WoW Journal - 28-August-2006

I was doing lots of different things in World of Warcraft this weekend, playing three different characters. My Alliance priest leveled up to 56, doing quests in Azshara and Felwood, after having finished with Un'Goro. To me Azshara always seems like a half-finished zone. There are very few quests in that zone, much less than for other zones. There is also a huge mountain with two cave entrances, one marked with Alliance flags, the other with Horde flags, which is obviously destined to become a battleground one day, but is empty right now. And there are some interesting corners with no quests at all, or just a quest fragment leading to nowhere. For example there is a group of shipwrecked people in one of the canyons on the south coast, which give you a quest to repel a naga invasion. But I haven't seen any quests leading you towards this rather hidden group of people. Nor do you get any reward or follow-up quest when you managed to beat off the naga. The whole zone reeks of unfinished business.

As I recently wrote, I'm not quite sure yet what I will do when my Alliance priest hits level 60. Doing level 60 content with him will be pretty much the same as doing the same content with my Horde priest, with no variety of play style on offer. And I don't want to start a new character before the Burning Crusade expansion comes out, as I'd rather do a new character of a new race, so I get to know the new quests from the new starting zones. So in the end I had the idea to reactivate my level 60 Horde warrior. He was leading a life of semi-retirement, just being used as herbalist / alchemist, and not going adventuring any more.

After some analysis I concluded that the reason why I don't play the warrior, who after all was my first level 60 character ever, is that he is spec'd as a tank. That is useful in small groups, but not good for soloing, not fun in PvP, and my guild already has a lot of tanks and so I couldn't go raiding as a tank either. So I rummaged through my bank and put on more damage-oriented gear. And I unlearned my protection talents and went for a build with 18 points in arms and 33 points in fury. So now I'm dual-wielding instead of using a shield, and deal a lot more damage per second.

So I went soloing with my newly spec'd dps warrior, and I liked it. I gathered a lot of the new items for the Argent Dawn, to exchange for insignias. As I already had a lot of reputation with AD, I managed to get up to revered. And at that point I was able to "buy" an 18-slot backpack for just 14 insignia. When I was still on a protection build, solo fights took very long, but I hardly got wounded at all, even if there were adds. As fury warrior the fights are much shorter, but I need to take care to not get too many mobs at once. For farming stuff, the dps warrior build is a lot more efficient. And I think that by just switching gear I would still make a decent tank for a group, although I haven't tried that yet.

What I did try was PvP, in a group with my guild. We did two battles in Arathi Basin, and won both. The opponents were mostly better equipped than I was, as my warrior only has the tier 1 gloves, and the rest of his equipment isn't epic. But we had Teamspeak, and voice communication gives a big advantage in battlegrounds. That was fun to try some PvP, but I'm not going to do much of it before the expansion. I'd rather wait until the honor system is completely revamped, and I can get PvP rewards by slowly building up points, without being forced to compete on a relative scale with people who play all day.

With my Horde priest I did an uneventful Molten Core raid. But the other day my guild went to Blackwing Lair for the very first time. That was the first time I tried the Razorgore encounter. That was a lot of fun, even if we wiped repeatedly and never even got close to finish all the eggs. We had read up on the strategy for the encounter, which involves trying to kite up to 40 angry mobs, but the plan failed somewhere in the small details which you can only learn by experience. This is a very technical fight, and for a guild like ours (huge and semi-casual) this will be an obstacle very hard to overcome. We will need to find the perfect strategy, and then arrive at the perfect execution, with not a single player messing up. With 200 people in the guild, and the composition of the 40-man raid group not being constant, that is rather hard to achieve.

My Alliance priest is, more by accident, in a rather strictly organized tight uber leet guild. If I wasn't a priest, they would have kicked me out long ago, due to slow leveling. As it is, they keep me in reserve, a bit like a spare wheel, you never know when you'll need another priest. :) Anyway, this guild is on a relatively new server, not yet 3 months old. And *they* have beaten Razorgore (without me, of course), on the first attempt. And killed Vael on the same first BWL evening, after a few wipes. Obviously it isn't a question of gear, there is a limit of how many epics you can get out of MC in 2 months. But that guild is much smaller, less than half the size of my Horde guild, and the participation rate of everybody in raids is much higher. Plus they are all experienced raiders from other servers. If everybody knows what to do, and you always raid with more or less the same 40 people, these encounters are a lot more doable.

This observation makes me feel unwell. Whatever "challenge" the developers put in our way, the players will find a way to overcome. But these achievements have a cost. If you can only succeed if you raid always with the same people, you end up kicking out those from the guild who can't play that often. If you can only succeed with certain mix of classes, some classes have a hard time getting into a raid guild. And if only certain talent builds are considered viable, guilds even start fighting over specs. In my leet guild there recently was a big fight because some priests had put some points into shadow, and that caused a huge row about them being "disloyal" to the guild. The harder you make the encounters, the harder the players become. It stops being all fun and games, and becomes dead serious. I noticed that Molten Core for my Horde guild has become more relaxed. Even if a mistake is made, or we have a bad pull, due to us being better equipped and more experienced now we usually recover without wiping. And that limits the amount of stress and the exchange of angry words. With BWL we risk some unpleasantness, when we wipe on Razorgore every weekend for several weeks, and people get frustrated. I'm sure that once we are all level 70, we could do the same encounter easier, having a bit more leeway for small mistakes. To err is human, and encounters that don't allow for error quickly become inhuman.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:35 AM Permanent Link