Time to clean out the trash!

Trash, what a funny name to give packs of mobs inside a raid. Just the fact that the World of Warcraft community decided to give it that kind of a nickname indicates how most people feel towards it. I on the other hand am quite interested in the concept of trash in a dungeon, and how important it actually is.

Having raided since vanilla, I’ve seen a lot of different trash, good and bad. For a time there was a lot of people complaining that trash shouldn’t exists, that was until Blizzard released Trial of the Crusader, and the players were reminded of how terribly boring a raid can be without any trash between the bosses.

Trash servers a very important role. Trash can in many ways act as a “break” between intense boss fights. It doesn’t necessarily have to provide anything in terms of gameplay, but I’ve often found that social activities on ventrillo/teamspeak often occur when the raid is clearing trash. I look back to trash-heavy dungeons such as Karazhan and I realize that one of the reasons why I look back at those raids so fondly was not just because I enjoyed them, but because my guild bantered a lot during the trash, and I bonded with my guildies greatly during that time.

Trash can also be used as a psychological preparation for a boss fight to come. Blizzard has been favoring adding trash that follows the gimmick of the boss they are “guarding”, and I quite enjoy that. A good example is the elementals before the Ascended Council boss in Bastion of the Twilight, which follows the gimmick of using the elements against each other to counter their abilities, psychologically preparing the raiders for what they have in store.

Now, what makes trash bad, and what makes it good? You may ask. Well, let me start off with what’s bad; too much of it!

You never want too much trash in a dungeon, and if you’re going to cram a whole dungeon full of it, make sure you can avoid most of it. Make it dangerous however, and make sure the raid must be very sneaky in order to avoid most of it, and add lots of patrolling packs that also needs to be carefully avoided. If you put a narrow corridor full of unavoidable packs that takes ages to kill however, congratulations, you’ve created boring trash!

Another thing that makes trash bad is by not making it difficult enough to keep the raiders on their toes. This is where the majority of Wrath of the Lich King went wrong. If you have easy trash, it just becomes boring and makes the raiders fall asleep. The trash must always be challenging in some form or another, and even when heavily out geared it should still have abilities that make it a threat to the raid if they don’t use proper crowd control or follow other important steps.

Good trash is difficult, yet there shouldn’t be much of it. In my opinion there should be a good 10-15 minutes of clearing trash between each boss, give or take. Also, why not include more traps in raids? Or even some platforming action? Make players jump between pillars above molten lava while rocks fall from the ceiling and fire erupt from the walls. It can certainly be done with the engine, but for some reason the raiding team simply doesn’t seem to value such challenges in raids. I think it’s a great shame, and I feel the raiders would find such things refreshing, but what do I know, I’m just a retarded, gay priest.

(I did that one for you, stupid guildies).

Difficulty levels, choice or progression?

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, and most of all it was on time that I removed my old self and updated it with a newer, cataclysmic me. For those of you who don’t know, I transferred my undead priest over to a new realm and had to race change into human because the guild I wanted to join was Alliance. This was a tough decision, as after five years of playing the same character you really get attached to it. The new guild turned out to be a great success though, so I’m not regretting the decision one bit, and I still think human males have some of the coolest animations and poses in the game, so I’m pretty happy overall.

Today I want to write about hard modes and how different games utilize them. I’ve written about a similar topic before where I complained about the lack of quality when it came to the hard modes in Icecrown Citadel, but that was solely a complaint about Blizzard being lazy and not utilizing their tools properly to make high quality content for their subscribers. That was back in Wrath though, and we all know it was a lackluster expansion from the start. Cataclysm is yet to be a Wrath 2.0, and I’m pretty happy about that, but sadly we can never know what the future will bring.

One thing that bothers me about hard modes in their current state is not their difficulty level, but the way Blizzard is using them to make them a higher level of raid-progression, instead of offering an actual choice to the player-base.

We’ve all played those good old games with the easy, medium, hard and possibly expert difficulty levels. These levels in their various shapes and forms, allowed players to challenge themselves depending on their current skill level. For new players, beating the game on easy would probably be tough, while for the experienced veterans; the game could only become truly challenging on the hardest difficulty available.

It is quite normal for players, when they are new to games, to start on the easiest difficulty level and then work their way up to the top. This is the most normal form of progression, since it’s like climbing stairs of sorts. This is fine, as long as the players have a choice to actually skip some of the difficulty levels and climb straight to the top.

A good, personal example would be when I first bought Dragon Age 2, which comes with four difficulty-levels, casual, normal, hard and nightmare. Since I played the crap out of the first game (probably somewhere around 200+ hours of gameplay), I was so familiar with the Dragon Age play-style that I started my first play-through on hard, even though I was completely new to the game. It was tough, but I made it. This was a choice I made for myself, and the game did not hinder me from doing so, although it did severely punish me by killing me over and over again until I got better and finally beat it.

According to Blizzard, their hard modes are an “alternate progression path”, which is a statmenet made out of festering piles of filthy garbage. There is no alternation about the current hard modes, because they require gear from the normal modes to even be beatable. Even if they had removed the requirement to actually kill the final bosses in each of the raid-dungeons to unlock the hard modes, your raid would be completely slaughtered if they walked straight into the heroic raids without acquiring any gear from the normal ones. Because of this, Blizzards idea of hard modes is simply for the raiders to have something to do once they’ve beaten the content, it doesn’t actually provide the players with any kind of choice, unless they are already farming normal modes and are getting bored of it.

My idea of proper hard modes would be first of all to add multiple difficulty levels. This is nothing new to World of Warcraft; they did it in Ulduar, plenty of times in fact. Remember Flame Leviathan? You could either leave all four towers up, or none of them, that’s a total of five difficulty levels. The fun thing about that encounter is that it wasn’t even all that gear dependant, meaning a fresh raid could actually have a go at the hardest difficulty from the get-go, now that’s giving your players a choice!

While I do enjoy the hard modes in Cataclysm quite much, there is no excuse for the current use of the mechanic other than Blizzard being lazy. Hard modes are simply an excuse to provide the players with more content without having to spend all that much development time doing so, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want them there, I just wished it would have been done differently, like in Ulduar.

Come to think of it, it wouldn’t really be that much effort for Blizzard to give a boss multiple difficulty-levels. Simply give a boss a ton of abilities, and remove one of them for each difficulty level below the hardest one. On the easiest difficulty, the boss could perhaps only have one to two abilities, while on the hardest one; the boss could have five to six. It wouldn't even be needed to increase boss health and damage output (which becomes a gear issue), the fight would just need to be more complex. This would make it less gear-dependant, and I actually think it would make raiders happier overall.

Mangs wall of text crits you for 258926824181

I’ll stop now

Disc is OP, nerf!

So I decided to start up this blog again after a long hiatus, reason being Wrath of the Lich King gave me nothing to really write about. I’ve been playing Cataclysm since its release however and I’m pretty happy about it so I’m resurrecting this at least for the time being.

My topic for today is Blizzard’s constant nerfing of the Discipline tree and how they are just stomping the problem into the ground rather than actually trying to fix it.

Throughout the entire Wrath expansion, the Discipline tree was absurdly overpowered, but the play-style was very simple. Spam shields, spam more shields and keep spamming more shields, as much as your mana would allow (and remember, this was Wrath, your mana was allowed to do whatever it pleased).

In Cataclysm, Blizzard stated they wanted to make Discipline “more fun”. They wanted to move away from the model of spamming shields left and right, while still maintaining Disc as a viable healing tree. Blizzard’s idea of fun however, is to nerf the crap out of Power Word: Shield every patch so that priests don’t use it as much. They state that “they don’t want it to be the only spell Disc priests use” as a justification for these changes.

The problem is however, that the reason why Disc priests prefer to spam shields is not because they are so powerful, but because it is their only form of utility that makes them unique compared to their holy brethren. Absorption is the only thing the Discipline tree is good at; it falls flat on everything else versus Holy.

Just start comparing the two trees, and see how much you miss by not going Holy. Circle of Healing, one of the most potent AoE heal in the game. Lightwell, the most unique and mana-effective healing spell in the game. Guardian Spirit, the best life-saver spell in the game (besides combat ress). Chakra, the most diversifying, unique healing-mechanic in the game that allows you to swap between single-target healing and AoE healing with the click of a button. And on top of this you have a mastery that affects your every single healing spell, compared to Disciplines mastery, which affects two spells, one of them being a passive ability that you have no control over.

Blizzard stats they want Disc to use their other tools as well and not just spamming shields. I am very curious as to what these tools might be because I’m not finding them, unless the tools they are talking about are cooldowns like Pain Surpression, Power Word: Barrier and Power Infusion, because they are nowhere close to the utility of the Holy tools. On its own the Disc tree may look pretty strong, but once you compare it to the utility of the Holy tree it falls flat on every area except for the shields, which Blizzard are now nerfing the crap out of patch after patch because they think the play style is boring.

In reality, Blizzard designed a flawed tree the moment they made Discipline viable in raids because it was always based solely on shields, but the fact is that despite its flaws in terms of fun game play, it was so good that many priests chose to play as it anyway because they took joy in playing a strong specc that could do what no other healers could, prevent incoming damage instead of just healing it.

Until Blizzard gives Disc priests some tools other than Penance and a 3 minute cooldown Barrier, Disc priests will either spam shields or specc holy. These tools they want us to use after nerfing our shields time after time are non-existent compared to the Holy tree, and unless they do something about the specc it will in my eyes always be broken. I am just waiting for the next patch notes that will probably say “Power Word: Shield has been removed from the game.”

Seeing as lava is the entire gimmick of Cataclysm...

I remember when I was young, when we walked bare-footed over the Burning Stepped to fish for epics in a pool of lava known as the Molten Core. Back in those days, lava really did hurt. If you were stupid enough to fall into the lava, you were most likely going to die.

As we increased in levels and hit points, the lava really didn’t do its part. It’s still kinda level 60 and hasn’t done much to level up these 5 years. As a result the damage it deals is pitiful, trying to die in a pool of lava as a level 80 is a very slow death, just imagine how it’s going to be when the player’s hit level 85 and the health pools will be measured in 6 digits.

They really need to spice up the lava. A good thing would be to let lava be instant death, you fall in the lava, you die, game over, finito, time to corpse run. Just imagine how nasty that would be, it would sure cause players to be afraid of the lava, and it would actually make the Cataclysm seem a little dangerous.

They probably won’t do something like that though, but at least make it deal damage based on a percentage of your total health, possibly ignoring fire resistance. Say a third of your health every second, which gives you 3 seconds to get up from the lava, sounds fair right? I mean its friggin lava, it’s pretty darn hot.

At least that would be nice, as it is now, the lava in World of Warcraft resembles a cozy, hot bubble-bath.

Hellscream's Warsong, now makes people 15% more retarded!

Today the buff in ICC went up to 15% and people are excited because they think we will finally have a chance to down Lich King. The fact is we’re not going to down Lich King, not if people believe we need the buff in order to do so.

Do you know what we have died on every single time on the Arthas encounter? Defile, defile and more defile. People don’t walk out of defile because the use eyes are obviously considered an exploit. A 15% damage buff won’t make us move out of defile faster, it will make people pay 15% less attention to other things.

When the 5% buff hit our guild took a dive into the trash can. We wiped on Deathwhisper normal mode, people died on trash, we wiped on places we had never wiped before. If anything the ICC buff makes people more retarded, even if they’re not aware of it.

The buff itself is a horrible, horrible idea. Why is it even there in the first place? Aren’t we supposed to get better as our gear and knowledge improves? Thus making encounters easier to beat? Why on earth do we need a stupid, scaling buff that makes people more retarded? So that ICC can be pugged? To hell with that, every god damn instance in WotLK can be pugged already, let ICC be!

Blizzard made a nice gesture by allowing us to turn it off, but they could have at least added an achivement or a title for people choosing to do so that we could have som reason for doing it. The problem is, people always walk the path of least resistance. I was one of the few raiders who suggested the buff be turned off; the response I got was “Why?”

I don’t blame people for raiding with the buff, it’s only retarded to not use what’s been given to you, but the main problem is that it does not prevent lethal boss mechanics, and lethal boss mechanics wipe the raid regardless. What the buff does remove however is focus, and that makes lethal boss mechanics more lethal.

Explain to me why we spent an entire night wiping on Blood Prince Council hardmode with the 15% buff active when we almost one-shotted the encounter the first time with the 5% buff. Because people didn’t run after the flame orb, they didn’t need to; they had a 15% damage buff!

One instance per tier?

I proposed a suggestion to my guild yesterday that wasn’t actually endorsed by the masses. To put it simple, I wanted my guild to cut down from two days a week to one day a week when it comes to raiding. Why did I do this? Two days of raiding is already very little, but when there’s only once instance to raid even that gets too much.

Burnout is closing in as it always has been doing at the end of a raid. People are getting tired of farming the same instance over and over, especially when we got nowhere else to go. In TBC we could change between Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine, Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, and Sunwell was not within reach for most of us until the expanison hit.

Today we got one instance to go to and that’s Icecrown. We’re so overgeared that no place else offers a vague challenge. That’s why I think we should raid one day a week instead of two, because people will get tired, they will get sick of the game, they will be burned out and we will lose them before the new raid is released.

However, most people seem to think that the amount of time you spend playing is not proportional to the amount of time you use to get burned out. I can certainly understand why some people are reacting to this, they are not sick of the game and they already think two times a week is little, so of course they’re against this, but I only want to prevent the same disaster that’s been taking place every single time we come to this place in time. At the end of Naxxramas we nearly lost all our raiders from TBC, at the end of Ulduar we had trouble filling a raid with barely 20 people, at the end of ToTC people were so damn tired of WoW that some left to never return, all because we insisted on over-farming those instances.

I think we’ve reached a point in WotLK that makes me say I’m really looking forward to Cataclysm. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and not repeat this failure of an expanison.

Life Grip lol!

Information about priests in Cataclysm was revealed recently and it seems like us priests are getting a friendly version of the Death Knight’s death grip. It’s called Leap of Faith, but everyone will call it life grip, it’s inevitable.

For those who don’t know, this spell allows you to pull friendly party or raid member from their position towards you. The range and cooldown is unknown, but I’ll bet it will be somewhere between 30 to 40 yards. Either way it’s going to be a hilarious spell and I can’t stop hating Blizzard enough if they decide to remove it before Cataclysm goes live.

This spell will not only be a source of great humor, but we will now finally have the ability to pull those retards away from the fire they aren’t supposed to stand in. As a priest, I’ve always felt like a babysitter in a good way and I take enjoyment in knowing I save my friends asses from time to time, but now I can do it much more directly then previously.

Myself and one of my priest friends also discussed many ways of using this spell to piss of raid leaders and such. For example, I jump off a cliff and in the air I use life grip on another raid member, pulling him/her down with me while my priest friend stands on the edge of the cliff and life grips me up again to his position, we are so going to get demoted for this, but it will be worth it.

But enough about life grip. After the eastern vacation from raiding, my guild cleared some more ICC hardmodes and I must say that buff is starting to get ridiculous. 10% increase in health, damage and healing/absorption has a huge impact on the encounters, and I still don’t understand why this buff is present in hardmodes. If it were up to me I would raid without it, but without a proper argument this isn’t happening, seeing as there’s no rewards whatsoever to raid without it.

We downed Rotface, Festergut, Blood Princes, Lana’Thel and Valithria and got Sindragosa to 35% in one night and I think Lich King will go down soon enough. Again I am confused about the varying difficulty in the bosses. We struggled like hell on Blood Princes, but we almost one-shotted Lana’Thel. Festergut and Rotface went down easily as well, but I’ve heard Putricide is a living nightmare, so I’m looking forward to that fight.

There is one thing in particular that is a great source of concern for me and that is burnout. It’s starting to kick in, even for me and I’m afraid I’ll be tired of ICC soon. I guess it’s inevitable when Blizzard only decides to release one instance per tier. Don’t get me wrong, both Ulduar and ICC have been great instances, but they’re still only the only content we had to raid for months (I won’t even mention the grand failure that ToTC was) and that wears you out, even with different difficulties to choose between.

I’m looking forward to this new raid that’s supposed to come out soon, and I hope Blizzard decides to pull a Sunwell and make it bloody hard, TBC style. With all the easy content and seeing now as ICC is being pugged on a regular basis, not to mention the increasing amount of Kingslayers appearing every day, I hope that this instance will be different.