness. Makes a big difference to the damage received. I didn't have the opportunity to try the third curse, but it should be good against spellcasters.

I also got the opportunity to test out my different demons. The imp you get at the start isn't very good, he is kind of an emergency solution if you find yourself out of soul shards. The voidwalker is my favorite demon, because after upgrading him with talents he can taunt mobs of me rather reliably. Using the DamageMeters addon, his disadvantage becomes noticeable, he isn't dealing much damage. Of all the damage done in a typical combat using the voidwalker, only one quarter is coming from the pet. The third demon, the succubus, is dealing much more damage, pretty much 50:50 damage split between warlock and pet in a typical combat. But she is as fragile as my warlock, and dies easily. She has the seduction skill to entrance one humanoid enemy, but while she is doing that, she is doing nothing else. And doing the Stormwind prison with two paladins I noticed that a voidwalker's tanking does a better job of handling adds than the succubus' seduction. So right now the plan is to keep using the voidwalker for the hard fights, while whenever I have to kill lower level mobs quickly, I go for the succubus.

One thing I'm not really sure about with my warlock is the utility of damage addition items. I tailored myself shadow gloves, which add "up to 9" to my shadow spells damage. That would be up to 10% more damage on my shadow bolts. But I'm not sure if it also works on my Corruption DOT spell. And I've seen other gloves for the same level, same armor class, which give +5 on intelligence and +5 on stamina, and I'm not sure if those aren't better. On the fire side I have a dagger which adds fire damage, plus the Orb of Soran'uk, a warlock quest item to hold in the left hand, which also adds to fire and shadow damage, as well as having a heal-over-time. Not that I'm using fire spells all that much, except for the immolation dot. Both the direct damage fire spell, and the fire rain, deal good amounts of damage, but tend to make monsters extremely angry at me, which then usually gets me killed. I must admit that I use the fire rain occasionally anyway, because it is so much fun to be able to rain destruction on several mobs at once.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link