WoW: Guess What’s Hiding In 4.0.1

Post soundtrack: “Moondance” by Van Morrison

I noticed something interesting while 4.0.1 was installing, and now I’ve found a working version of WoWModelViewer (the ‘DEV WORK’ version, so you should be surprised if it works) I found something veeeeeeery nice.

Isn’t Miss Goblin cute?  And she has company.

Meet Mister Goblin.  Some great little touches in his animations – I particularly love the way his ears sag when he cries, it’s quite touching.

Mr Worgan.   Pretty much what you’d expect.  And last, but not least…

And Ms Worgen.  While she’s still prone to lycanthropic Chihuahua-ism when viewed from certain angles (and some of her animations have clipping issues with her armour that you wouldn’t believe), she’s not as poorly modeled as the initial screenshots of her from the char select screen would suggest.

She does seem to need a good few layers of polish, though.

Roll on 4.0.3!

/wave

There’s No Server Like Home

Post soundtrack: “Sorry (I ran all the way home)” by The Impalas

Sometimes you just can’t fight the siren call of an old server – especially if you have a lot of characters there, as I have on Dath’Remar.  So I’m seriously considering leaving SAN (or at least putting it on the back burner) while I spend some time back on Dath and investigate future options.  (The fact I didn’t really start considering this until after reading Skeleton Jack’s post about his thoughts on Dath after moving there to join Insurrection is purely coincidental. Probably.)

I started back yesterday, doing a pug VoA with disc priest Mingle, and followed up with some time on rogues Pringle and Ringle (including the raid weekly on Ringle).  It felt oddly strange to be back on my dwarves after so much time invested in my gnome – I’m beginning to suspect it might be time to branch out into the other races, possibly even replacing a dwarf or two.

I’ve also been having a look on the official forums to see who’s recruiting – no-one seems to be after a disc priest, but I might be able to apply on Ringle.  It’s tricky though, as most guilds are well into ICC25, and I’ve so little experience with my rogue – when I went in, it was healing (either semi-effectively as disc or badly as holy) on Mingle.  Time to catch up on strategies, I guess.

I’ve also been exploring yet another MMO, having picked up a cheap copy of Warhammer Online while my interest in WoW was wandering.  Curiously enough, I was able to pick up a cheap copy of the collector’s edition for just over half the price of the (not currently on special) normal edition – it well worth the price of admission for the art book, but the accompanying hardcover graphic novel wasn’t quite as appealing for me, and the accompanying unassembled figure will remain unassembled.  (The main reason I bought a boxed copy was because the additional of 15gb of traffic to download the full client effectively killed any savings from buying a digital copy)

I have to say, the game is visually quite appealing, being both more stylised than WoW and yet less cartoon-ish.  It’s just a pity that for a PvP-based game that the player density is so low, even with the game reduced to a only four servers.  (I might write some more in another post, and maybe add some more shiny screenshots – feel free to encourage me)   Unfortunately it looks like I’ll have to cancel my sub after the 30 days ends – I’m saving for a new monitor, and my budget for the next few weeks will be challenged enough covering the cost of groceries without the extra expense of another MMO subs on top of that.

Anyway, that’s pretty much where I’m standing right now: pugging whatever I can find while I considering which guild to app to first.  (The tricky part, of course, is trying to accurately gauge whether I’m good enough to app to a progression guild, or if a more casual guild that just happens to raid would be a better fit – not an easy task with as much insecurity about my skills as I have)

And now that it’s nearing raid-time, it’s probably as good a time as any to see what’s happening.

/wave

Cataclysm Raiding May Not Kill 25-Mans

Post soundtrack: “The Ewok Celebration Song” by Crackerjack Junction

Yes, I’m still here; I was just being lazy.  Anyway, here’s a little opinion piece about the latest Cataclysm preview.  Enjoy.

So there’ll be no more separate 10-man/25-man raids in Cataclysm?  It sounds good to me, and while in the near term the effect may be cataclysmic (see what I did there?), it’s quite possible there are blue skies on the horizon.

From what I’ve read, reaction to the changes (announced here) seem to be divided into four camps:

1. Oh no!  25-man raiding is doooooomed!  No-one will do it if 10-mans offer the same rewards.
2. Yay, 10-man raiding will no longer be raiding-with-training-wheels!  Equality at last!
3. …
4. Profit!

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Seriously though, I’m not usually an optimist but I’m finding myself leaning towards the thought that these changes could be a good thing for raiding in future, and here’s why.

I think that, while 25-man raiding will be facing quite a shake-up (probably equivalent to the transition from 40-man in vanilla WoW to 10- and 25-man with TBC) there will be a new equilibrium after the dust has settled, and there’s a good chance it might leave 25-man raiding in a stronger place (albeit with a smaller population).

At the moment 25s are driven (progression aside) by the fact that the best gear is exclusive to 25-man raids, and because of that it’s where the majority of players are going.  Not just the good players, but also the…  shall we say, “less than talented.”  (Incidentally, a lot of complaints I’ve read about the current state of recruitment for 25s currently seems to revolve around the difficulty in finding (and keeping) competent players, often leaving a number of raid spaces being taken up by people whose lack of skill acts as a drag on the genuinely capable players but who are almost guaranteed a space because they show up for raids)

With 10s and 25s sharing the same level of rewards I suspect there will be a sudden drop in the number of players willing to carry others in order to acquire epics for themselves.  Soon after Cataclysm launches (when the population of 85s starts to stabilise) I’m pretty sure there will be a sudden increase in the number of 10-man raiding guilds, as like-minded players will start to gather together.  It’s also possible that these new 10-man guilds will start forming earlier, when the pre-launch 4.0 patch goes live, if the promised guild-leveling mechanic is launched with it.

The side-effect of 25s no longer being mandatory for top-shelf gear, is that players looking for easy loot may find themselves doing 10-mans more often.  And with a smaller pool of players wishing to do 25s, it’s not impossible that they may find themselves combining forces (without the less skilled players who now focus on the convenience of 10-mans) to focus on 25-man raiding.  It might be too early to say that Cataclysm could be a new ‘golden age’ for 25-man raiding like TBC was, but if the random factors align it could happen.  (my fingers are crossed on this one)

The downside to this will be that players who aren’t as skilled will find themselves having to work harder for a raid space, or will come to rely increasingly on pugs.  Fortunately Blizz have said that the initial raids will be balanced toward players in blue gear, so pugging them shouldn’t be too much more difficult than Naxx 2.0 was.  After that?  Well, there will be badges which will likely be farmable in heroics and the beginner raids.  Time will tell, I guess.

I like what I’ve read so far, and it’d be nice to get back into 25-man raiding with a group of like-minded players.  Am I being foolishly optimistic?  Maybe.  But I’d like to think this could be the expansion that brings dedicated raiders back together.

Is WoW The Game It Used To Be?

Or it the players who’ve changed?

I never reached the level cap playing vanilla WoW so missed old-school raiding, but managed to raid everything in TBC up to Felmyst in Sunwell.  However, the changes to raiding that Wrath has brought us seem to have changed the raiding experience considerably for a large number of people, myself included, and not necessarily for the better.

Last night our guild was faced with the possibility that a large number of the raiders (including several officers) are so unsatisfied with the quality of our raiding (and the lack of recruitable players on the server) that they’re facing either stopping working on 25-man hard modes (which are pretty much the only remaining measure of progression raiding) or transferring to another server with a more mature raider population in order to continue progression raiding.

Several factors have lead up to this, ranging from experienced players getting burnt-out and leaving the game, to raiders server-transferring to more progressed guilds elsewhere, to unreliable raiding performance of current raiders (myself included) and general dissatisfaction with the progression-raiding model.  While some people are afraid that we may end up disbanding or at least retiring from 25-man raiding, the officers are working on one last recruiting push to try and get enough capable raiders and see if we can still push hard-modes.

Personally I’m beginning to think that if I’m not careful, this might be the feather that broke this particular camel’s back.  WoW (and the people I play it with) is a big part of my life, but the game doesn’t have the thrill that it used to.  Raiding especially has changed, with the challenge level going from “Challenging” in TBC for everything (well, with the exception of Sunwell), to either “Faceroll” for normal fights or “Impossible” for hardmodes in the current raiding tiers.

Apparently (hearsay FTW!) Blizzard’s goal with hard-modes is that only the top 1% of players are skilled enough to complete them.  I reckon this is raising serious issues with raiding guilds, who at a rough guess comprise 5%* of the total player base, but due to the binary nature of current raid difficulty the majority of them will end up either wiping in growing frustration or possibly dropping hardmodes entirely due to their very small reward-to-effort ratio.

* – Numbers may have been completely fabricated in order to support my rant.  Take with a large grain of angry salt.

Gear no longer has any meaning more than being the (occasionally aesthetically pleasing) vessel for your various stat bonuses – some of my guildmates still keep their T6 sets in the bank, because of how much completing the set meant.  However, when they replace their T7 with T8, or T8 with T9, the set it’s replacing will get vendored without a second thought because of how little the old items mean in this age of disposable gear.

The leveling game isn’t all that bad (once you get past the archaic 1-60 grind), and Outland is still quite beautiful (well, apart from Hellfire Peninsula).  But once you hit 80, the remaining game (either self-goals like collecting pets/mounts/reputations/achievements or group goals like raiding) just isn’t that exciting anymore.  Even raiding has gone from feeling elation at having defeated boss X (so you can move onto the next boss), to feeling relief that boss Y is dead (until next week).

I suspect I’m just getting burnt out by the same-ness of the endgame (and the necessity of a month of jousting to open up the latest group of dailies is just salt in an open wound).  To be blunt, I’m running out of things to do.

So it’s time for a change.

I’m going to try something new on my priest; I’ve changed raiding spec from shadow to discipline, and that means trying something very new.  I’ve spend a metric bucket-load of gold picking up some new disc-friendly gear (including the Etched Signet of the Kirin Tor – thank you Inscription), and my talent build has passed the healing officer’s once-over, so now I just need a lot of experience (which I suspect I’ll be getting in short order).

Here’s hoping we’re able to pull the guild back together, and reclaim our place as A Guild That Doesn’t Suck.

/wave

Shifting The Goalposts

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been dissatisfied with raiding lately (especially 25-man), and this week I decided that it was time to make some changes.

I really enjoy WoW, both the game itself and the social side of it with my guild, and the thought of becoming so disenchanted with raiding (and the pressures that are surfacing with the hard-mode bosses in Ulduar) that it taints the game as a whole is something I want to avoid.

Of course, the tricky bit about making changes is working out what changes are to be made.  My idea currently is to cut down a lot on 25-man raids (with the exception of coming in if there’s a shortage of dispellers or ranged dps in-guild), and maybe do some 10-man raiding if I can get an invite.

This means Mingle will be getting demoted (probably to casual raider or possibly just to member), which also means less loot (as full raiders get priority, and casuals aren’t eligible for tier loot) but as I’ve been passing on everything lately that’s not a concern.  But it gives me the chance to change my main

Any what will I be doing instead?  Well, I’m considering my options.  I’ve spent a bit of time playing Kringle and Pringle lately (and took Pringle into Naxx-10 with quite a bit of success – she came out with 7 epics, but sadly no tier items), and there’s always my anorexic horde hunter and lonely night elf druid (the latter is tempting, considering the new druid bear and cat models coming in the next major content patch, which means probably in 3.2).

There’s also a few other interesting games that have been underappreciated due to the time I’ve spent in WoW, such as Fallout 3 (which has had three new content patches of it’s own since I played it, the last of which is supposed to fix the rather abrupt end of the original game) and Mass Effect (which was fun to play through originally, and is proving fun to play through again).

So I’ll continue posting here, although not quite as much as I was when I was so enthusiastic when I started.  And I intend to continue playing WoW, and hopefully write posts consisting of more than lists of upgraded loot that my characters have managed to accumulate.

Speaking of writing, this post from World of Matticus is well worth reading if you’re a blogger:  The Purple Kodo: 13 Points of Blogging

Anyway, I’m still fishing.  For all that some things change, some things are still the same.

/wave