Farewell, Azeroth

It’s been a wild ride, Azeroth. I’ve come and gone, seen your sights many a time, ridden off into the sunset only to stroll into your lush lands once more on a sunny morning.

You promise great things with new lands and a reimagining of your world, soon. And perhaps I will return again to explore your paradise of conflict and beauty, to do battle with the dragon aspect and enjoy the cameraderie of my peers. But, right now, I can’t be certain that I shall. This world, the re real one, has so much beauty of it’s own to explore. And time, we have so little of it. And while I love you, Azeroth, and everything you stand for, and everyone who resides within your virtual walls… I can no longer dedicate so much of my soul to you.

Perhaps a future awaits where I tire of this world once more and choose to wile my time within your world. Perhaps. None can see what the future holds.

Farewell for now, Azeroth, and to you who remain, may your travels be wondrous and filled with joy, discovery and excitement.

p.p.s Skurm will continue to blog at his ‘real life’ blog, skurmish.wordpress.com

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It always ends with a whimper

Let’s face it. Wrath of the Lich King, as an expansion, is limping along and gasping it’s last. Progression, now, doesn’t matter. Raiding isn’t really a big deal, relegated to a few slacker casual guilds out there trying to finish up the last of the available content before the Cataclysm arrives. There will be no going out with a big bang ala Isle of Quel’Danas and the Sunwell. Ruby Sanctum was a flash in the pan. The only things left to do in this expac are to tie up any loose ends left for your individual character. Perhaps it’s a title, perhaps it’s a mount but the gear-grind is basically over, the drive to push on through to the end has all but evaporated.  Even the epeen is vanishing as people realise their fat purples today aren’t going to be worth spit a few days after the new expansion arrives. Apathy has become so apparent within my guild that 25man raiding has all but ceased and of the 2 or 3 10man teams we had going are dead and gone, now we barely scrape together  a single group one or two nights a week to attempt Lich King in 10man.

And so it is that I put down my blogging pen, too, in anticipation of something new.

WoW-specific blogging will resume it’s regular programming soon enough. Till then, enjoy the twilight days of the Lich King’s last stand, and I’ll keep on inking my idle thoughts on the genre and gaming in general. Personally, I think I’ll be more or less leaving Azeroth itself in it’s current incarnation to the die-hards and focus on some much needed Real Life.

‘Till we meet again,

Adieu

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31 point trees are win

I’d been working on some ideas for Blood tank trees for Cataclysm, but after last weeks other bit of news, no not the RealID fiasco, the bit about talent trees being severely pruned, it’s a bit pointless. The Beta talents right now are going to be nothing alike what they’ll be at launch.

First off, each tree is being pruned down to 31 points deep rather than 51. It’s basically 2 tiers less. Second, we’re getting about half as many talent points total, so where we get 71 right now, we’ll probably only have points in the 30’s to play with by the time we ding 85.

At first this sounds like a massive nerf and simplification, but the reasoning behind it is that we spend so many talent points on must-have junk-talents like +1 to hit here and +1 to crit there, that most of those 71 talent points are being spent on boring talents. This makes a hell of a lot of sense. I know I drop otherwise awesome, fun and flavourful talents like Lichborne to instead pick up something dreary like one percent to dodge. Ho hum.

It will be farm more fun to be able to focus on grabbing ‘unnecessary’ talents like Mark of Blood or Blood Worms than minmaxing cookiecutter builds focused purely on stats. Especially the DK class, which loses out on a lot of versatility in the way cookiecutter builds spec in order to maximize dps or eh/threat. And it’s versatility that was supposed to be this class’s strong point. Something we had to sacrifice in trying to keep up with all the other classes. We lose out on so many ‘toys’ that are baked into other classes, and it’ll be refreshing to be able to haul out something super cool like Hungering Cold in a dungeon or raid instead of sinking that 1 point into getting 5/5 Black Ice.

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Blizzard regains it’s sanity

And so, once more, all is right with the world.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as conversation threading, the ability to rate posts up or down, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, ( http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html ) and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime
CEO & Cofounder
Blizzard Entertainment

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Facebookfail

In a related anecdote : New Facebook Signups Plummets

Thinking back the privacy brouhaha around Facebook earlier last month, is this merely coincidence?

Facebook have gone from being kinda cool and open, to being thought of as scumbags and criminals.

Do you think you can survive the same, ActiBlizzard? Do you really think you’re bigger than your community, your customers?

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RealDumb

The big deal right now within the WoWosphere (that’s totally a new word I just invented) is your RealID being attached to any forum posts you make on the official forums. This isn’t live yet, but it will be in a few weeks time for Starcraft 2, and it will be in place for the launch of Cataclysm.

Like about 95% of the rest of the WoW populace who’ve commented about this, I think it’s a really, really bad idea.

For one, I think ActivisionBlizzard have allowed themselves to become a victim of their own hubris. Sure, WoW is the most popular MMO in the world. But is it really the game that everyone plays? The game for the masses? I’m not quite so sure really. I still think the bulk of the WoW playing populace are, well, seasoned gamers. There may be a lot of people for whom WoW is there first ever game but I think that number is pretty slim, and always will be. WoW is astill a pretty hardcore experience. There’s a lot fo grinding, and raiding is still severely complicated. This isn’t Farmville, Kotick. No matter how much you want it to be.

And that means that most of WoW’s populace are probably at least somewhat tech savvy internet veterans, and they value their privacy. Furthermore, consider the people who use your forums. Chances are they do so right now exactly because these forums allow them a modicum of anonymity. And while this can be used for nefarious purposes – trolling, flamewars, etc – anonymity is also great at getting valuable, intelligent people to come out of their shells. To stick their neck out.

Will they be sticking theirs out after this change goes through? Odds are, no. Will flaming and trolling still happen? Odds are, yes. Anonymity may turn otherwise normal people into trolls, but here’s the thing : Real trolls don’t care. Real trolls troll because, well, they have shitty personalities. That’s just baked in. Casting aside the veil of internet secrecy isn’t going to change that.

I haven’t come this close to cancelling my ‘subsrciption (ie not buying any more game cards) in a while. It’s not even so much about the forums, since I rarely post there, and could probably get by never visiting them ever again. The problem is, it highlights a disregard for the wishes of it’s clientele that appears to have been growing within Blizzard, suspiciously ever since the Activision merger.

So I won’t lie. I would quit right now if it weren’t for the contacts I’ve built up within the game. And Blizzard knows that. Hence RealID in the first place. But here’s the thing – you can’t copyright someone else’s name. And once I have my cadre, my crew, its’ actually quite easy to walk away, and take them with me.

Especially if they feel the same way I do.

And I’m betting right now that most of them are.

You’ve just crossed a terrible threshold, Blizzard. Like Arthas, in your blind zeal pursuing one single goal, you’ve lost sight of what really mattered in the first place. And you have, in the process, become the enemy.
What hubris. What irony.

There’s no coming back from that.

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Unholy. My Go-to spec.

So, where am I these days, I hear you ask. Hypothetically. What’s up, Skurmish? How’s it hanging, broski?

Well, our ultra-casual guild is still working on Arthas 10man. It’s slow going as usual. People are burning out like the wickermen doused in high-octane.  Still soldiering along though, hoping to get Kingslayer for myself and a bump up the ladder for the guild. Been doing a fair bit of tanking in ICC actually, particularly on Arthas himself. Short factoid of the day, we are awesome offtanks for this encounter. Being able to simply drop that Death and decay at Arthas’ feet and pick up all those ghouls is quite something. After seeing our warriors and even paladins struggle with this aspect of the fight, I was somewhat chuffed at being able to handle it so easily. Score 1 DK tanks, woot.

I’m back to being Unholy. Frost was a fun experiment but it was becoming a little too bipolar. Either you’re doing incredible tank-n-spank dps, or you’re doing mediocre mobile dps. Unholy shines in both roles, so I chose to go with what I enjoyed most, was comfortable with and with what happened to offer the most overall raid utility. Warlocks are rare like hens teeth but shamans, a dime a dozen. Getting one of the resto or elementals to drop Windfury is far easier than getting a lock to keep that Curse of Whatever up all the time and on all the mobs.

Specifically, I’m 0/17/54 specced, and running around 700-ish armor penetration (gemmed all for strength mind you) with Shadow’s Edge and Deathbringer’s Will (woot!). Oddly enough, simming with AskMrRobot gave me a better sustained DPS score than a blood subspec, where everyone on teh forums and even EJ said otherwise. Huh. Interesting. So much for conventional wisdom. Frost subspec really seems to scale better in virtually every way and with virtually every stat weight.

In other news my warrior is coming along nicely, and I really do enjoy tanking the lowbie instances with him.  One thing I did realise is that Wrath of the Lich Kings’ content really isnt all that easy. We’re just horribly overgeared for it. Even with a good chunk of heirlooms, running easy (ie UK, Nexus) normal pug 5mans at level 70 can be nerve-wracking. When I hit 80 and start tanking heroics in noob gear I forsee many deaths in my scrub warriors’ future. I think if it weren’t for all the overgeared dps and healers out there that will no doubt carry me along, I’d be quite intimidated at the prospect.

Can you guys remember back to early Wrath, and chainwiping on Skadi in Utgarde Pinnacle, among others? When tanks running around in 25k HP gear was quite a lot, and healers actually went oom now and then? Crazy times eh? Also, it was fun. I realised that challenging 5man content is a breath of fresh air this late in the game, and the only way I’m getting some is to reroll. I hope to hell Cataclysm brings back some of that. It will be a real drag to have all us ICC geared clowns blitz through the early endgame content in a couple of weeks.

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Dark Knights

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There’s Always That One Guy

You know who he is. The one that, for whatever reason, decides he doesn’t like you, and that he’s going to find issue with whatever you do, and say, as long as you’re a member of Guild X.

I’m not sure why this is. I think, sometimes, it’s a case of competitiveness gone one step too far. Or an offhand joke that rubbed some guy off the wrong way resulting in a lifelong vendetta.

We like to joke around on vent/teamspeak, on guild chat and in our guild forums but the reality is, there are a lot of people out there who take things the wrong way. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m not very ‘chatty’ much these days, primarily as a result of this. My one weakness is forum trolling, primarily because I’m left with a fair amount of free time in the day as a result of my job. Ingame, I’m too busy doing stuff like raiding or farming to get too involved in guild politics, but I can’t help find myself becoming embroiled in the stuff on the guild’s forums. I wish I could just walk away instead.

I’m really looking forward to 10 man raiding in Cataclysm. I don’t think I’ll raid any 25man content, and it’s not because 10man is easier (it’s not, really) or simpler to organise. It’s because I’ll have more of an opportunity to pick who I play with, and hopefully avoid those difficult personalities.

Although it seems that, even in 10man raiding, you can’t help but get into some kind of rivalry with That One Guy.

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PVP Rage Post

Man, there’s so much that bugs me about this game sometimes. Particularly about PVP.

Like how we can’t win Wintergrasp on our realm due to the 2.5:1 lead in numbers Alliance has over Horde.
Like how a hunter, yesterday, basically killed me in under 3 seconds, with me running 1300 resilience.
Like how retarded Horde has become, at least on the EU side and in my Battlegroup. Some days winning a single BG for the daily random becomes basically outright impossible. I don’t know why this is, but it seems that, over time, the influx of essentially terrible players has increased within the Horde. It used to be that Horde was the ‘hardcore’ faction, where all the PVPers rolled their toons. Since the introduction of Blood Elves – not coincidentally the most populous Blood Elf race in the entire game – the overall quality of the average Horde pug team in a BG has simply plummeted, to where we’re a joke faction now. To hwere I’m honestly contemplating rolling an Alliance alt for the first time in my WoW life.

I think my short PVP kick has ended, again. I crafted my Shadow’s Edge, respecced back to PVE tank&dps, and gave up bothering on my DK. Going to retire my frost mage, as well. After the past few weeks of trying to make a go at PVP and repeatedly smashing into seemingly insurmountable walls… no more. I’ll work on my warrior alt a bit while I wait for Cataclysm, because the past few weeks has, again, reminded me why I ragequit WoW for WAR last year during my PVP kick.

PVP in this game is a twitchy abortive mess of burst damage and indestructible healers that can never oom. If it wasn’t for the raid experience, I honestly don’t think I’d have lasted anywhere enarly as long as I have. If WoW had relied on PVP for it’s endgame, it wouldn’t have lasted a year.

I miss the days when we were all still relatively new to this game, when we were still figuring a lot out, when there was room for error and not every single person was running around in badge epics  and honor welfare loot obliterating each other in microseconds. Cataclysm can’t come soon enough. We’ve been stuck in this expansion for far too long now. 6 months of 1 raid?

Ugh. Seriously, the next big mmo, the one that kills WoW, only needs one real thing to beat it.

Regular. Content. Updates.

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