Player Versus Player

Ok, first of all, I need to get this off my chest.  It’s got nothing to do with World of Warcraft so those of you not interested in a random rant can just skip right ahead to the next paragraph.  I hate being lied to and treated like I’m some kind of moron.  I hate it.  Violently.  So of course, watching TV, especially news and advertisements, usually sends me into a frothing rage.  On my last ship I was actually forbidden from sitting in the mess when the news was on.  True story.  So anyway, you know the sort of thing I’m talking about.  “New Crappee Washing Powder, Improved formula!”  What the fuck?  You’ve been selling your junk with the “New, Improved” bullshit attached for the last fifteen years.  By my reckoning that must mean the crap you were selling us fifteen years ago must have actually been making my clothes dirtier!

Which leads me onto MacDonalds’ new advertising campaign in the UK.  “The Great taste of America returns to MacDonalds!”  Does no-one else see the comedy in that?  No?  The Great Taste of America.  MacDonalds.  What, do they suddenly have burgers on the menu now or something?

It gives me RAGE.

So anyway, we’ve not had Dickhead of the Week for a while.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Akrion!

Now those of you who pvp on a regular basis probably have no idea what I’m talking about.  Nothing out of the ordinary here.  What we have is me just about to cross Blackstone Span on the way into Lol Barad when some window-licking mouth-breather reasonably politely asks me to help him kill some pvp-flagged Hordie, who just happened to be sitting next to the level 85 Elite horde guards waiting for incredibly stupid people to take a shot at him.  I equally politely told him no thanks, as I wasn’t interested in seeing my health drop from 100% to nil in half a second and have to spend the next five minutes after rezzing waiting for an unwanted debuff to wear off.  Also I suck.

Apparently, this makes me homosexual.

First of all, since there’s pretty much absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual, it’s a really crappy insult.  But you know, take it in the spirit in which it’s intended and all that.  This is, believe it or not, the first time I ever reported a player for abuse.  I’m not sure what exactly prompted me to do something on this occasion instead of the usual approach – ignore and keep riding.  But something got to me this time.  Not the fact that I’d been insulted, because it really didn’t bother me.  Strange as it may seem, the opinions of aggressive, retarded children don’t factor much into how I decide to run my life.  If Bill Hicks had told me I sucked I’d be heartbroken, but the opinion of Akrion the cockmonkey matters not one whit to me.  In fact, if cockmonkeys like this disapprove of you, you can pretty much take it as given that whatever you’re doing, you should probably keep doing it.

But no, what prompted me to actually do something on this occasion was social responsibility.  This asshat’s wandering around our server randomly insulting whoever he likes, and he’s getting away with it.  I know he’s getting away with it, because if he’d ever been reported and banned he wouldn’t be doing it.  Up until now, the consequences of this nasty little shitbag wandering around casually spoiling peoples’ days has been precisely zero.  It’s been precisely zero because we do nothing about it!  Don’t waste time arguing with these butt-nuggets.  Never argue with idiots.  They just drag you down to their own level and beat you with experience.  Hit the shits where it hurts, get them banned.  You end up with less arsehole on your server.  It’s win-win.  There is NO downside.

Also, it’s getting very depressing that every time I run across one of these bottom-feeding oxygen thieves it’s in a pvp context.  To put this into perspective, sure, you get arrogant, obnoxious turds in pve too.  Of the dozen or so random heroics or Baradin Hold raids I’ve run this week I’ve run into one of these arseholes maybe once or twice.  The tank who drops group after the first boss because the loot he wanted didn’t drop, for example.  But the second you queue up for a random battleground or the battle of Lol Barad I run into dozens of them.  Rude, aggressive, selfish, obnoxious wankers.  Everywhere.  And yet, the pvpers in my guild are pretty decent, polite, capable and intelligent folks.  Does the act of hitting that “Queue for Random Battleground” button transform you into a slavering idiot?  What strange magic is at work here?  But of course, the important distinction is that the guys who pvp in my guild are all on rated battleground and arena teams.  The idea of someone like our good friend Akrion, who thought that attacking a flagged hordie standing inbetween two elite guards was a sound tactical move, actually being a member of a team that could do anything more complicated than queue for the toilet, fills me with lol.

So Galadan once again found himself defending Lol Barad from the clutches of the evil horde, and once again we failed miserably.  I’m beginning to think it’s me.  Obviously, Alliance can win Lol Barad, we were defending after all.  But there’s a grim inevitability about whenever I don my holy plate and sally forth to Ironclad Garrison.  I turn into a Rogue magnet.  I shit thee not.  Today I actually had four of the buggers on me at one point.  Afterwards I check damage logs and look at the Alliance rogues, both of them in the top five damage done.  Then I check interrupts done for the whole of a fifteen minute battle and the leader is a warrior.  With one interrupt.

/weep.

Maybe it’s me.  Maybe I’m just a collossal arsehole magnet?  Perhaps the Alliances’ best hope for conquest is if I just stick to doing my dailies and keep the arseholes away from the battlegrounds, following me around calling me gay?

In other news, I just absolutely LOVE Blizzards’ proposed changes to crowd control.  For those of you scratching your heads in puzzlement, what’s planned for the next patch (I think) is that applying crowd control in pve will no longer initiate combat, because getting a trap and a polymorph to go off at the same time is really hard.

Yes, that was sarcasm.

I’ll just let the always reliable Daily Blink sum this one up for me.

/facepalm

Also, I got a new t-shirt!

Kek!

Start Your Engines!

Well folks, Cataclysm’s fast approaching, and with it Wrath of the Lich King winds down to a few last weeks of furious grinding and raiding.  Most of that loot you’ve sweated hard to obtain is going to be vendor bait before long unless you’re a complusive packrat like me and keep absolutely everything (every mage set except Tier 3, all the holiday clothes etc).  There are certain things you can do to both spin out the time between now and the expansion release and prepare yourself for when it arrives.

1.  Get Stuff Finished.
Still not downed the Lich King?  You’re fast running out of time to get it done, I’m afraid.  There are other things you can do that will have tangible benefits that you can take with you into Cataclysm, though.  Weapon skills are going away, so the achievments associated with them are becoming Feats of Strength too.  Get your Master of Arms and Did Somebody Order a Knuckle Sandwich while you can!

Speaking of which, since Zul’Gurub is being demoted from raid status, the Hero of the Zandalar Tribe achievement is also becoming a Feat of Strength.  As a consequence, that’s one less faction you can grind to Exalted, so now is the time to get yourself to Zul’Gurub and make the Zandalar Tribe proud of you.  I can quite happily confirm that any raid geared Warrior or Deathknight can comfortably solo everything in Zul’Gurub with ease.  As an added bonus, there are two mounts and a polymorph recipe that drops in there too, you never know your luck.  Get them while you can.

Go out and explore!  Get that World Explorer achievement (and the title that goes with it) before those world zones aren’t there anymore, or are changed beyond all recognition.  Seriously, The Barrens and Mulgore are breathtaking, get out there and see them before Deathwing ruins them.

Get back into Ulduar and farm those drakes while you still can.  Tier 10 gear’s going to be useless very soon, but flashy mounts are for life.  Since the Ulduar drakes are a lot easier to get than the Icecrown ones, and they’re also 310% mounts, you not only get a groovy rare mount but you save yourself the 310% flying skill fee in Cataclysm.  Once the expansion hits you won’t be able to get them, and if you fancy a challenge, Firefighter and One Light In The Darkness are still far from easy.  If you’ve never even been past the Siege area of Ulduar for the weekly raids before, you owe yourself a look, it’s an incredible raid instance.

My Other Mount is a Ferrari

And Ulduar has a TRAIN!  HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

Full speed ahead for Mimiron! Choo choo!

2.  Stock Up!
Give yourself a headstart on your trade skills.  There are still plenty of orange and yellow recipes even at 450 skill, and most people are dumping all their materials on the Auction Houses now before they lose value completely.  Pick yourself up some bargains and get some easy skill and xp when the expansion hits.  Some trades are easier to level up than others of course.  Blacksmiths, Leatherworkers and Tailors are pretty screwed since their best recipes use very rare and expensive resources (ohai Primordial Saronite), but Enchanters and Alchemists are laughing.  Stock up now!  Cooks can also steal a headstart over the competition, start fishing up those Glacial Salmon now for your favourite meal.
And Finally…
And since no week is complete without a fail story, here’s two!  First, another moron who doesn’t seem to realise that if you act like a fuckwit to look good on the damage meters I’m still going to know you’re a fuckwit.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you mage extraordinaire: Reversed!

The only thing that he managed to hit a Frozen Orb with were the Val’kyr Guardians from his Nibelung.  By contrast, there was a noob warlock in that raid who only managed to do 2k dps, and from a straight glance at Recount/Skada he would appear to have been the most useless raid member.  But hey, at least 30% of his damage was on Frozen Orbs… you know, the thing ranged dps are brought along to Toravon raids to kill?  Congratulations Reversed, beaten on damage meters by a warlock who dinged 80 half an hour ago.  You suck incredible amounts.  Please go find a motorway and play chicken with buses.

Our next candidate for Dickhead of the Week is Saxomen, alleged to be a tank and most definitely a Protection Paladin.  Fingers had the misfortune to be grouped with him this week in an Icecrown 10 PuG.  My first indication that he may have spent too much time tanking bosses with his face was when the raid leader announced that we’d be doing I’m On A Boat, which involves no raid member jumping over to the lootship more than twice, explained how he wanted it to work, and Saxomen asked why he had to jump over too.  Yeah, not the sharpest tool in the box.

Things went from the sublime to the ridiculous once the Gunship battle started and the first Battle Mage ran out.  As melee dps, Fingers was in the forward cannon bay, and as Below Zero began channelling, he was forced out of his cannon.  I counted to three, targetted an area on the Horde gunship to jump to, but managed to pick a landing spot that was out of line of sight, thus cancelling the rocket jump.  My second attempt was more successful, and I hit Sprint to close on the enemy Battle Mage.  Usual practice here is for Overlord Saurfang to be tanked over by the Horde axe throwers, because he’s got a very nasty cleave.  He’s High Overlord Saurfang, he’s pretty famous for his cleave, actually.  So, my being all alone over by the Battle Mage didn’t surprise me at all.  At least until I got company, the High Overlord Saurfang kind of company.  “Er…  tank?”  I thought to myself, popping Evasion at that same time.  After a couple of seconds, the tank did indeed show up.  Let’s just take a quick break here for the sake of the numbers.  From the time the Battle Mage ran out I had to time to dismount from my cannon, fumble one rocket jump, launch myself over to the other ship, run to the Battle Mage, generate a Slice and Dice combo, pop Evasion, and unload two 5 point Eviscerates before a tank appeared from anywhere.  At which point, Mister Saxomen decided that the best place to “tank” a Cleaving raid boss was…   you guessed it, right next to the melee dps.

And that was just my THIRD most powerful Cleave, boy!

Shortly after, from my comfortable viewing spot in a crumpled heap on the deck of the Horde Gunship, I witnessed this “tank” turn his back on the High Overlord, walk to the rail of the Gunship, then jump back over.  With High Overlord Saurfang beating on his exposed back all the way.   Top tip, folks.  Turning your back on Raid Bosses is very, very bad for your health and your healers’ blood pressure.  This is what the nice goblin gave you a Rocket Pack for.

Apparently this was all my fault because I jumped too early.  Sorry, my bad.  I didn’t realise tanks needed 20 second headstarts on Gunship these days.

That’s all folks!

/facepalm

I don’t know what it is about Trade Chat that fascinates me so much.  It’s usually a vile cesspit of snobbery, elitism, idiocy and bigotry, this much is true.  And yet I feel drawn to it the same way you can’t stop picking at a scab or probing a sore tooth.  Call it morbid curiousity but even though you know it’s not going to do you any good you just want to see what happens next because there is comedy gold in them thar hills.  I spotted this one just before the weekly reset…

/facepalm

Just so it’s clear what you’re looking at here this is a Druid and a Deathknight, classes that between them can dps, tank and heal, looking for a tank and healer to carry their sorry arses through Pit of Saron.  And yes, the third member of their group was a Paladin.  What else could it have been?  I say “carry them” because in this case while Deathknights are theoretically capable of dpsing, I was in a Vault of Archavon with this particular example earlier that day and with his dps output we’d have had downed the bosses faster if we’d kicked him and stacked a third tank.

Next we have irrefutable proof that it’s not just Alliance idiots who have their irony glands surgically removed when they enter trade chat.  This is Benkins, the level 16 Draenie Hunter, and he’s Horde till he dies.  Do you want to tell him or shall I?

If this sort of thing floats your boat you can spare yourself the horror of sitting in Trade Chat yourself and take a look at some of the gems over at WoW Bash.  My personal favourite, which puts any of my feeble efforts to shame…

Or maybe it’s this one…

You decide!

It’s Dangerous To Go Alone

As mentioned earlier, Gorn’s on a whistle-stop tour of the Old World while hammering out the Loremaster achievement (18 quests to go, fact fans).  Along the way, he picked up World Explorer and it struck me once again just how incredibly gorgeous the world is.  I’ve banged on about this subject before but it bears repeating, especially as these Old World zones are all changing very soon and there isn’t a lot of time left to get the Explorer achievement before Cataclysm turns it into a Feat of Strength or something.  Here’s Gorn hunting for Brumeran in Winterspring…

And here he is fresh from searching for the remains of Apprentice Surveyor Scrimshank in the Silithid Hives of Tanaris…

One of the good things about bimbling around the Old World zones without much of a plan just to see where you end up is that you discover things you never would have otherwise, which I guess is sort of the whole point of the Explorer achievement.  When I was doing it on Calli I discovered a Silithid Hive in Feralas I never even knew existed.  On Gorn I stumbled across something a little more practical and lucrative.

Anyone who ever spent any time in Desolace (and if you played vanilla wow and got stuck levelling in Stranglethorn Vale after level 33 or so you probably did) may have noticed a goblin caravan doing a circuit around Mannoroc Coven and the Kolkar Village.  You can’t interact with them, or at least I thought so, until purely by accident I passed by them on the way north from Gelkis Village and they’d stopped by the side of the road and deployed a vendor bot.  The bot was selling, amongst other things, several rare cooking recipes I didn’t have, so naturally I snapped them up.  As I was leaving they packed up shop and started to head north, which happened to be the way I was going too.  After a few score yards they stopped and started yelling for bodyguards to escort them through Mannoroc Coven.  Lo and behold a quest icon suddenly appears over their heads.  I take the quest, protect them from a few demon attacks and get sent ahead with their thanks to collect my payment from Smeed Scrabblescew’s outpost.  I’m curious now, however, so I follow them to see where they’re going.  Sure enough, they stop again by the side of the road near Willows’ Hut and deploy another vendor bot, this one selling a bunch of different rare cooking recipes, so naturallyI snap those up too.  After ten minutes they head off again, this time past the Kolkar Village where they once again stop and yell for further assistance.  Another quest pops up and I once again escort them to safety and get sent to Scrabblescrews’ outpost to collect my payment.  Two more quests towards Loremaster and a bunch of valuable cooking recipes   that I’d never otherwise have even known about if I wasn’t taking time out to smell the coffee.

Oh and if there are any Zelda fans out there, there’s a quest line in Un’goro Crater that you must do.

In other news, one of our guildies was going through a 25 man Icecrown PuG on the weekend and had this litany of horrors to report in guildchat…

Getting hit by two Deathwhisper Shades is careless, but pretty understandable.  Nine Rotface Ooze explosions is pretty dramatic, but it was either mutliple attempts or the doofus was actively running around looking for exploding slimes to stand under.  Standing in Gunship Rocket Strikes eleven times is starting to stretch the bounds of possibility though.  For those of you who may not have done it, enemy Rocketeers target you and have the courtesy to paint the ground you’re standing on with a great big RUN AWAY MORON targetting symbol under your feet.  They even give you five seconds to realise what’s going on before you get a rocket in the face.  To fail to get out of the way eleven times takes a pretty special kind of stupid.  But the crowning glory is getting hit by Saurfangs’ Bloodbeasts seventy eight times!  Words fail me at that point, you just shouldn’t be allowed to play if you’re that stupid.  Or at the very least you should be made to carry some kind of public warning…

And because no post is complete these days without something from the Daily Blink, here’s one for our very own special snowflake class…

I’m so pretty, oh so pretty…

Smoke and Mirrors

So in the time since my last post, all hell has broken out over RealID, the NDA on Cataclysm information has been lifted and my modem has suffered a slow and painful death.  To address the RealID issue first, I have to confess I couldn’t personally give a rats’ ass about the whole issue.  So I would be forced to use my real name to post on the official forums in future?  Big deal.  The official forums are a vipers nest of scumbags, hypocrisy and retards and I stay away from the whole toxic mess because I still have a few shreds of self respect.  Sure, I could sympathise with the people who were up in arms over the issue, women in particular for reasons that should be blindingly obvious (and if they’re not, you’re not smart or mature enough to be reading this blog anyway) but personally?  Don’t care, don’t give a shit.  Sorry.

The whole idea that making people use their real names to post comments was somehow going to turn everyone into reasonable human beings had me rolling in the aisles too.  I can understand where Blizzard were coming from, the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory relies on anonymity after all, and if you take away the anonymity you take away the dickheads, right?  Er, wrong.  The only way to stop people behaving like assholes to other people is to remove the people from the equation.  Because people are basically assholes to people they don’t know.  It doesn’t matter if you’re posting as Krull-Magtheridon or Richard from Eastney, the other readers of the thread still don’t know you.  And there are socially challenged wankers out there who are assholes even to people they do know.  Hands up anyone who had someone in their guild who was a complete pain in the ass until they eventually jumped or were pushed?  Yeah, we’ve all been there.  Assholes will be assholes.  Because they’re assholes.  Not because they get to post on the forums as Pwnj00-Genjuros.

But what amazed me the most was Blizzards’ swift about turn on the whole issue.  Damn, but they turned around fast on that one, didn’t they?  I mean suspiciously fast.   Now contrary to what the forum troglodytes would have you believe, Blizzard are not stupid.  You don’t get to 11.5 million subscribers by misjudging your customer base, not in this world.  So I was left wondering what on earth they thought they were doing by pulling a stunt like this that was so obviously going to misfire on them.  And then I was reminded of a little story I heard about the Borderlands cover art.

There it is in all its glory.  Pretty evocative, right?  A little close to knuckle for the ESRB perhaps?  I mean, the guy does look like he’s blowing his own brains out after all.  Well the story goes that this is the “It will blow your mind” art Gearbox wanted for the game and didn’t want to risk being told to change it, so the art they first sent in had the guy actually holding a gun in his hand and actually blowing his brains out.  Naturally it came right back from the ESRB with a “What the hell are you thinking of?  Change this immediately” note attached, at which point the image above was submitted instead and accepted for publication.

True story?  No idea.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that Blizzard announced and backpedalled on the RealID issue far too quickly for my liking, and in a manner similar to the Borderlands cover art story I’m left wondering if it’s possible they were pulling the same kind of stunt?  I just can’t figure out where the gain is, the alternative is that Blizzard have actually lost the plot and I’d prefer not to believe that!

Off topic slightly, but Borderlands is actually a pretty great little time waster by the way, I can recommend it.

Moving on, the Non Disclosure Agreement on Cataclysm has been lifted and we can finally get our greasy paws on all sorts of juicy information if we should so choose.  I’m not even going to begin to try to cover it all, since most of it’s going to change before the beta ends anyway so it’s pointless crying over talent changes we don’t like at this point.  However, you can at least get an impression of the general philosophy Blizzard have with regards to design and draw some conclusions from that.  First of which seems to be that healers are going to be doing a lot more dps when there’s no-one needing actual healing.  The healing talent trees are chock full of “your dps spell x is free to cast when you score crits with healing spell y” stuff.  I must admit to being a bit baffled at first when I heard that Blizzard wanted healers to be doing dps.  From a personal standpoint, I didn’t roll four level 80 healers so I could hurt stuff with them, so I was fairly nonplussed by the whole concept, but I appreciate that not everyone has 10 level 80s they can pick and choose from and to a lot of people the idea of being able to cast the odd holy fire when no-one needs a heal is probably useful.  What had me scratching my head was Blizzards’ other design intent, the one about healers having mana issues in Cataclysm.  So…  you want healers to have to worry about mana management and you expect them to be pew pewing when no-one’s in immediate danger of dying?  Are you morons?  No, it turns out, they’re not.  I am.  You can see from the talent trees even at this early stage that they’re working on ways to achieve both, and content is most likely going to be balanced around the dps coming from the healing classes as well as the pure damage dealers, so it looks like something we’re going to have to start getting used to.

Speaking of morons, I met more of them since my last post!  Yes, it’s Dickhead of the Week time!  Feast your eyes over these fucktards:

At first glance, the chat log seems relatively innocent, but you simply lack context.  Mercules, the guy at the bottom was only asking for a summon to VoA.  What the screenie doesn’t show was that he’d spent the previous 11 minutes sitting on his fat lazy arse in Dalaran 50 yards away from the Wintergrasp portal while the raid gathered up and everyone else had made their own to the Vault.  People who joined the raid from Stormwind three minutes before the Readycheck made it there before him, but no, he’s special.  He’s entitled to keep the entire raid waiting while he sits on his useless backside spamming raid chat with “summon plz”.  And then demand buffs that he missed because he wasn’t there while we were clearing trash.  And then aggros the boss on the pull and spends the rest of the fight on his back, dead.  And then leaves the raid the instant he’s got his two Frost badges after contributing precisely zip other than keeping us all waiting while he took his sweet time accepting the summon.  A twat of the highest degree.

And because you can always rely on the ranged dps to be showboating on the damage meters instead of doing their fucking jobs, here’s another screenie showing yet another waste of good oxygen doing exactly zero damage to the Frozen Orbs on Toravon the Ice Watcher just so he can wave his wowcock in everyones’ faces when the gullible or stupid ask for the damage meter:

I have no idea what he thinks he’s doing.  It’s not big, clever or impressive to 100% fail at the only reason ranged dps exist in Toravon raids.  What he’s effectively doing here is proclaiming to the world that he has no clue how to play his class, is a liability to any raid he’s in and he probably has a very small penis.  But hey, it’s his subscription, if he wants to proclaim “I’m a dickhead!” to the world, it would be churlish of me to fail to pass on the news.  Call it a community service, no thanks required.

See you next time!