While taking a brief break from World of Warcraft, I played quite a bit of Team Fortress 2. It’s always an entertaining break from the same old games – I like the concept of a class-based shooter, but I’m not into the gritty realness of a Battlefield or Modern Warfare, so TF2 it is. I also did a little bit of PvP on my warlock, and it occurred to me that there’s a lot of similarities between a class-based team FPS game and WoW battleground PvP.

Seriously, hear me out.

Lesson #1: Everyone has their own job

In TF2, I typically play the Heavy. Big, high-health, slow, and wields a friggin’ mini-gun. For a change of pace, I occasionally switch to the Scout – moves faster than anyone, has a variety of dirty tricks to stun people while on the move and harassing them with a multitude of small hits (sound familiar?) – or the Medic – his gun shoots medicine, don’t ask.

Heavies specialize in dealing massive damage; Medics specialize in healing; Scouts specializing in being really fast and capturing points. Everyone can do these things, but generally classes are good at certain things.

In WoW, you might be a rogue, sneaky with your stunlocks and the ability to make everyone in a 20-mile radius hate your guts for simply being in the same battleground. You might be a prot warrior, wading into combat and shrugging off damage like water off a murloc’s slimy fins. Me? I’m a death knight, and I’m going to go straight for the squishiest-looking caster, interrupt him eight ways from Sunday, and hopefully pummel him into the ground with this big ol’ axe. (I am Heavy Weapons Guy, and this… is my weapon.)

The first thing to accept about PvP is that everyone is good at something, but not everyone is good at everything. Not every class is fantastic at running flags, holding towers, or fighting in the middle of the road (though everyone always seems to be practicing that one). One of the keys to success is finding what you’re good at and doing it well, then learning to get passable at the things you’re not. I, for one, try to never get into a one-on-one fight with an arms warrior – on top of reducing my self-healing, they also deal massive damage with Bladestorms and Sweeping Strikes, and generally just turn me into a messy pulp. Give me a warlock, I’ll fight him instead.

Lesson #2: Stand on the dang point, mister

A Heavy on his own is easy pickings for a Sniper. They have extremely fat heads and they move very slowly, especially when firing. This is especially true for a Heavy away from his team, especially the loving embrace of a Medic’s Medigun, and when I can get ubercharged? That invincible 8 seconds is the pinnacle of damage-causing teamwork, and can usually clear a capture point or stop a team from moving their payload towards our base – at least for a little bit.

In WoW, especially in maps like WSG – where two people are usually the focal point of everyone’s attention at any time – or AV – where you might not see anyone for minutes at a time, depending on how spread out the fights are – it’s tempting to just go do your own thing. However, one thing you can’t forget is that you are there to do a job, whether it’s capturing flags or capturing towers, and if you’re not helping accomplish one of those goals, you’re not helping your team win. Furthermore, you’re away from teammates who are there to do their job, and who would help you, if you weren’t fighting in the middle of the road. Strength in numbers.

Who cares if you’re not capping the flag? You can still go slow down the people who are. Pester them with ranged attacks, stun them, slow them, do whatever you can to attain team glory. That’s really what it’s all about: teamwork. Not personal glory. Things like massive numbers of honorable kills will come in time!

Lesson #3: You’re going to die a lot – learn something from it

It’s just a matter of life: you’re going to die. A lot. This one’s universal across TF2 or WoW or nearly any multiplayer game, in fact – especially when you’re new, but even at all levels of skill, you will die a lot, and people will probably call you a n00b. Stop and think, though: do you really care about earning the respect of the kind of person who feels the need to belittle new or unskilled players? Help them learn. Don’t be that guy yelling across battleground chat about how much your team sucks. As Dusk said:

Less Talk More Fight

Enough is enough. BG chat is for calling incoming, not telling some guy from Suramar he’s a scrub because he didn’t heal you exactly when you wanted to be healed.

It’s far too easy to trash talk your own team when there’s almost no chance you’ll ever see them again (1.12 damn near ruined bgs), but god, enough.
It’s a video game, calm down and look at what you’re typing. What are you getting so upset over? It’s a video game.
It’s not worth it, whatever it is, whatever he said, whatever he did, who cares?
Do you care?
Stop for a moment here, please, take a very deep breath and ask yourself "why do i care?"

When you engage in a fruitless, useless and ultimately retarded flame war over something you will not remember in one hour, you are:
*Distracting your entire team
*Obscuring vital information, like where the hell the flag is or how many people are coming to the LM
*Removing yourself, your flame war opponent, and anyone who responds on any point, from your side. When you are typing, you are doing nothing useful.

Nobody is ever impressed with tough talk on the internet.
Nobody.
Speaking of which:

First complains, least skilled. No exceptions.

The first person to say "you guys all suck" when you are losing is the worst player on your team.
No exceptions.

So with that out of the way, the only thing to get over is dying. If you’re coming from PvE (in WoW) or a game where you’re used to thrashing the AI (say, going from Half-Life 2 to TF2), you’re going to die. A lot. But take heart! In both games, basically all it costs you is a respawn timer. No repair bill, no corpse run. The important thing is to learn from your death. During the 30 seconds you’re down waiting on the Spirit Healer to rez you, think to yourself: what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? Sometimes there’s nothing you could do – you simply get rolled over by an entire team from the other side because everyone else is fighting in the road.

Sometimes, though, there’s a lesson there. Maybe you need to put your Frost Nova in a more easily reachable position so you can quickly Blink away from a frozen opponent and rain arcane death down upon them. Maybe you need to pace out your Strangulates and not use them on less-useful spells. Maybe you need to not use your trinket on the first stun the rogue puts down, because he’s just going to apply another. Things like that!

You’re going to die a lot. Learn from it. Don’t let it get you down.

(EDIT) Lesson #4, courtesy of nagrarok

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Taking Battleground PvP Lessons from Team Fortress 2

And now, the blue post(s), with commentary. Follow along after the jump, ‘cos this is a big ol’ wall of text. As you may have guessed, there’s the occasional bit of foul language in this post.

New Death Knight Abilities
Outbreak (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.

It was cleared up in a Q&A (which is reprinted below) that Outbreak is one of those new "free" actions that we’re going to be applying now that we’re not pressing a button every single second of the day. Assuming there’s some way to lower the cooldown on this (and, well, let’s face it, a minute isn’t that long, it’s still every few rotations), Glyph of Disease just got obsoleted. I, for one, would welcome the ability to get the GoD’s effect without giving up a more useful glyph for what is essentially a "quality of life" glyph, but this seems sort of… well, underwhelming.

Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike — the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.

This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.

A PvP ability? Bestill my beating heart. (Actually I figure this’ll be something more like Mortal Strike for Arms warriors – its primary utility is in PvP, but PvE still hits it because it’s a button that does damage.) Still, this is unimpressive, in my opinion. I’m sure some hardcore PvPers will disagree with me.

Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent’s next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can’t reflect an ability, you won’t be able to copy it either.

Okay, that’s kinda cool. Assuming it does what it says on the tin, it’s a nice little addition to our arsenal, even if it is just a copy of Spell Reflection wherein we get hit (and wherein we put a debuff on the enemy instead of a buff on ourselves). My one issue with it is that it’s only going to work in melee range, but that’s really a minor gripe.

Rune System Changes
While we’re satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we’re making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here’s the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.

* In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they’re unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.

Rogue comparisons are something they seem really keen on making. I’m a little displeased; if I wanted something that played like a rogue but wasn’t a rogue, I’d finally give in and roll a druid.

* A death knight’s runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn’t have any free global cooldowns to use them. We can’t grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it’s impossible to save resources for when they’re most useful.

* Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight’s attacks are weak. The death knight’s rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player’s timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren’t able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.

These two points are simply matter of fact. Anything that requires split-second non-stop button pressing is of course affected by latency; getting a rotation even slightly off can result in a ridiculous loss of DPS. This is the main reason why simulator and dummy DPS is often leagues higher for us. Oddly, though, I’ve never really felt like I wasn’t making much impact with my individual attacks, except when I’m doing something like PvPing in all tank gear.

* The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra "storage"), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.

Oh good, a use for haste besides speeding up white swings. This seems usable, at least. Off the top of my head this seems like it will slow down most rotations, especially on the second pass. Initial rotations will probably be unchanged but once our diseases are up and ticking, and we dump some RP, it looks like we’re going to be waiting a bit longer between each strike, which is probably where new free abilities like Outbreak will come in. I’m very wary about this – yes, our current DPS rotations are so tight that if we needed to add something new we’d have to use Unholy Presence, but fundamentally changing the way the system works?

* As this is a major change to the death knight’s mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class’s current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.

Meaningful is probably just developer slang for "hits a little harder." Try and make a Blood Strike meaningful for anyone but deep Unholy.

Going to divert from the notes here to insert Ghostcrawler’s answer to rune system questions. I feel it clears up a few things.

I’ll take a stab at explaining the rune mechanic. Once you see it in action, it’s pretty easy to understand.

Just focus on Blood Runes for the moment. The big change is that rune #2 will never start filling up until rune #1 is full. They always fill 1 then 2. Today 1 and 2 can both fill at the same time.

In Cataclysm, when you’re killing things, you use rune 1. Then any extra "red" in rune 2 will fill rune 1 back up again. If both of them are full, you can use 2 Blood Runes immediately. But after that, rune 1 will fill up first and then rune 2. If it helps, imagine rune 2 is the extra tank.

I’m still not sure he’s phrasing this right – I suspect it’s a flawed analogy – and if he is, then what the hell? This sounds like if I use one rune, the second rune will start "draining" into the first one. That can’t be right, because then rune 2 has to fill up, and I’ve essentially blown two runes by using one.

This sounds like it will slow down DK attacks, and it will to a point. That’s part of what we’re trying to accomplish. We can then fill those extra GCDs with things like free abilities or runic power abilities or we have room to add talents that make runes fill faster. Remember, slow attacks can hit harder though. Instead of DKs hitting fast like a rogue, they’ll hit slower and harder, like a warrior, which fits a lot of player’s image of a DK anyway. Dual wield will hit faster of course.

However, I’d rather not be standing around doing fuck-all while auto-attacking. Frankly, there’d better be a lot of these free or runic power abilities that are interesting enough to punch in combat, because this sounds like an enormous slowdown.

I’ll try another comparison. Imagine that all rogue abilities cost 100 energy. They have to wait until they get 100 energy, and then immediately use an attack so that they aren’t wasting future energy. That’s how DKs play now, except they have 6 runes to watch. Now imagine the same rogue except all his abilities cost 50 energy. If he hits an attack when he has 60 energy, then 50 is consumed but he has 10 energy still left and a head start on the next attack. That’s the way we want DKs to play.

If that still doesn’t make sense, then focus on what the experience will be, which is that you’ll have more breathing room in your rotation and won’t have to hit a button every single GCD. If you don’t use a strike the second it’s available, that’s more okay because the extra tank will store extra rune resources rather than just wasting it. You’ll still be hitting a lot of buttons though. We’re keeping double rune strikes and Death Runes and disease multipliers and all of that. We’ll have to make some changes in some abilities to accommodate the resource change, but it won’t be unrecognizable to you.

This is the part that actually makes sense, because his analogy of an "extra tank" is kind of flawed. Let me try another one: we’re like rogues, except with three energy bars instead of one, and each one’s broken in two halves. If I use a Blood Strike, I now have tank 1 at 0% and tank 2 at 100%. Now tank 1 starts filling up: 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%… but if I hit Blood Strike again, tank 1 is still filling up 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, but tank 2 is now empty, and tank 2 just sits there until tank 1 hits 100%. Then tank 2 fills up. Like I said: for initial rotations, this isn’t going to matter, but we’re going to find ourselves with breathing room in the second half of our rotation.

If there’s enough Fun New Buttons™ to punch, Frost may actually have to start running in Unholy Presence again – as you’ll see below, being primarily in Frost gives you melee haste, and assuming there’s no difference between haste and melee haste, their runes are going to fill up faster than everyone else’s and they’ll probably want to look into UP if they need to punch more keys. That reminds me of the old glory days of Frost, when it just had so many buttons to push that the GCD was an enormous constraint.

We’re not sure DKs even need Rune Strike any longer. If it survives, we’ll turn it into an instant swing. But if we turn it into an instant swing, then it really isn’t that different from existing strikes so it’s possible we can just make a tanking rotation without it.

Then just make it work like Revenge, or get rid of it. /shrug.  It’ll make all my macros shorter, at least. And frankly with Vengeance (see below) making everything hit harder basically all the time, I don’t think Rune Strike – primarily a single target threat buff – is necessary anymore for us.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled preview notes, already in progress.

Talent Changes
Next we’ll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we’re planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we’re intending each death knight spec to perform.

One of the biggest changes we’re making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it’s less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn’t as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We’d rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the "correct" tree out of three possibilities.

Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood’s niche was self-healing — fitting for a tank — as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.

Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.

Well, thanks for not telling us a damned new thing. This is the content of the "Blood bomb" a few days ago, only summarized. The only solid change mentioned was that Bone Shield will jump over from Unholy. I’m okay with that. I still have a huge concern, though, and that is Blood’s AOE threat. Blood AOE threat, unless you talent specifically for it and thus gimp yourself somewhere else like single-target threat or survivability or utility, is in the shitter. There’s only so many Icy Dickpunches I can throw around.

Additionally, I’m not sure how dual-specialization makes having a single tanking tree necessary. In fact, if anything, I’d say it was the only thing that made multiple tank setups worked – back when I was still actively tanking 5-mans, I had to carry two tank specs – one to throw around massive AOE for you half-retarded douchebags in random heroics who attach your AOE attack of choice to every key on the keyboard and slam your face into it, and the other for when I’m tanking raids with actual skilled WoW players. The anti-douchebag spec did, at least, have the wiggle room to let me take Anti-Magic Zone. I love that big pink fucking bubble.

Whoops, off-topic. Moving on.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
Blood
Damage reduction
Vengeance
Healing Absorption

Frost
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Runic Power Generation

Unholy
Melee damage
Melee and spell critical damage
Disease Damage

Nothing too surprising, really.

Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you’ll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.

I haz a bubble! Seriously, though, that’s kind of cool, and moves Death Strikes up in our priority, unless they’re planning to make more than one move self-heal in Blood. Well, and Rune Tap. They could change it, but right now, Bloodworm and Mark of Blood heals aren’t considered self-heals (Bloodworm heals come from the worms themselves, while Mark of Blood heals – according to my combat logs, anyway – come from whoever you put the Mark on.)

Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.

Another statement they keep throwing around without justifying it. Does this mean Frost is going to get something to do with all that RP besides spam Frost Strike?

Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree’s play style.

Unholy DKs: now even more like warlocks in plate.

Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.

You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won’t see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking.

Vengeance is probably the one change I actually got excited about, but I read it in the warrior changes, so it really kind of wore off by the time I got to the DK changes. I did some napkin math on this, and assuming "unbuffed health" means "unbuffed health with all our armor on," let’s take Icecrown as an example – most bosses hit for somewhere in the 16k range, so I’d be gaining 800 AP (roughly) per hit, up to a max of around 3100. That’s pretty impressive. Shouldn’t have a problem holding onto a single target pretty much ever, and this will make doing dailies or questing in tank spec a lot more fun.

Again, though, the majority of what this amps up is single target threat. Still no answers as to how we’re going to handle AOE threat. Maybe we’ll finally get a damage shield, since we’re the only tanks without one unless some druid is kind enough to give us thorns.

Bonus round! DJ Zarhym on the ones and twos:

Here are a few points of clarification:

We want to provide a 2-handed style for Frost since we recognize that pets are an acquired taste. We think we have the design space to do that now that we don’t need to support Frost tanking. We’re definitely committed to making Frost work as a dual-wield tree though — that isn’t going away.

Welcome back, 2H Frost, my old friend. We missed you. Also, it’s not in our Q&A, but it was confirmed somewhere else that there will be Strength-based one-handed DPS weapons available again, for dual-wielding Frost death knights and Fury warriors using the new Single-Minded Fury talent. Huzzah!

Outbreak is free with a 1-minute cooldown. It’s not supposed to completely replace Plague Strike and Icy Touch.

I mentioned this above.

We’re not sure how we’re going to handle presences yet. We recognize the oddness of Blood death knights playing in Frost Presence and Frost death knights not playing in Frost Presences. We might rename the presences or take some other action.

Cosmetic, but it does seem backasswards that Frost DPS uses Blood Presence and Blood tanking uses Frost Presence. I worry about what "take some other action" might mean.

And now back to Mr. Greg "TO THE GROUND" "Ghostcrawler" Street.

Quote:
GC, does this mean that important cooldowns won’t require runes? Instead we’ll see things like Strangulate, Bone Shield, Ghoul Frenzy, UA and stuff cost runic power or just be free? They would be incredibly frustrating to use with such long rune cooldowns.

I don’t think we can make them all cost runes. That would be too hard to manage. If I had to guess, some will be runic power and some will just be free. If we did move Bone Shield to Blood, then that one might be okay as a rune since it’s something you do pre-emptively, but we have some more talent tree work to do first before we can really answer that.

This is the one scenario where I’d fully support the removal of Rune Strike – moving survival tools onto RP.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Death Knight Cataclysm preview, much like everyone else

So the holiday lull is over and the new year begins. My real life resolutions for 2010 aren’t anything impressive, and I’ve been cheating on WoW with consoles so I could really use some goal setting… so let’s take a look at what I intend to get done in WoW this year.

• Finish Insane in the Membrane before Cataclysm – or at least the goblin and Shen’drelar portions. Ideally I’d like to have all of this done by the expansion, so I can march into Deepholm and prove that I really am insane – see, it says so right above my head… Barring that, I’d like to at least finish the Steamwheedle Cartel and Shen’drelar reputations. Feralas is marked for some pretty heavy changes, and as it’s the easiest source for both of those (or at least the best for this title), I’d like to get done with that place while I can. Goblin I can do – Shen’drelar will be hell on the pocketbook… I suck at making money. This also has a sub-resolution:
• Get my rogue to 60+. This is the only way I’m going to be able to pickpocket all those Heavy Junkboxes unless a miracle occurs. The problem is, I really don’t like playing my rogue, so I need to use my remaining month of recruit-a-friend time and power-level her.
• Finish The Loremaster on my warlock. This is the title I originally wanted for him back when he was a little Forsaken warlock. Then he was a gnome warlock on Kael’thas and I’m sorry, I just can’t play gnomes. Now he’s an orc warlock back on Feathermoon and is only a few levels higher than he was at the end of Wrath. He’s halfway done with basically all of Loremaster, barring Northrend, so I guess I should also add:
• Finally (FINALLY) finish Higher Learning. Do you know how close I am to this? I need one book. One. It is never there. I have seen its joke replacements for the last four months. I WILL FINISH THIS ACHIEVEMENT THIS YEAR. Finished on January 18, 2010.
• Get my warlock to 80 before Cataclysm. That way I can ignore him until it’s almost time for the expansion after that. Ha ha, I kid.
• Get my Violet Proto-Drake. As it stands, I’ll get this during the Midsummer Fire Festival – assuming I don’t get boned by the RNG again during Valentine’s Day. The Midsummer Fire Festival is the only event I’m not at least 33-50% done with, because it was the only holiday that passed during the time that I quit playing WoW. I’ve been cleaning up so far, and I’ve got no reason to stop. Hot Pink Drake of Speed, here I come!
• Level a druid, paladin, or shaman to 80. Really, just level anything to 80. I’m pretty sure I’m the last remaining person in World of Warcraft with one level 80 character. And I’ve really had the urge to level a kitty druid lately… and I do have the leather heirlooms for it… I’ve just been trying to hold off on it until I finish leveling my rogue, and I was also kind of waiting until troll and worgen druids were available. However, I’m bad at not giving in to temptation.

So yeah, that’s it. There’s my list. It’s a short list of resolutions (spoiler: I typed "reoslutions" again), but it should be enough to keep me occupied.

Especially Insane in the Membrane, which some days feels so overwhelming that I start to think maybe Battlemaster would’ve been a better idea.

Oh wait! I forgot one!

• Post informative stuff about Death Knights again. The death knight blogosphere shrank about as fast as it grew, didn’t it? And my old guides could really use a good revamp. So yeah, I figure 2010 is a good time for me to get back into posting about the art of death knighting again.

So what are your goals for the year?

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Shaking off the dust; WoW resolutions

TheMightyGresh: do you really want to huuuurt me? Do you really want to make me cryyyy?

Yes. Warlocks are some of my favorite PvP targets, mostly because I still remember how warlocks work. Other classes might have tricks up their sleeves, but I know your arsenal pretty well. Plus affliction warlocks are a pretty good challenge, since unlike many casters – who I can lock out with my eight billion interrupts – affliction has a ton of instant casts, so I have to settle for a general silence and a beating with a sack of quarters.

Oh, and Fear? So underpowered. Hello, diminishing returns; hello, Every Man for Himself.

Trizophenie: Cloud or Squall? And why?

Neither. I haven’t actually liked a Square-Enix hero since the days of FF6. Cloud’s a doofus who’s too wrapped up in himself to see the bigger picture of "hey dummy save the world," while Squall is a whiny emo boy– wait a sec, I’m seeing a trend here. To contrast, I did kind of like Tidus, I just wish his dialogue writer hadn’t made a concerted effort to make him sound like an idiot. Then again, Tidus kind of was an idiot, wasn’t he? "Durrrr what do you mean Zanarkand’s destroyed? Why is Auron sparkling? Durrrrrrrr."

Sabiba: here’s a question for you: Why does blizzard hate hunters in PVP?

I’m going to assume this is an arena question, because hunters seem to be doing fine in Battlegrounds. Here’s your answer: they hate everyone, at different times, in arenas. Reason being, as they stated in an interview a while ago, arenas were basically shoved clumsily into the game and it’s been hell for balance ever since. Frankly, I’d be just as happy if Cataclysm brought with it the removal of arenas.

Llanion: What toppings go on a correct pizza?

Anything except anchovies. The last pizza I had was the Socrates’ Revenge from Dewey’s Pizza: olive oil, minced garlic, Mozzarella-Fontina blend, spinach, black olives, green olives, Feta cheese, red Onions, tomatoes. Fantastic!

Krizzlybear: I have excellent rhythm, but I can’t get the crossfader to work properly. Any suggestions? Oh right, WoW questions only…

Heck if I know, man, you’re a full two difficulties above me. It would help if the crossfader locked a little more solidly into the ‘center’ position; as it is I tend to swing too far back when I hit a crossfade spike (I spike left, then accidentally go all the way right instead of back to center). I found that rather than trying to use it the way the tutorial shows, I positioned it between two of my fingers with my hand laying flat on the turntable controller – I tend to get better control that way.

Sleepyrabite: As I have nothing to ask about for WoW… What’s your current favourite offline game?

Funny you should ask – I just recently moved the rather clumsy "Hey Phil Whatcha Playin’" feature to a site I recently found that is designed for exactly this kind of thing – here’s my Backloggery! I’m currently dividing my attention between Half-Minute Hero, the Persona PSP remake, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, and (as you may have surmised from my answer to Krizz) DJ Hero. When my girlfriend is in town, we also play some co-op Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires. I also admit curiosity about Dragon Age: Origins; however, I may be the only gamer alive who didn’t really like Torchlight.

Ladygypsy: how is mana pronounced? MAN-a or MAHHHN-a? (srsly, I can’t pronounce squat in WoW.)

Well, I know how I pronounce it, but I wasn’t sure it’s correct, so I asked an authority. Apparently "mah-nah" – your second pronunciation – not "man-uh" is the correct pronunciation. It’s apparently a Maori word! I’ve learned something new today.

Lightning Round! Nibuca asks 12 million questions!

• If you were trapped on a "Lost" isle.. and had access to only one game/console/pc which would you choose? WoW. Surely no one expected that, but look at it this way: I can try and get my guildies to send a helicopter to get me off this stupid island!
• If a boss falls in the game.. and the last of the raid members dies at the same time.. is it a wipe? Nope. Sure, you have to get back up and repair and heal, but you still get phat lewtz, making it not-a-wipe.
• What pie is best for T-day? Pumpkin.
• Should all pie be topped with whipped cream? No – apple pies, or other warm fruit pies, deserve ice cream. Any pie with a meringue doesn’t need whipped cream – it brought its own topping to the table.
• Is ice cream optional? For most pies, yes. I really only prefer it with fruit pies. It’ll do for whipped cream in a pinch. Again, though, not really necessary for meringue pies at all.
• Boxers briefs or commando.. which do you think @brigwyn chooses… {evil grin} I refuse to consider Brigwyn’s undies or lack thereof; the fact that he showed up in my dreams on tour with Daft Punk was bad enough (at least he was fully clothed).
• Harvest festival overview.. Grinding reputation with the "running circles in Dalaran" faction… RP for the uninitiated… That’s not a question, but lucky for you, I’m nice. I know as much about the Harvest Festival as you, I’m not sure what the second one is, and I’m not on an RP server anymore and never RP’d when I was on one. NEXT!
• How is the "Mr T hand grenade" better/worse than the zombie infestation from last year?
• Better, for people who didn’t enjoy the zombie infestation: you can click off the Mohawked buff instead of hoping for a healer to pass by, or waiting to zombify then exploding.
• Worse, for people who did enjoy the zombie infestation: sorry, you don’t get to fight your own faction and infect them with zombiedom.
• Better, for everyone all around: the Mohawked buff isn’t going to stop you from going about your business.
• Worse, period: it doesn’t really lead up to anything. Unless… Mr. T is the final boss of Cataclysm?! So now we know where Deathwing’s been hiding all these long years: the A-Team van.

There, I think I won! Now if only there was a prize.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Ask a reasonable question … get a stupid answer.

I’m not entirely able to explain why I hate this, but I think it’s the same thing as why I don’t play on PvP servers: if I want to PvP, I’ll go PvP. If I don’t, I don’t. By throwing in these achievements, in order to receive two tangible in-game rewards (the title and, eventually, the mount), Blizzard is essentially saying “suck it up: you have to go do PvP, no matter how much you hate it.” Yeah, I know, no one is forced to do them, but no one is forced to get a 2200 arena rating either: arena people arena because they enjoy that, and I hunt achievements because I enjoy that, but when my achievements force me to do meaningless PvP-based sub-achievements? Screw it. Holidays can piss off.

On top of that, I don’t even think Blizzard has completely thought through how these holiday PvP achievements work. I wouldn’t want to be a battleground-runner this week. I had a feeling that hundreds of non-PvPers struggling to complete objectives that more or less pit them against their own team and the other team would be an… inhospitable environment. Apparently I was right. Euripedes has a plea from the PvP side of the fence for Blizzard to please, stop this nonsense:

So here’s a suggestion, Blizzard:

Stop it.

Seriously.

Nobody likes it this way.

The people who want to PvP are frustrated because their battlegrounds are filling up with these incompetent morons who haven’t the slightest idea what to do and have absolutely no will to change that.

The people who don’t want to PvP are frustrated because they have to participate in something that, at best, has no interest to them and, at worst, is akin to smashing their face into mirrors and then stabbing themselves in the legs with the shards.

You want to have these people participate in PvP for an achievement? Fine. Then do it this way:

• Win all five battlegrounds with your orphan out!

Shazam. You still force them to do something they don’t want to do, but at least this time they don’t have to completely screw up the battleground to do so.

Let me clarify: I’m not totally against PvP achievements. I think forcing them into the meta-achievement is a stupid idea, but I can understand maybe they’re there to give the event a more well-rounded flavor. Fine. What I am against is poorly-designed PvP achievements. Here’s a few examples of what I consider good and bad PvP achievement design:

• Well-Designed
• G.N.E.R.D. Rage. Neither side is negatively-impacted by the G.N.E.R.D.S. buff. If you die, applying the G.N.E.R.D.s buff is super-easy, because you get them out of every damn candy bucket in Azeroth, and you can trade them between people – so if you’re out, but your buddy has a ton, just let him give you some before you queue up. In fact, this one has the bonus that you can do it anywhere – world PvP, Wintergrasp, Battlegrounds, maybe Arenas even. You name it, if you can get an HK, you can finish G.N.E.R.D. Rage.
• Rotten Hallow (H). This is the Horde PvP Hallows’ End achievement, and it’s really only PvP in the loosest sense of the term. It’s quick, it’s fun, and on some servers (Feathermoon, looking at you) it’s not even going to get you flagged or attacked.
• Elders of the Alliance / Elders of the Horde. It might not be the easiest achievement for some people (heck, you might have spent some time running around the city as a ghost looking for the elder), but at the very least, you could strip naked and corpse-run your way to victory. It may not be easy or enjoyable, but it’s sure as hell not going to run anyone else’s day.
• All the Midsummer events: Desecration of the Horde / Desecration of the Alliance and King of the Fire Festival. I did these before there was an achievement for them on Queklain (well, I think I missed a few fires in Outland), and I look forward to doing them again as Zulfon. Stomping out fires is quick and easy and earns you a skirmish here and there from dedicated defenders (unlike Rotten Hallow, stomping out the fires does flag you), and as for the city fire retrieval… these things are a lot easier to find than the elders (well, except for Orgrimmar’s, because we have bonfires everywhere all the time – but in, say, Stormwind, a bonfire in the park really sticks out), and sneaking from spot to spot as a non-stealth class? Hell, it was like Metal Gear Solid meets World of Warcraft. One of my fondest memories was riding into Stormwind on my dreadsteed, stealing the fire of Stormwind, sprinting north, and jumping into the canals; the guards gave up, though an intrepid hunter didn’t. Deep underwater, I died, then self-rezzed… then, sneaking through the canal system of an unfamiliar city, I made my way nearly all the way to the castle itself without ever drowning. Finally, I found a boat next to a low section of the wall… leaping out, I mounted up my dreadsteed again and rode like a bat out of Hell to the tram, /cackle’ing all the way IRL. It was awesome, and I look forward to doing it again (and finishing it as Queklain – Flame Keeper Queklain seems apropos for a warlock!).
• Poorly-Designed
• Rotten Hallow (A). The Alliance side of the Rotten Hallow achievement is at least partially like the Horde one, in that they have a “crash the party” achievement, and the wickerman area well outside of Undercity is arguably even easier to get to than the Southshore Inn. The issue is the other half of the achievement: the Alliance is relying on being around the Inn when someone from the Horde does their Hallows’ End thing to get this finished. This is ultimately unfair, and if this is the design Blizzard truly wanted, than the Horde should have been forced to clean up the mess at the wickerman as well.
• With a Little Helper from My Friends. This would have been a lot better if there was a Winter Wondervolt machine in the battlegrounds and in Wintergrasp, or if the buff didn’t wear off after death. I tried doing this one: tons of gnomes show up, swarm out, get a few HKs, die, lose the buff, and /afk out to get a new one rather than wasting their time. Great job on this one, Blizzard. </sarcasm>
• And lastly, the inspiration for this, School of Hard Knocks. I don’t curse often, so when I do, you know I mean it: Blizzard Entertainment World Event Designers, what the fuck were you thinking? I entirely agree with ‘rip: if this had been “win once in each Battleground with your orphan out,” this would have been (1) entertaining, (2) possibly enjoyable, and (3) at least contributing to the point of the battleground, i.e., to win. As it is? Let’s take Eye of the Storm: not only does your average PvE achievement hunter not bother taking any towers this week, you also end up with a giant clusterfuck around the center flag, with no one doing any kind of D and eventually a win is achieved (for the other team, of course) via the towers because there were only 2 people on your team who weren’t chasing the flag and only the flag. Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin are even worse, I’m sure: I don’t dare poke my head in to find out.

So no, you won’t see me in Alterac Valley with an orcish orphan trying to keep up, or letting the Alliance cap farm so I can take it back and get a quarter of an achievement. That’s not my style. Brewfest? Midsummer Fire Festival? I’m all over those. But as for my orphan… all he gets is a day away from the orphanage, and I get a pig and a beholder.

Sorry Blizzard: maybe next year, if you’ve started thinking these things through.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Orphans? Bah

Yeah, that sums up 3.1 pretty nicely, for me. I won’t lie, there’s good parts to it – I’m liking my death knight and warlock (yes, you read that right, warlock) better than ever, and love the new options available to most of my toons. The Argent Tournament is fantastic – I absolutely love it. But everything else? Frustrating.

Last night, it came in threes:

1. I ran into a delightful bug with the dual spec feature. Mild compared to others, but consistent. Non-spellcasters who have abilities in their talent trees where rank 1 is bought with talents and every rank afterwards is bought from a trainer will find that often switching between trees removes the lowest such talent and anything below it. This means that every time I switch to my DPS spec, I have to reapply 7 points into the Blood tree; when I switch to tank, everything between Frost Strike and Howling Blast needs to be retalented. I can only imagine how annoying this would be for Unholy DKs; if I’m wrong and it’s the highest, not the lowest, everything between Corpse Explosion and the bottom of the tree could potentially get removed.
2. I’ve been trying for a while to get a spot in a 25-man team with members of The Aftermath. Unfortunately my contact guy and I have been missing each other. Last night we finally got in touch and he says “hey, you want to come do 25-man Emalon with us?” New boss? Of course I want to go! So I hearthed from Outland, where I had been working on Loremaster stuff, to Northrend and notice we don’t have Wintergrasp. Wuh-oh. We fielded maybe 40-ish people in our group, with a few more besides… and still had from 3 to 7 stacks of Tenacity at all times. In short, it was an enormous lagfest that we lost through sheer numbers. So, no Emalon.
• Also? I doubt we’d have been able to go to Emalon if we’d won. The instance servers had been down for going on four hours at that point and showed no signs of recovery.
3. Oh, and then I disconnected, and the B.net login servers were fried, so I couldn’t get back on for at least an hour, maybe more, by which time my desire to log on had completely waned. Instead, I watched the debut episode of Pitchmen (Billy Mays is awesome) and played … incoming blasphemy… City of Heroes.

So yeah, that’s how 3.1 is for me: so good, it drove me to another MMO. Parts of it are good, but much like when 3.0.8 came out, the game is in a largely unplayable state at the moment. So how’re things for you?

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

3.1: The Frustration of Ulduar

Banana Force M, proudly failing their way to a murloc. What could possess a team to have such a silly name? Simple: we took a component of each blog name to form the title of this tri-national arena team:

• Siha, of Banana Shoulders, representing the Deep (Really Deep) South, hailin’ from Australia (and feeling kind of dirty because we’re making her play a blood elf instead of her usual human),
• me, of course, reppin’ for the U.S. of A., (and unnecessarily crippling my team further by playing a class and spec I’ve never played before, an Arms Warrior), and
• Llanion, of Mad Cow Chronicles, holdin’ it down for the Great Frozen Northlands of Canada.

We entered with one goal in mind: to win a murloc! Specifically Murkimus the Gladiator, the prize for playing 200 matches. We have no illusions of making it into the top 1000 in order to get the Vanquisher title (as I think I mentioned after viewing our rank last night, “all we need is for 1,325 teams to be worse than us and we’re in”). But by <deity>, we’ll get that fishman!

Some highlights:

• Realizing that our team name sounds like some kind of 80′s cartoon superhero combo, and reacting accordingly:
  
• Llanion killing a death knight in single combat. (He was so proud, it was adorable, sort of. To be fair, the death knight kept spamming Chains of Ice despite diminishing returns, was in full Deadly Gladiator gear, and apparently had forgotten where his/her strangulate button was.)
• Is something missing here? (Click to embiggen)
  
• Leaping onto the tomb in the center of the Ruins of Lordaeron to /chicken at a priest on a team that was just cowering in the doorway. Luckily, we won, so I didn’t look like a huge idiot.
• OH SHIT BEES!
  
• Losing to teams with such names as Just Here For The Murloc, ThisWasTheOnlyNameLeft, WERE ALL GUYS IRL LOL, and Crazy Cat Ladies.
• Beating teams with names like Two Jews and Marcello and the Power Rangers.
• Look, ma, we briefly had a winning record!
  

Sometimes you roflstomp over the other team, sometimes it is you who gets roflstomped. We’re all very zen about it, and we really do win our share of matches. Despite having a losing record, I freely admit I expected to be doing a lot worse – Llanion claims to be terrible at PvP, I’m playing a class I never played before, and Siha’s the only one with any extensive experience on our team.

Also, impromptu dance parties.

1/3 of the way done. We’re almost there! Our squishy little metal murloc is in our reach! \o/

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.

Failing towards victory: Banana Force M