Retrospective

So, 5 years of World of Warcraft.  My, how time flies.  I can’t actually remember when I started playing, I know it wasn’t exactly at the game launch in Europe, I was playing Star Wars Galaxies back then and not interested in any game that didn’t have Imperial Stormtroopers.  I remember that I quit Star Wars when Sony broke the game and started again from the ground up with the Combat “Upgrade” and that’s when I first dabbled with World of Warcraft.  All I know is that I bought the first available “second wave” of boxed copies of the game after the first load had sold out in the UK and I started playing on Hellscream EU the day the server was activated.

My first character was Henriksen, my trusty Dwarven Hunter, and he was also the first I levelled to 60 (and the last I got to 80!).  Things were very different back then in vanilla WoW.  There were no arenas, no battlegrounds, no world pvp objectives.  What we did have, however, was Southshore and Tarren Mill.  Nestled in the Hillsbrad foothills, these two towns, one Horde one Alliance, both with Flightmasters, both within easy flying range of Ironforge and Undercity, both with conveniently-placed graveyards and both within 200 yards of each other were the scene of countless clashes between Horde and Alliance players.  I don’t know if Southshore and Tarren MIll were deliberately set up this way to provoke the slaughter that ensued, but if it was an accident of game design it was a good one.  Right from the off, even before anyone on Hellscream had hit level 60, there was carnage at Tarren Mill.  Since hardly anyone was over level 50 back then, the fights tended to follow a repetitive pattern.  30-40 players of both factions would fight on the field between the two towns until one side would get pushed back, the losing side would fall back to the safety of their town, and then someone on the opposite side would get close enough to provoke the level 50 town guards (but to me they were just skull-level boss mobs!) who would rush out and promptly slaughter everyone.  The defenders would suddenly become the attackers and chase the retreating enemy to the borders of their town, at which point their own town guards would come out and turn the tables yet again.

Hi. I'm Deathguard Humbert and I'm going to kill you and eat your face.

It never got old, and no attempt to impose any kind of plan on proceedings ever came to anything (so it was a lot like Alterac Valley).  I cannot remember ever arriving at Southshore in the early days without there being some kind of battle going on, it was like a 24 hour bar brawl.  People would get tired of it and leave, but there was always someone who’d just logged on and wanted some Southshore action to replace them.  It was fantastic, emergent gameplay at its best.  And then Warsong Gulch came along and the Tarren Mill/Southshore battles died literally overnight.  And that was kinda sad.

The class talents were completely different to what we see today, too.  Paladin blessings used to last 5 minutes.  There were no Greater Blessings.  Arcane Explosion wasn’t instant cast unless you spent FIVE talent points in the Arcane tree.  Evocation was an Arcane talent and had a 10 minute cooldown, Ice Block was a Frost talent.  Imagine not having Ice Block or Evocation, or instant-cast Arcane Explosions?  Mana gems disappeared when you logged out.  They didn’t come in stacks of three, you got one and that was it, and they shared a cooldown with Warlock healthstones.  There was no Ice Lance, no Frostfire bolt.  No Arcane Barrage.  No Arcane Blast!  Mage Armour didn’t exist until patch 1.3.  Hurricane was a 40-point Balance Druid talent and had a cooldown. Swiftmend didn’t exist and only Restoration druids had access to Innervate.  There was no Tree of Life form.  There were no key rings, all your keys had to be left in your bags and the only 18 slot bag in the game was a drop from a 40 man raid boss.  There used to be a talent that increased your Wand damage by 25% if you were dumb enough to spend 5 talent points in it.  Holy Fire used to have a 5 second cast time.  Items that granted bonuses to healing didn’t give bonuses to spell damage, a level 60 priest in full tier 2 raid armour and weapons did as much damage with their holy spells as someone who just dinged 60 in greens and quest rewards.  Hunter pets often couldn’t keep up with their master and would lag so far behind that they’d despawn. Mages used to have a Detect Magic spell, unless this was cast, you couldn’t see what buffs a boss had.  You know, useful stuff like enrage, frenzy, bloodthirst etc.  Stuff your tanks might like to know about and have removed. Priests had different racial spells available to them that weren’t available to priests of any other race.  Only Dwarven Priests had Fear Ward.  There was no Need or Greed loot rolling, you either rolled on the loot or you didn’t.  There was only one Auction House in Ironforge and one in Ogrimmar.   If you were in Eastern Plaguelands and needed to get to Booty Bay in Stranglethorn Vale, you had to take a flight from each connecting flightmaster all the way down.  You couldn’t just select Booty Bay as your destination from Light’s Hope Chapel flightmaster.  You had to speak to each flightmaster at each stop every step of the way. There were no relics, totems or idols; druids, paladins and shamans had nothing to equip in the ranged weapon slot.  There were no mage refreshment tables and the highest rank conjured water spell (which you could only get from a quest in Dire Maul) only produced a stack of 4 water.  Raids had 40 people.  4 water per cast.  Do the maths.

Instance Bosses used to despawn if you didn’t defeat them within a certain time after starting the fight.  People who think the one hour per week time limit imposed on defeating Algalon the Observer in Ulduar is harsh, something like that used to be standard practice!  Just as one example, if you didn’t defeat Vaelastrasz the Corrupt within an hour of pulling him, it was bye bye for 12 hours while you waited for him to respawn so you could try again.  There’s a reason why Vael broke so many raiding guilds.

Zul’gurub was the first raid that wasn’t for 40 players, although you could “raid” some of the 5 player instances.  You could take 10 players into Scholomance and Stratholme and take 15 players into Blackrock Spire.  Believe it or not, people would still wipe.  Someone at Blizzard must have had a good laugh on the day they decided where to place Zul’gurub, the first 20 player raid instance.  Imagine you’re on a pvp server.  Stranglethorn Vale, already known as Ganklethorn Vale (and for good reason), teeming with level 30+ players of both factions, all ganking the crap out of each other while struggling to complete their quests, level up and get the heck out of this hellhole, now hadanything up to a hundred or so bored, epic-covered level 60s of both factions waiting for Zul’gurub raids to start.  The carnage reached epic proportions.

Another “undocumented feature” of Zul’gurub was the infamous corrupted blood plague that spread from there to… well… everywhere.  The last boss, the Blood God Hakkar, cast an effect on the raid called Corrupted Blood that was basically an annoying Damage over time effect that spread from player to player if you didn’t spread out.  Annoying that is, if you’re level 60.  Completely lethal if you’re level 20, standing in the Ironforge Auction House next to an infected mage who just teleported out of the instance.  It spread like wildfire and Blizzard were completely unable to do anything about it, being forced to hotfix the debuff and reset all their instance servers to remove the plague.  Experience gained here came in useful for their undead invasion event before the Wrath of the Lich King launch, however.

I guess the point here is that the game is constantly changing, and it’s this constant change that keeps it fresh.  I miss the old battles at Tarren Mill/Southshore, but the reason people stopped doing them and are never going to do them again is because it’s more convenient to visit a Battlemaster or just join from your pvp menu than it is to travel to the Hillsbrad Foothills and hope someone from the opposing faction is looking for a fight.  The game has moved on, it’s more streamlined and user-friendly than it used to be and this is a good thing.  We miss stuff not because it was good, but because there was nothing better to do.  The Hillsbrad battles are pretty much exactly what goes on in the Field of Strife of Alterac Valley anyway, except you’re guaranteed to find a fight there, not always the case in Hillsbrad.

Will the game still be around in another 5 years?  I imagine it will, but it won’t be much like the game we’re playing today.  Personally, I can’t wait.

That Was The Week That Was

Pirates > Ninjas
It’s been another interesting week.  Sithica got to see Trial of the Crusader 10 man as a tank in a random PuG.  Yes, a PuG.  I’m still getting used to the idea of people doing Pickup Groups to the latest raid content and beating it, my Vanilla WoW heritage is showing.  I guess it’s true that 10 man ToC really isn’t anything to be scared of these days with the multitide of options available to people to gear up their characters.  Heck, Sithica went in there with the Tier 8.5 tank chest and Tier 9 tank shoulders and the last time she was in a raid was when Naxx 25 was still considered mildly challenging!  Anyway, ToC10 – not scary if you know your stuff and are geared even slightly appropriately.   But I digress, the raid group itself was pretty competent and the bosses dropped quite nicely despite my going into spanner mode on Twin Valkyr and forgetting to switch into Frost Presence.  I apologised profusely to the healers and they were fine with it, everyone had a laugh at my expense, it was that kind of group.

However.

We’ve all read stories of Ninja Master Looters.  I’ve seen warnings about certain individuals spammed in the trade channels, as I’m sure you all have.  In five years of playing I’ve never actually encountered it myself, until this ToC10 raid.  What actually happened was that Binding Light dropped from Faction Champions and the Raid Leader invited anyone interested to roll on it.  Note, that’s anyone interested.  The usual protocol on Hellscream EU is that you roll for the spec you’re raiding with first, if no-one wants the loot for main spec, offspec rolls are invited.  I’m absolutely fine with that, even if it means I never get any dps gear on my tanks, since they’re always, you know..  tanking.  But heck, that’s what badges are for.  Anyway, the point is that on this raid, anyone could roll on anything they could use.  Great.  Now my Deathknight isn’t interested in any healing trinket, obviously, but the Holy Paladin was, so he rolled and won.

Then the raid leader, a Resto Druid decides that it’s not a very good trinket for a Holy Paladin and since he “really really needed it” he took it for himself.

Whoah!  Hold on there, cowboy!  There was a minute of “Uh, didn’t the paladin win the roll?” type of comment but as the paladin, strangely enough, didn’t seem that bothered, everyone let it go and the raid continued.

Er..  www.wtf.com?  Alarm bells were very definitely now ringing.  I wanted to say something but you don’t want to be the lone voice of dissent when even the injured party doesn’t care about it, so I held my tongue and we continued.  Then we down Twin Valkyr and lo and behold, Reckoning drops.  The Hunter in the group immediately started jumping cartwheels, as well he should, it’s an amazing two-hander for a hunter.  It’s also significantly better than Sithica’s current two-hand dps weapon, even if the stats aren’t perfect for a Deathknight, they’re still pretty damn good for her Blood dps offspec, and so this being a raid where you can roll on any useful loot and “anyone can get loot if they win a fair roll” I roll on it too, as does the Retribution paladin and the Warrior Tank.  And I win the roll.  And all hell breaks loose.

“That’s not a tank weapon!”
“Well spotted, I don’t intend to use it for tanking.”
“It’s useless for a Deathknight!”
“You don’t play a Deathknight much, do you?”
“It’s better for the hunter, they need agility and you need strength!”
“Yes it is better for him but it’s not useless for me and he didn’t win the roll.”

And then the raid leader gives it to the Retribution paladin.  Who just happened to be his guildmate.  And who rolled lower than the hunter.  Apparently, Blood Deathknights don’t get any benefit from Agility but Retribution Paladins do.  Well I’d have been okay to pass the weapon to the Hunter because it’s clearly better itemised for him and nowhere near as big an upgrade for me as it was for him, but the Ret Pally?  No fucking way, José!  What rankled most was that this was clearly the kind of raid where you were only getting a drop if it wasn’t any use to the Leader and his cronies.  So since I had no desire to see myself screwed out of any tank loot because the Leader “really really needed it” for his Bear offspec or his Warrior mate, I left the raid and hearthed out.  Life’s too short to waste it with arguments over pixels, but my time is not there to be used to twink someone else’s mates.  Sorry, and bye.  The most bizarre thing about it all was except for the loot drama, they’d all been really nice raiders.  The mind boggles.

It doesn’t end there, of course.  I can’t get anything meaningful done for the next ten minutes as the Raid Leader and all his guildmates spam me with whispers either begging me to come back and tank the last boss or calling me a noob, ninja and loot whore.  Yes, apparently, I get screwed out of a winning loot roll because the Master Looters’ mate wants it, and that makes me a ninja.  Go figure.  So I switch to Calli for some peace and quiet and spend some time doing cooking dailies and working the Auction House.

An hour later, they’re still in /trade, looking for a tank for last boss ToC10.  I know I shouldn’t be laughing, but I’m mean, petty and vindictive like that.  Felt sorry for that hunter, though.

Twink My Alt
So it’s been ups and downs in ToC10 this week.  The call went out for any dps spare for a ToC10 consisting of the alts of players in our servers’ top raiding guild.  Two of our guys, including The Mighty Jingles, join the group to round out the numbers.  The group’s being led by the hunter alt of one of the other guild’s top warriors.  He’s known to have a “bit of an ego” but when you’re at the cutting edge of raid progression on a server you have something to brag about, and he’s never done me any harm so I tend to ignore any malicious gossip.  He, and the rest of his guild, all know their stuff, so this should be a cakewalk.

Oh dear.

Northrend Beasts was painful.  I mean it was just embarrassing.  Myself and the other rogue alt of one of our officers accounted for 75% of all damage to the snobolds on that fight.  Let me just stress, rogue alt.  Melee dps.  Melee dps who should have been stabbing Gormok in the ass while the ranged dps killed the snobolds.  But since The Mighty Jingles was the only ranged dps who seemed to be even aware of what snobolds were, he was forced to do something about it.

Three wipes in and still no bosses dead, I looked at the leaders’ gear, since he was being about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike as far as dps was concerned.  He only had a couple of blues, but the rest weren’t purple.  He was doing ToC10 in greens and quest rewards.  We decided at that point that discretion was the better form of valour, made our excuses and left.  I have no interest in running up a repair bill just so I can play “twink the alt” of someone who should really know better.

But this is not a failpug post!  After what feels like years of dutifully cracking open an Oracle egg every week, something great finally hatched!

I just wish protodrakes weren’t so damn ugly!

And just to prove that not all Trial of the Crusader groups suck, Calli earned a couple of new achievements over the course of the last two weeks.

You can’t win them all, but you can win the ones that matter.  Anything else is just life experience.

Welcome To The Suck

One of the Hunters in our 25 man raid is a Dwarf named Rui.  He’s a good hunter, solid dps, doesn’t make a habit of standing in the Fire, never pulls aggro… in short, nothing like the guys who are the first to get squished by Vault of Archavon bosses when you’re bored and PuG it late on a Wednesday night.  Anyone who runs with a regular raid knows that there are always “characters” in those raids.  For example, we have an excellent healing paladin named Tinuviel, but she’s pretty much known as Afkviel for reasons that I hope are obvious from the nickname.  Rui is the guy who always disconnects.  His connection sucks harder than an industrial strength vacuum cleaner.  I think Hoover is his ISP or something.  It’s become something of a joke over time.

“Everyone buffed?”
“Yep.”
“Tanks ready?”
“Ready to go.”
“Rui disconnected yet?”
“Of course.”
“Ok, let’s get this show on the road, pulling in three…”

Well let me tell you, since patch 3.2.2, I’ve been Rui, and it’s not as funny in the flesh as it is from a distance.  For years, I’ve been the guy with the connection made from solid granite.  Never miss a raid, never go offline, always there.  After patch 3.2.2 rolled out, every time Gormok the Impaler so much as looks at me in a funny way, I get dumped out to the login screen and cannot reconnect as long as the fight is going on.  And then it takes 15 attempts to connect to a character in Dalaran.  And so it goes on.

Yesterday the daily cooking quest was Rhino Dogs and the daily fishing quest was the Ghostfish, both conveniently located in Sholozar Basin.  So I hearthed to Nesingwary Basecamp, flew over to Rainspeaker Canopy to pick up this weeks’ Oracle egg and went fishing.

I’m no expert on the subject, but I’m pretty sure that your fishing bobber shouldn’t time out before you can see the fishing channeling bar appear.  And I’m also relatively certain that casting a line isn’t supposed to take fifteen seconds.  On a similar note, as a level 80 mage covered in 10 man Heroic and 25 man Crusader Coliseum gear with an average item level of 240, I shouldn’t be dying from the bleed of a level 76 non elite Rhino’s gore effect in the time it takes for me to get an Arcane Blast off.

There are (at latest time of checking) 32 pages of complaints on the US forums and 10 pages (in the busiest thread) on the EU forums about the instant disconnects people are suffering from Crusader Coliseum and the associated lag that plagues you afterwards.  There are no Blue solutions, but the cures suggested by the community range from clearing your dns cache (whatever the hell that is) to sacrificing a virgin to the Blood God at the next full moon.  Personally, I’ve tried everything bar reinstalling Warcraft, which is something I’m not going to do because the only difference between having a rock solid connection and one made of swiss cheese and spaghetti is that patch 3.2.2 rolled out.  And I’d not be exaggerating if I were to say I’m not best pleased with the state of affairs.

But the suckage doesn’t end there.  Usually, after being online for three hours or so, my latency will drop from 4500ms to something approaching playable and I can think about getting into a group to do something useful.  Last night we threw together an Onyxia raid for alts, and I came along to tank on my warrior, Gorn.  Now call me a bluff old traditionalist, but when the raid leader says “Gorn, you tank the boss, I’ll tank the adds”, I take that to mean that the raid leader is going to tank the adds.  I don’t take it to mean that I’m going to tank the boss, help him tank the whelps, tank the elite adds when they show and hope he’s not busy admiring his nails and is quick with a taunt when the last elite is up and the boss lands at the other end of the fucking instance, because apparently, that’s exactly what “You tank the boss, I tank the adds” does, in fact, mean.  Sadly, since my balls are made of flesh rather than Madame Eva’s finest crystal, I obviously interpreted the instructions the wrong way.  Silly me.  Entirely my fault obviously.

Well, we got her down on the second attempt and at least I got a new hat out of it.

Well it’s about damn time!

Guess who arrived in the mail yesterday?

Squeeeee!

The best part is you get one mailed to every character on the eligible account!  As well as occasionally blasting the air with railgun fire and firing off the odd rocket propelled grenade every now and then, he also responds to mouse clicks with the customary cute baby murloc gargle, except filtered through a radio link.  Awesome!

I will love him and keep him and call him..  er..  well..   Grunty.

/sigh

So I’m on Sithica the deathtard, grinding out those Badges of Triumph for a better pair of tanking shoulders than the ones she picked up in Naxx10 an absolute age ago, and I end up in yet another PuG.  Not sure why I keep doing this to myself, but I guess if I didn’t I’d have nothing to write about.  Aaaaaanyway…  it’s a pretty good group, but I seem to be having threat problems, as in, I can’t seem to generate enough of it.

I’m aware that we lolknights got something of a beating with the nerfbat a short while back, but while I have noticed my Frost Strikes and Howling Blasts hitting for a lot less lately than I’m used to, holding aggro never used to be this hard.  What am I doing wrong?  The problem is this PuG warlock.  Tórment is his name.  It’s only heroic Gundrak, but my usual tactic of dropping Death and Decay (glyphed) spreading the disease love around and Howling Blasting the bejesus out of everything just isn’t working, and this poor lock is taking a beating.  Eventually even repeated Dark Commands can’t get the aggro off him (or the healer gives up trying to heal both of us at the same time) and he dies.  I feel like a total jerk.  It’s possible he wasn’t bothering to take the marked target and start his nukes on that, but I just can’t be sure.  Either way, a dps died on my watch and I take that personally.  Or at least I did, until he mutters the immortal words:

lern2tank, noob

Okay, now the fastest way to push my buttons is to use l337speak in front of me and mean it, and this guy lit up every button I have with that one remark.  All sense of guilt and pity evaporated at that point.  Sure, it may still have been my crappy tanking that got him killed rather than a complete disregard for marked targets and a complete inability to throttle his own threat in the pursuit of that all-important number 1 spot on recount, but now he can just go take a very long jump off the end of a very short pier.  His cards are well and truly marked.

If you have a problem with my tanking, aggro-monkey, you’re entirely welcome to find another tank.

… I replied, and believe me, I was more than prepared to leave the group and let them find a competent tank, since I had half convinced myself it was actually my fault.  But the healer quickly stepped in and assured me that my tanking was fine, please continue, etc.  And on the very next pull, the warlock did it again, only this time I just knew he was trying to prove a point.

So I let him die.

Yep, didn’t even attempt to taunt the mobs that were eating his face.  Wisely, the healer didn’t even attempt to keep him alive, either, so I didn’t have any healer aggro to worry about.  Once the lock died, and he died very, very fast, the rest of the pull went like clockwork.

Keep it up, I guarantee you’ll get sick of it before I do.

I told him.  He behaved himself after that.  Didn’t utter another word.  Well a few hours later I’m on my warrior, Gorn, in a Vault of Archavon 25 man PuG as dps.  I’m still feeling some residual guilt about the warlock from the earlier PuG as I’m not totally convinced the aggro issues were totally his fault, but… got to keep your mind on the matter at hand.  We’re squared off against Koralon, the Main Tank has just given a ready check and started the pull countdown.  Then a number of things happen.

1.  The boss suddenly bursts into flames
2.  I see a Chaos Bolt streak out of nowhere and slam into him as he lunges forward
3.  The health bar of one of the warlocks suddenly goes from 100% to 0% in one shot
4.  The Tank manages a quick “wtf?” just as two healers get eaten.
5.  We wipe.
6.  A warlock is very quickly kicked out of the raid.

I wonder if you can guess what his name was?

But the PuG rollercoaster doesn’t end there.  Brewfest is upon us!  And that means more loot, and beer, but mostly more loot.  So I’ve run Blackrock Depths to kill Coren Direbrew a couple of times, and now I’m on Shinano in another PuG to do it again.  We have a loladin named Baro with us.  As each person joins the group, the leader asks if they can summon the boss.  Baro has to be asked five times before he grudgingly answers with “y”.

I know you think you know where this is going, but it’s much more entertaining than that, trust me.

So we get to the Grim Guzzler and I say I’ll start it off first.  I start it up and Direbrew begins the fight with his usual “You’ll pay for that, Druid!” or whatever it is he says.  We kill him, loot him, wait for him to respawn, and repeat.  Three times.

Of course Baro has already done it, several times as it turns out later, and he can’t summon the boss at all.  But Baro is different from your usual instance ninja dickhead, he has at least some sense of shame, because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s the one who’s screwed the rest of us out of a chance at the boss.  So when asked if he’d started it off yet he claims he did it first.

Er..  no you didn’t, I did.

I say.  To which his defence is:

Omg Shinano is a ninja shes trying to screw us all she didnt summon boss yet!

I am very happy to report that while he continued in this vein for quite some time, the rest of the group were slightly more intelligent than he hoped they were.  Or more intelligent than him anyway, which amounts to the same thing.  You see, when you start the encounter, the boss refers to you in chat by your class.  And while Baro was accusing me of being a ninja, raping babies and starting the Chicago fire, they were all scrolling up to check the chat log.

Busted!

I later found out in general chat that not only had he pulled this stunt at least twice before, he’d also led one group where he’d enabled master looter and ninja’d a drop or two.  So, one more time, just in case you missed it, name Baro, class Paladin, server Hellscream EU.

I’m just planting seeds, never know where they’ll take root.