Wow, you know?
The world of Warcraft is very different. Since Blizzard released patch 4.0.3a, I have had a great time exploring the changed world, collecting flight paths on Ascanius, creating low-level Alliance characters to experience the new 1-5 starting zones, and even starting up a few Horde characters on the Kirin Tor server to play with the folks from RPGnet. Troll druids and tauren paladins are a lot of fun, and I especially appreciate the way that the tauren starting experience has been seriously improved even though Mulgore itself hasn't changed a great deal post-Shattering.
Obviously there isn't much to say about my experiences playing Ascanius since the patch, because collecting flight points is about the only thing he has been able to do. I'm really looking forward to levelling in Vashj'ir, working on Engineering and Archaeology, and getting to fly around in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor . . . but these are all things I've said before.
Therefore I shall provide some quick capsule reviews of the Alliance-side starting zones. I literally only played these characters from 1-5, deleting them once they reached their first inn in the newbie town.
Human Hunter: The first thing I noticed was that there's actually a good reason for killing wolves as one of your first quests now; whereas in the classic game you were collecting wolf meat (really?) and then the pelts of diseased wolves once Blizzard did their small-scale revamps to the starting zones several months ago, now the wolves you're killing are Blackrock orc-trained creatures, representative of a real threat to Northshire Valley. Following these quests up with fighting skulking Blackrock spies and the marauders who burned the old vineyard, culminating in the execution of the Blackrock orcs' leader, really helps sell that classic "orcs vs. humans" Warcraft conflict. My favourite touch: the use of female orc models alongside male orcs for the Blackrock jerks, which is something that hasn't really happened before except in the case of Horde-aligned NPCs.
Gnome Warrior: The gnomes (like the Forsaken, actually) have a new backstory for post-4.0.3a player characters; where classic gnomes were drawn from the ranks of those who had managed to flee Gnomeregan before it became contaminated and overrun with leper gnomes and troggs, new gnome characters are rescued from the afflicted population and sent to the surface after they recover. There's a lot of cleanup work to be done up there, too, culminating in an interesting fight alongside High Tinker Mekkatorque where you direct his battlesuit's special attacks against Razlo Crushcog, a minion of the hated Mekgineer Thermaplugg. My favourite touch: the warrior quest to learn and practice the Charge skill rewards your gnome with a Very Light Sabre, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Dwarf Shaman: Probably the least-changed zone, perhaps neck-and-neck with the night elf area. You're still fighting troggs and recovering a gnome's tools from frost troll camps. There are some fun additions; you have to recover dwarven artifacts from troggs (who throw them at you in anger when you attack) and eavesdrop on frost troll shamans speaking prophecies to their people. Still, it's pretty familiar stuff. My favourite touch: when you're about to head through the tunnel from Coldridge Valley to Dun Morogh proper, it collapses - and you're instead flown straight to Kharanos in a gyrocopter.
Night Elf Mage: Not radically different, but still significantly improved. You're still killing grell and spiders, but there is less pointless running around. There's even an escort quest where the NPC is the one escorting you, in a way. There wasn't a great deal of reaction from the NPCs to the fact that I was playing a mage, which was a slight disappointment, but I did appreciate the fact that the "get me some water from this moonwell" quests spawned an NPC spirit that gave a little bit of backstory regarding the history of the night elf race when I approached the moonwell. Favourite touch: it's a tie between the fact that the one quest that sends you to the top of Aldrassil gives you a Slow Fall buff to help you get down without running down the ramp, and that I passed that damn satyr Zenn Foulhoof on my way to town, proving that night elves are still too dumb to get rid of a guy who's been tricking newbie adventurers for six years.
Next time, which will probably be this weekend before the actual launch date for Cataclysm, I'll post some thoughts about what I've been doing Horde-side since the patch. See you then!
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Patch 4.0.1
I haven't posted for longer than I expected, what with the many changes that talents have undergone on both the beta servers and the patch test realm, but now that Patch 4.0.1 has arrived and I've spent some time on Ascanius, I feel qualified to write a little about it.
Provisional!
I'm fairly happy, overall. The new Fire tree is significantly improved from the version about which I wrote in my last post on the subject. Impact is even a useful talent in PvE, now! For the first time in my World of Warcraft career, Ascanius actually has two talent specs - one with Burning Soul, Cauterise, and Molten Fury for single-target fights, the other with Improved Fire Blast, Impact, and Improved Flamestrike for multiple-target encounters.
I enjoy the new Combustion mechanic, too - it's a straightforward and accessible way to improve your performance when you're on a boss long enough to make sure all of your damage-over-time effects are up at once. It's also nice that the Scorch debuff can be refreshed by Pyroblast - and I can't tell you how enjoyable zero-mana Scorches while moving has been!
It's a little disappointing that clipping Living Bomb removes the explosion effect, but I can actually imagine encounters in Cataclysm where we might not want the area-of-effect damage spreading out from the boss. The more frustrating aspect of Living Bomb is the new three-target limit, especially as it pertains to the DoT-spreading aspects of Impact (or just to slipshod tab-targeting on my part!).
I'm enjoying the new built-in "Power Auras" system, although the glowing on-screen graphics make me even more anal-retentive about using my Hot Streak procs than I already was. In some ways, though, it's a shame that I never got to experience what it was like getting Arcane Missiles or Pyroblast procs as I levelled - luckily, I do intend to create a goblin mage in Cataclysm on another server.
I will likely have more to say in the future, but I'll knock out a few more points before I go:
Provisional!
I'm fairly happy, overall. The new Fire tree is significantly improved from the version about which I wrote in my last post on the subject. Impact is even a useful talent in PvE, now! For the first time in my World of Warcraft career, Ascanius actually has two talent specs - one with Burning Soul, Cauterise, and Molten Fury for single-target fights, the other with Improved Fire Blast, Impact, and Improved Flamestrike for multiple-target encounters.
I enjoy the new Combustion mechanic, too - it's a straightforward and accessible way to improve your performance when you're on a boss long enough to make sure all of your damage-over-time effects are up at once. It's also nice that the Scorch debuff can be refreshed by Pyroblast - and I can't tell you how enjoyable zero-mana Scorches while moving has been!
It's a little disappointing that clipping Living Bomb removes the explosion effect, but I can actually imagine encounters in Cataclysm where we might not want the area-of-effect damage spreading out from the boss. The more frustrating aspect of Living Bomb is the new three-target limit, especially as it pertains to the DoT-spreading aspects of Impact (or just to slipshod tab-targeting on my part!).
I'm enjoying the new built-in "Power Auras" system, although the glowing on-screen graphics make me even more anal-retentive about using my Hot Streak procs than I already was. In some ways, though, it's a shame that I never got to experience what it was like getting Arcane Missiles or Pyroblast procs as I levelled - luckily, I do intend to create a goblin mage in Cataclysm on another server.
I will likely have more to say in the future, but I'll knock out a few more points before I go:
- Although it smacks of homogenisation, I do like that Engineering tinkers have lost their enchant-like secondary effects and can now be applied to gear along with regular Enchanting effects.
- I haven't been raiding very much in Icecrown Citadel, but I did go in after the patch and came out with heroic Ether-Soaked Bracers and heroic Frost Needle. The sword was good enough to make switching from my Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff worthwhile right away, but I had no off-hand item better than the Inscription-created Rituals of the New Moon - until only my second run through heroic Halls of Reflection, when I was lucky enough to get Shriveled Heart. I also managed to earn my third piece of Tier 10 gear this morning after defeating the Headless Horseman.
- This week many of us finally earned our Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievement, even though the Rusted Proto-Drake no longer automatically awards you with the Master Flying skill for 310% speed. Still, it's a great mount and I'm glad to have it. Hopefully we can get most of the rest of the raid their achievements this coming week.
- I really like the fact that all mounts scale with Riding skill now. Ascanius is currently zooming around Dalaran and the old world on the same Chestnut Mare that was his first-ever mount back at level 40 in 2005, bought for what seemed like a fortune in gold at the time.
- My alts are more or less static; I have respecced and fixed up their action bars, but the only one I'm really doing anything with is my Retribution paladin. I actually took her to kill XT-002 Deconstructor for the weekly raid quest last night, and was lucky enough to get Ironsoul from Flame Leviathan on the way. Concepción had previously been carrying the ilevel 200 sword that you can buy at the Argent Tournament, so this was a fun upgrade.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
The Story of World of Warcraft
So talents are for another time. I'm going to take a stab at something else (credit goes to the hosts of the WoW Insider Show from WoW.com for the notion): summarising the story of the original World of Warcraft up until the release of The Burning Crusade.
Convoluted!
The story of the game is largely expressed in the broad strokes of the end-game dungeons and raid instances, so that's what I'll use as the basis for my summary.
WoW launched with two 40-player raid instances: Onyxia's Lair and Molten Core. The titular Onyxia was a malicious black dragon, daughter of the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing (originally Neltharion, the Earth-Warder). The storyline that led players to confront her in her lair in Dustwallow Marsh involved her having posed as a noblewoman in the kingdom of Stormwind (a trick her father had used before), using magic and guile to distract and corrupt the nobility and the regent, Bolvar Fordragon. In the current canon of the game, however, Onyxia was slain by Stormwind's king, Varian Wrynn, upon his return from captivity.
Molten Core has a more involved history, but one with interesting links to the black dragons. Three centuries before the game began, there was a civil war between the three branches of the dwarven race. Thaurissan, leader of the Dark Iron dwarves, sought to summon a powerful fire elemental in order to destroy the forces of the Bronzebeard and Wildhammer clans; instead he accidentally released Ragnaros the Firelord, master of all fire elementals, from his captivity within the earth. Ragnaros destroyed the capital of the Dark Irons and caused the eruption of a mighty volcano now called Blackrock Mountain. Beneath the volcano, Ragnaros and his minions occupy the Molten Core, and the Dark Iron dwarves are largely loyal servants of the Firelord. In the canon of the game, Ragnaros was defeated and thrust back to the Elemental Plane.
There's one obvious connection between Ragnaros and the Black Dragonflight, but before we come to it, there are others. Before he was corrupted, Neltharion was appointed by the Titans who created Azeroth as Earth-Warder: given dominion over the element of earth and the deep places of the world. Which race is most associated with earth and the depths? Dwarves, of course, who literally descend from the Earthen race originally created as servants by the Titans.
Who corrupted the Earthen with the "Curse of Flesh" to create the dwarves in the first place? The Old Gods. Who corrupted Neltharion the Earth-Warder and caused him to become Deathwing? The Old Gods. Who were the original masters of the armies of wind, tides, stone, and fire - this last led by Ragnaros the Firelord? The Old Gods. The hand of the Old Gods - C'thun, Yogg-Saron, and others yet unnamed - has been behind a great many of the evils which have plagued Azeroth right down to the modern day.
The obvious connection between black dragons and Ragnaros is related to the next 40-player raid instance introduced to the game, in patch 1.6: Blackwing Lair. Blackrock Mountain isn't just the lair of Ragnaros and his Dark Iron servants; its upper reaches, in the Lower and Upper Blackrock Spire dungeons and the Blackwing Lair raid, are controlled by the forces of Deathwing's son Nefarian and his servants, the Blackrock clan of orcs and ogres. Nefarian struggled with Ragnaros for control of the entire volcano, and also presented a threat to the Horde through his alliance with Rend Blackhand and his "Dark Horde". Canonically, Varok Saurfang was responsible or at least involved in the final defeat of Nefarian.
After the struggle against Onyxia, Ragnaros, and Nefarian occupied the attention of both Horde and Alliance heroes, new threats began to make themselves known in patch 1.7. In the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale, the troll god Hakkar the Soulflayer arose in the ruined city of Zul'Gurub, former capital of the Gurubashi troll empire. Zul'Gurub became a 20-player raid instance, as the Zandalar tribe of trolls sponsored the efforts of heroes to invade the city and defeat Hakkar along with the troll priests who had attempted to stop his rise but found themselves enslaved to his will.
The threat of Hakkar was soon eclipsed by a more serious danger stirring in the sands of Silithus and other locations in southern Kalimdor: the ancient qiraji, masters of the insectoid silithids already known to infest the region. Patch 1.8 introduced the efforts by the druids of the Cenarion Circle to investigate the phenomenon; patch 1.9 saw the Gates of Ahn'Quiraj open and provide access to the 20-player Ruins of Ahn'Quiraj and the 40-player Temple of Ahn'Quiraj raids.
It all comes back to the Old Gods. Hakkar the Soulflayer is also called the Blood God, and his strange power might be connected in some way to the Old Gods. The qiraji once sealed in Ahn'Qiraj were created by and still serve the Old God C'thun, who dwells at the bottom of the Temple. The influence of the Old Gods didn't end with the defeat of C'thun, although their involvement in the final 40-player raid instance of the original game is a little harder to tease out.
This final instance, Naxxramas, is most directly connected to the storyline of Warcraft III, especially its expansion pack The Frozen Throne. The demonic Burning Legion desired to invade and destroy Azeroth; to this end, they empowered the spirit of a corrupted orc shaman, Ner'zhul, as the Lich King, and commanded him to raise an undead army called the Scourge to assist in the conquest. Ner'zhul, ruling the Scourge from his Frozen Throne on the continent of Northrend, desired his freedom and conquest of Azeroth for himself, however, so he sought the corruption of the human prince Arthas Menethil of Lordaeron (who had, ironically, fallen into fanaticism as he sought to eradicate the Scourge) and turned him into a tool for taking ultimate control of the Scourge away from the Burning Legion. This was finally accomplished when Arthas merged with the Lich King, the two becoming one entity.
Prior to this, however, Arthas had been essentially a general of the Scourge, loyal to the Lich King. One of his closest allies was the lich Kel'Thuzad, who had been one of the architects of the very plague which had turned Arthas's people into Scourge. Kel'Thuzad's fortress was the floating necropolis of Naxxramas, which invaded the Eastern Kingdoms of Azeroth in patch 1.10 and occupied the skies above the Plaguelands - the former lands of Lordaeron.
So where do the Old Gods come in? Among the forces of the Lich King to be found in Naxxramas were undead members of an insectoid race, called nerubians; these nerubians are an offshoot of the same original race that gave rise to the qiraji of southern Kalimdor. The nerubians had an empire in Northrend that attempted to resist the power of the Lich King, but eventually fell as he raised their fallen against him.
Not only were the nerubians themselves descendants of a race created by the Old God C'thun, new developments in Wrath of the Lich King would reveal that their empire in Northrend was destroyed not only by the fight with the Lich King but by their uncovering the Faceless Ones as they dug deeper into the earth in retreat from the Scourge. Who are the Faceless Ones? The ancient servants of Yogg-Saron, the Old God of death, of course.
It's clear that the influence of the Old Gods is behind much of the threats facing Azeroth in the original World of Warcraft. It's interesting to contemplate how this changed quite radically in the first expansion.
Convoluted!
The story of the game is largely expressed in the broad strokes of the end-game dungeons and raid instances, so that's what I'll use as the basis for my summary.
WoW launched with two 40-player raid instances: Onyxia's Lair and Molten Core. The titular Onyxia was a malicious black dragon, daughter of the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing (originally Neltharion, the Earth-Warder). The storyline that led players to confront her in her lair in Dustwallow Marsh involved her having posed as a noblewoman in the kingdom of Stormwind (a trick her father had used before), using magic and guile to distract and corrupt the nobility and the regent, Bolvar Fordragon. In the current canon of the game, however, Onyxia was slain by Stormwind's king, Varian Wrynn, upon his return from captivity.
Molten Core has a more involved history, but one with interesting links to the black dragons. Three centuries before the game began, there was a civil war between the three branches of the dwarven race. Thaurissan, leader of the Dark Iron dwarves, sought to summon a powerful fire elemental in order to destroy the forces of the Bronzebeard and Wildhammer clans; instead he accidentally released Ragnaros the Firelord, master of all fire elementals, from his captivity within the earth. Ragnaros destroyed the capital of the Dark Irons and caused the eruption of a mighty volcano now called Blackrock Mountain. Beneath the volcano, Ragnaros and his minions occupy the Molten Core, and the Dark Iron dwarves are largely loyal servants of the Firelord. In the canon of the game, Ragnaros was defeated and thrust back to the Elemental Plane.
There's one obvious connection between Ragnaros and the Black Dragonflight, but before we come to it, there are others. Before he was corrupted, Neltharion was appointed by the Titans who created Azeroth as Earth-Warder: given dominion over the element of earth and the deep places of the world. Which race is most associated with earth and the depths? Dwarves, of course, who literally descend from the Earthen race originally created as servants by the Titans.
Who corrupted the Earthen with the "Curse of Flesh" to create the dwarves in the first place? The Old Gods. Who corrupted Neltharion the Earth-Warder and caused him to become Deathwing? The Old Gods. Who were the original masters of the armies of wind, tides, stone, and fire - this last led by Ragnaros the Firelord? The Old Gods. The hand of the Old Gods - C'thun, Yogg-Saron, and others yet unnamed - has been behind a great many of the evils which have plagued Azeroth right down to the modern day.
The obvious connection between black dragons and Ragnaros is related to the next 40-player raid instance introduced to the game, in patch 1.6: Blackwing Lair. Blackrock Mountain isn't just the lair of Ragnaros and his Dark Iron servants; its upper reaches, in the Lower and Upper Blackrock Spire dungeons and the Blackwing Lair raid, are controlled by the forces of Deathwing's son Nefarian and his servants, the Blackrock clan of orcs and ogres. Nefarian struggled with Ragnaros for control of the entire volcano, and also presented a threat to the Horde through his alliance with Rend Blackhand and his "Dark Horde". Canonically, Varok Saurfang was responsible or at least involved in the final defeat of Nefarian.
After the struggle against Onyxia, Ragnaros, and Nefarian occupied the attention of both Horde and Alliance heroes, new threats began to make themselves known in patch 1.7. In the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale, the troll god Hakkar the Soulflayer arose in the ruined city of Zul'Gurub, former capital of the Gurubashi troll empire. Zul'Gurub became a 20-player raid instance, as the Zandalar tribe of trolls sponsored the efforts of heroes to invade the city and defeat Hakkar along with the troll priests who had attempted to stop his rise but found themselves enslaved to his will.
The threat of Hakkar was soon eclipsed by a more serious danger stirring in the sands of Silithus and other locations in southern Kalimdor: the ancient qiraji, masters of the insectoid silithids already known to infest the region. Patch 1.8 introduced the efforts by the druids of the Cenarion Circle to investigate the phenomenon; patch 1.9 saw the Gates of Ahn'Quiraj open and provide access to the 20-player Ruins of Ahn'Quiraj and the 40-player Temple of Ahn'Quiraj raids.
It all comes back to the Old Gods. Hakkar the Soulflayer is also called the Blood God, and his strange power might be connected in some way to the Old Gods. The qiraji once sealed in Ahn'Qiraj were created by and still serve the Old God C'thun, who dwells at the bottom of the Temple. The influence of the Old Gods didn't end with the defeat of C'thun, although their involvement in the final 40-player raid instance of the original game is a little harder to tease out.
This final instance, Naxxramas, is most directly connected to the storyline of Warcraft III, especially its expansion pack The Frozen Throne. The demonic Burning Legion desired to invade and destroy Azeroth; to this end, they empowered the spirit of a corrupted orc shaman, Ner'zhul, as the Lich King, and commanded him to raise an undead army called the Scourge to assist in the conquest. Ner'zhul, ruling the Scourge from his Frozen Throne on the continent of Northrend, desired his freedom and conquest of Azeroth for himself, however, so he sought the corruption of the human prince Arthas Menethil of Lordaeron (who had, ironically, fallen into fanaticism as he sought to eradicate the Scourge) and turned him into a tool for taking ultimate control of the Scourge away from the Burning Legion. This was finally accomplished when Arthas merged with the Lich King, the two becoming one entity.
Prior to this, however, Arthas had been essentially a general of the Scourge, loyal to the Lich King. One of his closest allies was the lich Kel'Thuzad, who had been one of the architects of the very plague which had turned Arthas's people into Scourge. Kel'Thuzad's fortress was the floating necropolis of Naxxramas, which invaded the Eastern Kingdoms of Azeroth in patch 1.10 and occupied the skies above the Plaguelands - the former lands of Lordaeron.
So where do the Old Gods come in? Among the forces of the Lich King to be found in Naxxramas were undead members of an insectoid race, called nerubians; these nerubians are an offshoot of the same original race that gave rise to the qiraji of southern Kalimdor. The nerubians had an empire in Northrend that attempted to resist the power of the Lich King, but eventually fell as he raised their fallen against him.
Not only were the nerubians themselves descendants of a race created by the Old God C'thun, new developments in Wrath of the Lich King would reveal that their empire in Northrend was destroyed not only by the fight with the Lich King but by their uncovering the Faceless Ones as they dug deeper into the earth in retreat from the Scourge. Who are the Faceless Ones? The ancient servants of Yogg-Saron, the Old God of death, of course.
It's clear that the influence of the Old Gods is behind much of the threats facing Azeroth in the original World of Warcraft. It's interesting to contemplate how this changed quite radically in the first expansion.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Raiding Achievements
In the past week, I've achieved two of the goals I had remaining for myself in Wrath of the Lich King.
Success!
Last Thursday, Free Company finally defeated the Lich King after two months of weekly attempts. I'll quote what Andrew, our raid leader, posted on our guild forums about it:
We first faced the LK on the third of June
We killed him on the fifth of August
I have logs from seven days worth of attempts
We killed the LK on our 76th attempt
According to GuildOx we are the 56th guild on our server to kill him
GuildOx claims that only 36.61% of the guilds in the world have done that
Using their 10 man casual ranking we are ranked as the 15th best guild on the server
It's a good feeling to finally be able to call myself Ascanius the Kingslayer. It's also funny to note, as Kate did, that our other tank - Lexa's gnome warrior - was carrying the ilevel 200 Titansteel Shield Wall when we killed the Lich King.
We didn't stop there, though! On Monday night, we ventured back in to Ulduar, and look what happened:
Yes, we finally defeated Algalon the Observer. The amusing thing about this attempt was that Ian came along - the first time he'd ever faced Algalon at all - and we succeeded on our third attempt of the night. He commented afterward that he didn't really feel like he'd earned it!
This leaves me with, really, only one more raiding achievement that I'd like to earn before Cataclysm: Glory of the Ulduar Raider and its Rusted Proto-Drake reward. Fortunately for me, Ascanius only needs two more achievements in order to attain that: I Love The Smell of Saronite in the Morning and One Light in the Darkness. Unfortunately, plenty of other people still need much more difficult achievements like Firefighter, but I don't mind helping them get there.
My next post will probably address beta talents for Fire mages again, now that we've had some time with the redesign.
Success!
Last Thursday, Free Company finally defeated the Lich King after two months of weekly attempts. I'll quote what Andrew, our raid leader, posted on our guild forums about it:
We first faced the LK on the third of June
We killed him on the fifth of August
I have logs from seven days worth of attempts
We killed the LK on our 76th attempt
According to GuildOx we are the 56th guild on our server to kill him
GuildOx claims that only 36.61% of the guilds in the world have done that
Using their 10 man casual ranking we are ranked as the 15th best guild on the server
It's a good feeling to finally be able to call myself Ascanius the Kingslayer. It's also funny to note, as Kate did, that our other tank - Lexa's gnome warrior - was carrying the ilevel 200 Titansteel Shield Wall when we killed the Lich King.
We didn't stop there, though! On Monday night, we ventured back in to Ulduar, and look what happened:
Yes, we finally defeated Algalon the Observer. The amusing thing about this attempt was that Ian came along - the first time he'd ever faced Algalon at all - and we succeeded on our third attempt of the night. He commented afterward that he didn't really feel like he'd earned it!
This leaves me with, really, only one more raiding achievement that I'd like to earn before Cataclysm: Glory of the Ulduar Raider and its Rusted Proto-Drake reward. Fortunately for me, Ascanius only needs two more achievements in order to attain that: I Love The Smell of Saronite in the Morning and One Light in the Darkness. Unfortunately, plenty of other people still need much more difficult achievements like Firefighter, but I don't mind helping them get there.
My next post will probably address beta talents for Fire mages again, now that we've had some time with the redesign.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Add-Ons
Although I enjoy raiding, there is definitely one word that neatly describes my attitude towards add-ons used for raiding or any other purpose.
Minimalist!
The list of add-ons I use is really quite short. Let's start with those unrelated to raiding. I use BankItems to keep track of what I have stored in the bank and bags of all my characters - with four 80s and another two in their 70s, this saves me a lot of time switching between characters. I also use GatherMate to keep a record of gathering nodes like herbs and ore.
Really, that's it. I don't use Auctioneer because I rarely use the auction house - what my characters gather and craft is for their own use or the guild's use, and I prefer to make money through daily quests when I need cash. I've never used a quest add-on like Quest Helper, although while I was earning my Loremaster title I did use EveryQuest to keep track of what I had and hadn't done. I don't use any map mods.
Raiding add-ons, I keep very simple. I use Quartz because I raid on my mage and a lag-sensitive cast bar is very useful. I use DeadlyBossMods for alerts and timers. I use Omen for a threat meter. I have Decursive for the rare occasions when it's necessary.
I don't have any kind of action bar mod. I don't have any kind of damage meter. I don't use anything besides the default raid frames (although I am cognizant that this is purely and simply because I have the luxury not to use them, since I raid as DPS). I don't even use something like PowerAuras (although I have tried it out) to alert me to Hot Streak procs, since between the sound, the visual around my mage, and the flashing icon on my list of buffs, I never miss one.
So that's me. I raid pretty light on add-ons; I only use a couple of macros, too, and most of them are just adding /cancelaura to Ice Block so I can hit the same key to come out of it (I do the same for Blink so I can use it in situations where I need to de-Ice Block and Blink immediately), or /stopcasting to Counterspell for when that's necessary.
On the other hand, you should see the tweaked UI that Lexa uses . . .
Minimalist!
The list of add-ons I use is really quite short. Let's start with those unrelated to raiding. I use BankItems to keep track of what I have stored in the bank and bags of all my characters - with four 80s and another two in their 70s, this saves me a lot of time switching between characters. I also use GatherMate to keep a record of gathering nodes like herbs and ore.
Really, that's it. I don't use Auctioneer because I rarely use the auction house - what my characters gather and craft is for their own use or the guild's use, and I prefer to make money through daily quests when I need cash. I've never used a quest add-on like Quest Helper, although while I was earning my Loremaster title I did use EveryQuest to keep track of what I had and hadn't done. I don't use any map mods.
Raiding add-ons, I keep very simple. I use Quartz because I raid on my mage and a lag-sensitive cast bar is very useful. I use DeadlyBossMods for alerts and timers. I use Omen for a threat meter. I have Decursive for the rare occasions when it's necessary.
I don't have any kind of action bar mod. I don't have any kind of damage meter. I don't use anything besides the default raid frames (although I am cognizant that this is purely and simply because I have the luxury not to use them, since I raid as DPS). I don't even use something like PowerAuras (although I have tried it out) to alert me to Hot Streak procs, since between the sound, the visual around my mage, and the flashing icon on my list of buffs, I never miss one.
So that's me. I raid pretty light on add-ons; I only use a couple of macros, too, and most of them are just adding /cancelaura to Ice Block so I can hit the same key to come out of it (I do the same for Blink so I can use it in situations where I need to de-Ice Block and Blink immediately), or /stopcasting to Counterspell for when that's necessary.
On the other hand, you should see the tweaked UI that Lexa uses . . .
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Beta Talents for Fire Mages
We've had a few builds' worth of the new 31-point talent trees released so far, so I'm going to offer some brief comments on the Fire tree and mage talents in general. In a word?
Awkward!
Most of the talents which remain are those which I expected to hang around. Master of Elements, Incineration, Ignite, Fire Power, Improved Scorch, Hot Streak, Molten Fury, Critical Mass . . . these are all recognisably similar to existing talents in the Fire tree, which fit with the schema of "something that changes the way you play" rather than "something which passively increases your damage" that Blizzard is openly aiming for. Then there are the four "new ability" talents, which are much the same as they always were - Blast Wave, Dragon's Breath, Combustion (albeit altered, and I'll come back to that), and Living Bomb.
The problem, as I see it, is that once I have taken all of the obvious PvE talents that I'd like to have as a raider, I'm left with cruft which is either obviously PvP-oriented, or involve making changes that probably won't show up at all in 90% of my gameplay. After taking Master of Elements, Incineration, and Ignite, I have to put a point in something I have almost no use for in order to advance.
Burning Soul is a PvP talent - it has its uses in PvE, but even with increased health pools in Cataclysm I doubt I'll want to stand around getting beat up enough to make investing a talent point in making my spells faster while it's happening. The priority will always be to get out of that situation. Likewise Blazing Speed and Molten Shields. Therefore all I have left is Improved Fire Blast, reducing the cooldown and increasing the range on a spell I almost never use.
The next tier is fine - Fire Power, Blast Wave, and Improved Scorch are all welcome. Well, technically, I don't have Blast Wave in my raiding spec at the moment, but it's a fun talent and it will presumably have its uses if Cataclysm succeeds in making crowd-control a more important part of gameplay. Knocking loose adds away from the healer and back towards the tank is always a good time.
In the next tier, Hot Streak, Combustion, and Pyromaniac are all interesting enough. Combustion's changes make it a very different spell, but I can see that it will be very useful for lining up multiple damage-over-time effects on a target, then popping Combustion and nailing it with a Fireball or even a Pyroblast made instant-cast by Hot Streak. Speaking of the latter, the change from "2 consecutive critical strikes" to "3 consecutive strikes within 6 seconds of each other" is fine with me.
But then in the next tier we get Dragon's Breath - again, welcome, and making a return to my spec where I skip it now - and Molten Fury, which I've found very useful for raiding . . . but there isn't enough in this tier to get me anywhere. So I have to go back and put another point in Improved Fire Blast.
Critical Mass is great, but all by itself in the second-to-last tier it's just frustrating. So what else have I got to go back and get? Impact is a PvP talent - the chances are that a 7% chance to proc a stun from a Fire Blast is going to come up at a time which is useful are pretty damn small. A stun is always welcome in PvP but will more often than not be wasted in PvE.
Improved Flamestrike is not awesome, but it's the best of a bad lot of choices - more damage and a reduced cast time can be useful when dealing with packs of trash, and it might well count towards the various effects that key off damage-over-time effects on enemies. I'll take it, but again I feel like I'm using up talent points on stuff I'll rarely if ever use, just to reach what I really want to take - and that's not supposed to happen in these new trees.
Now I can finally have Living Bomb, hooray!
My options outside of the Fire tree are actually a little complex. Do I focus, for instance, in the Arcane tree, picking up Arcane Concentration for Clearcasting, Netherwind Presence for haste, and Arcane Potency for improved crits after Clearcasting procs? In this instance, I still have to decide between Frost's mana-reduction from Frost Channeling and increased crit chance from Piercing Ice. Or do I skip Arcane Potency and instead fill out both of the Frost options, leaving Arcane Concentration at 2 points?
Obviously final decisions won't be made until I'm level 85, and no-one knows what the trees will look like now. My final conclusion on the talents as they stand, however, is that Fire still has a few places where I'm required to choose talents I don't care about at all, and ironically the interesting choices lie in what I'll choose from the other trees. Hopefully Blizzard is still tweaking Fire, and I'll feel more positively about it in the future.
Awkward!
Most of the talents which remain are those which I expected to hang around. Master of Elements, Incineration, Ignite, Fire Power, Improved Scorch, Hot Streak, Molten Fury, Critical Mass . . . these are all recognisably similar to existing talents in the Fire tree, which fit with the schema of "something that changes the way you play" rather than "something which passively increases your damage" that Blizzard is openly aiming for. Then there are the four "new ability" talents, which are much the same as they always were - Blast Wave, Dragon's Breath, Combustion (albeit altered, and I'll come back to that), and Living Bomb.
The problem, as I see it, is that once I have taken all of the obvious PvE talents that I'd like to have as a raider, I'm left with cruft which is either obviously PvP-oriented, or involve making changes that probably won't show up at all in 90% of my gameplay. After taking Master of Elements, Incineration, and Ignite, I have to put a point in something I have almost no use for in order to advance.
Burning Soul is a PvP talent - it has its uses in PvE, but even with increased health pools in Cataclysm I doubt I'll want to stand around getting beat up enough to make investing a talent point in making my spells faster while it's happening. The priority will always be to get out of that situation. Likewise Blazing Speed and Molten Shields. Therefore all I have left is Improved Fire Blast, reducing the cooldown and increasing the range on a spell I almost never use.
The next tier is fine - Fire Power, Blast Wave, and Improved Scorch are all welcome. Well, technically, I don't have Blast Wave in my raiding spec at the moment, but it's a fun talent and it will presumably have its uses if Cataclysm succeeds in making crowd-control a more important part of gameplay. Knocking loose adds away from the healer and back towards the tank is always a good time.
In the next tier, Hot Streak, Combustion, and Pyromaniac are all interesting enough. Combustion's changes make it a very different spell, but I can see that it will be very useful for lining up multiple damage-over-time effects on a target, then popping Combustion and nailing it with a Fireball or even a Pyroblast made instant-cast by Hot Streak. Speaking of the latter, the change from "2 consecutive critical strikes" to "3 consecutive strikes within 6 seconds of each other" is fine with me.
But then in the next tier we get Dragon's Breath - again, welcome, and making a return to my spec where I skip it now - and Molten Fury, which I've found very useful for raiding . . . but there isn't enough in this tier to get me anywhere. So I have to go back and put another point in Improved Fire Blast.
Critical Mass is great, but all by itself in the second-to-last tier it's just frustrating. So what else have I got to go back and get? Impact is a PvP talent - the chances are that a 7% chance to proc a stun from a Fire Blast is going to come up at a time which is useful are pretty damn small. A stun is always welcome in PvP but will more often than not be wasted in PvE.
Improved Flamestrike is not awesome, but it's the best of a bad lot of choices - more damage and a reduced cast time can be useful when dealing with packs of trash, and it might well count towards the various effects that key off damage-over-time effects on enemies. I'll take it, but again I feel like I'm using up talent points on stuff I'll rarely if ever use, just to reach what I really want to take - and that's not supposed to happen in these new trees.
Now I can finally have Living Bomb, hooray!
My options outside of the Fire tree are actually a little complex. Do I focus, for instance, in the Arcane tree, picking up Arcane Concentration for Clearcasting, Netherwind Presence for haste, and Arcane Potency for improved crits after Clearcasting procs? In this instance, I still have to decide between Frost's mana-reduction from Frost Channeling and increased crit chance from Piercing Ice. Or do I skip Arcane Potency and instead fill out both of the Frost options, leaving Arcane Concentration at 2 points?
Obviously final decisions won't be made until I'm level 85, and no-one knows what the trees will look like now. My final conclusion on the talents as they stand, however, is that Fire still has a few places where I'm required to choose talents I don't care about at all, and ironically the interesting choices lie in what I'll choose from the other trees. Hopefully Blizzard is still tweaking Fire, and I'll feel more positively about it in the future.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
In Hindsight . . .
. . . my decision not to write a post about Blizzard's announcement that they would implement the use of Real ID on the official forums was a prescient choice that avoided wasted effort.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Cataclysmic Talent Changes
It's time to talk about the redesign of talent trees coming with Cataclysm.
Radical!
Frankly I think it looks like a great new design if they can get it working as intended. Obviously we don't have specific details on the new trees and class abilities - and I'll post again when we do, of course - but I think it's worth thinking about the intent here.
Talent trees have always undergone changes. Back in the classic era, they were a late-breaking design element in the first place, and at the level 60 endgame there were classes which only had one or two viable trees - especially any class which could heal.
Later in classic and during The Burning Crusade, we saw an effort to make each tree viable for at least one aspect of the game. It was accepted, for instance, that Frost was the tree mages used to be viable in PvP, and it wasn't considered important that they be competitive with Fire mages (and, later, Arcane mages) in PvE. Wrath of the Lich King evolved talents to the point where it was intended that each tree be useful in all areas of the game: dungeons, raids, arenas, battlegrounds, and solo questing. Blizzard never found the perfect balance - and they have admittedly basically abandoned fixing up our current talent trees in favour of working on making Cataclysm better - but each patch brought new tweaks that didn't presume that Subtlety should be outright weak in raids, even if they never made it competitive at the high end.
In principle, then, even this very different approach to the talent trees is not much of a departure from the general history of change and flux around talents over the last five years. If you accept Blizzard's stated goals as valid and worthwhile, and I do, then the new design promises to be very interesting and a lot of fun.
First and foremost, I love the idea that the players of new characters will be presented at level 10 with a choice to make between each talent tree, and the information necessary to make the right choice for how they want to play. If Cataclysm represents a concerted effort by Blizzard to bring new players into the game, and (on the evidence of all of the quality of life and newbie-friendly changes they've made recently) I think it does, this is probably one of the best they could have made. Why not tell new players - or players new to a class - what they're in for when they specialise their character? Let people know that Subtlety rogues rely more on stealth and tricks, Assassination rogues more on poisons, and Combat rogues on straight-up viciousness.
Second, and following on from that last, it's a great idea to give each specialisation a defining ability right off the bat at level 10. I'm anxious to see the full list, but what we already know suggests that Blizzard is thinking in the right direction. Divine Storm for Retribution paladins, Mind Flay for Shadow priests, Mortal Strike for Arms warriors . . . all iconic choices.
Some people have suggested that Pyroblast might end up as the iconic Fire mage ability, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were something more flashy like Dragon's Breath. I suspect that the new Fire tree will see Pyroblast remain a talented spell but immediately open up and lead into the talent for Hot Streak.
In passing, I note with interest the idea that Frost mages will have the Water Elemental as their iconic level 10 ability. It will be interesting to see if this becomes something of a mage's equivalent to Spirit Wolves for Enhancement shamans, or if it's going to be more like the death knight's Ghoul with an option to make it permanent, perhaps via a talent point like Unholy death knights rather than through a glyph as it now stands.
Obviously there will be more to say when we learn more. Hopefully the next week or two will see the announcement of the whole enchilada, as Ghostcrawler put it.
Radical!
Frankly I think it looks like a great new design if they can get it working as intended. Obviously we don't have specific details on the new trees and class abilities - and I'll post again when we do, of course - but I think it's worth thinking about the intent here.
Talent trees have always undergone changes. Back in the classic era, they were a late-breaking design element in the first place, and at the level 60 endgame there were classes which only had one or two viable trees - especially any class which could heal.
Later in classic and during The Burning Crusade, we saw an effort to make each tree viable for at least one aspect of the game. It was accepted, for instance, that Frost was the tree mages used to be viable in PvP, and it wasn't considered important that they be competitive with Fire mages (and, later, Arcane mages) in PvE. Wrath of the Lich King evolved talents to the point where it was intended that each tree be useful in all areas of the game: dungeons, raids, arenas, battlegrounds, and solo questing. Blizzard never found the perfect balance - and they have admittedly basically abandoned fixing up our current talent trees in favour of working on making Cataclysm better - but each patch brought new tweaks that didn't presume that Subtlety should be outright weak in raids, even if they never made it competitive at the high end.
In principle, then, even this very different approach to the talent trees is not much of a departure from the general history of change and flux around talents over the last five years. If you accept Blizzard's stated goals as valid and worthwhile, and I do, then the new design promises to be very interesting and a lot of fun.
First and foremost, I love the idea that the players of new characters will be presented at level 10 with a choice to make between each talent tree, and the information necessary to make the right choice for how they want to play. If Cataclysm represents a concerted effort by Blizzard to bring new players into the game, and (on the evidence of all of the quality of life and newbie-friendly changes they've made recently) I think it does, this is probably one of the best they could have made. Why not tell new players - or players new to a class - what they're in for when they specialise their character? Let people know that Subtlety rogues rely more on stealth and tricks, Assassination rogues more on poisons, and Combat rogues on straight-up viciousness.
Second, and following on from that last, it's a great idea to give each specialisation a defining ability right off the bat at level 10. I'm anxious to see the full list, but what we already know suggests that Blizzard is thinking in the right direction. Divine Storm for Retribution paladins, Mind Flay for Shadow priests, Mortal Strike for Arms warriors . . . all iconic choices.
Some people have suggested that Pyroblast might end up as the iconic Fire mage ability, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were something more flashy like Dragon's Breath. I suspect that the new Fire tree will see Pyroblast remain a talented spell but immediately open up and lead into the talent for Hot Streak.
In passing, I note with interest the idea that Frost mages will have the Water Elemental as their iconic level 10 ability. It will be interesting to see if this becomes something of a mage's equivalent to Spirit Wolves for Enhancement shamans, or if it's going to be more like the death knight's Ghoul with an option to make it permanent, perhaps via a talent point like Unholy death knights rather than through a glyph as it now stands.
Obviously there will be more to say when we learn more. Hopefully the next week or two will see the announcement of the whole enchilada, as Ghostcrawler put it.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Achievements
Instead of discussing the little information we have at this time about changes to the mage class or the Engineering profession in Cataclysm, I've decided to write about what I've been doing in the game recently: namely, earning achievements.
Diverting!
This past weekend, I finally completed the Loremaster achievement.
The real challenge was, of course, Loremaster of Kalimdor. I have to say that, despite some issues, the EveryQuest addon was really helpful in tracking down quests I still needed to do.
In the course of this achievement, I naturally earned the Seeker title for 3000 quests complete. That happened somewhere in Tanaris, I think; it's all a blur to me now.
The final leg of my journey was Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms. I actually started with a higher EK total than Kalimdor, which is natural for a human character who avoided night elf zones back in the original game, but I figured it'd be easier to complete the whole achievement if I finished off the harder part first. It also really, really helped that I was earning the achievement on a mage who is also an Engineer; being able to teleport all over the world, including to Everlook, was a blessing.
Ascanius's final quest turn-in to earn the achievement was for killing Araj the Summoner, which I dimly and possibly inaccurately recall was a Raid quest back in the day when I first encountered it while levelling in the Plaguelands. I could never find a group to help me back then, especially since I was playing in my original California-based guild; naturally, at level 80 in Icecrown Citadel raid gear it wasn't much of a challenge.
The reason I chose Araj the Summoner actually relates to another personal feeling about the game. As I mentioned, I levelled to 60 in the Plaguelands back in the pre-Burning Crusade days. This was around the time that the original Naxxramas preparation grind was patched into the game, and Light's Hope Chapel was suddenly surrounded by dozens of NPCs from the Argent Dawn and even the Scarlet Crusade. I became very interested in the Argent Dawn and its anti-undead mission; I remember discussing how cool it would be if you could actually join in-game factions in a meaningful way, leading to exclusive quest chains and the like.
That never quite happened, although in a way the Argent Tournament works by unlocking extra daily quests once you've achieved the Crusader title is kind of like a pale shadow of it. Still, I never lost my fondness for the Argent Dawn, so a couple of months ago I went through Stratholme over and over, farming reputation with them, until I finally earned the Argent Champion title (Ascanius and my paladin Concepción have been Crusaders for a long time).
The same day that I earned Loremaster, I looked over my achievements, and realised that I was one heroic Oculus run away from earning five achievements: The Oculus, Heroic: The Oculus, Northrend Dungeonmaster, Northrend Dungeon Hero, and Champion of the Frozen Wastes. Yes, it turned out that I had never even run The Oculus on normal mode, let alone heroic, despite earning all sorts of raid achievements.
I queued myself up, and surprisingly only had to wait about three minutes. As it turned out, I earned six achievements with that single run, because my group also got the Make It Count! speed-run achievement. I did have to endure a comment of "eBay IMO" from one of my group members when I announced at the beginning of the run that I'd never been to the dungeon, given my Icecrown Citadel-10-level gear score.
Finally, after a bout of sickness yesterday, I managed to finish another achievement on my orc shaman this morning:
Yes, Mithridates is now the proud owner and rider of a Venomhide Ravasaur. The twenty-day daily quest process to earn the mount took me about a month, since I kept missing days here and there, but in the end I'm happy to have done it - and, once I inevitably transfer Mithridates to the Alliance and turn him into a dwarf or draenei, he'll have a Wintersaber without having gone through that much more tedious grind. Of course, I expect Blizzard to replace the Wintersaber grind with something much more palatable in Cataclysm, but still.
Future achievements I'm planning to earn are mostly related to raiding. Last night our guild attempted Algalon the Observer for the second time; we didn't really come close to success, but I feel like we'll get it either next time or the time after that. Starcaller Ascanius has a nice ring to it.
Once he's done, we're planning to finish off Glory of the Ulduar Raider; Ascanius only needs I Love The Smell Of Saronite In The Morning and One Light In The Darkness to earn his lovely Rusted Proto-Drake. I actually think it's the best-looking of all the raid reward mounts in the game, so I'm delighted that my preferred raid size matches up with my preferred reward in this instance! Of course, not everyone has earned the same achievements as I have; unfortunately our guild leader wasn't there when we finally earned Firefighter, so getting him that will be painful.
Then, of course, there's the Lich King. I honestly have no sense of how long it will take us to finally knock him down; even once they patch in the final 30% Strength of Wrynn buff, I expect we have a lot of work to do to nail the execution. Still, again, Ascanius the Kingslayer has a nice ring to it too!
I guess I'm fortunate that I have plenty of things left to do in the game. I still haven't been to the Ruby Sanctum, since I didn't raid last week. I'm really looking forward to the Operation: Gnomeregan and Zalazane's Fall events, whenever they become active (and I hope to have Mithridates to level 80 by that time). Then, of course, there's also the actual pre-Cataclysm events, which promise to outdo the excellent zombie plague event that preceded Wrath of the Lich King. I have my alts to work on - Mithridates is at level 74, my gnome warlock Burnadotte is at level 42, and I have my dwarf hunter Sigehelm at level 74 waiting for my wife to feel like playing her human mage again. I even have a dumbass night elf death knight bank alt, Khasemekhwy, if I feel like fucking around with a death knight some more.
Next time I post, I hope to have more to say about the information coming from Cataclysm testers. Let's hope Blizzard pushes some updates for mages or Engineering in the next beta patch!
Diverting!
This past weekend, I finally completed the Loremaster achievement.
The real challenge was, of course, Loremaster of Kalimdor. I have to say that, despite some issues, the EveryQuest addon was really helpful in tracking down quests I still needed to do.
In the course of this achievement, I naturally earned the Seeker title for 3000 quests complete. That happened somewhere in Tanaris, I think; it's all a blur to me now.
The final leg of my journey was Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms. I actually started with a higher EK total than Kalimdor, which is natural for a human character who avoided night elf zones back in the original game, but I figured it'd be easier to complete the whole achievement if I finished off the harder part first. It also really, really helped that I was earning the achievement on a mage who is also an Engineer; being able to teleport all over the world, including to Everlook, was a blessing.
Ascanius's final quest turn-in to earn the achievement was for killing Araj the Summoner, which I dimly and possibly inaccurately recall was a Raid quest back in the day when I first encountered it while levelling in the Plaguelands. I could never find a group to help me back then, especially since I was playing in my original California-based guild; naturally, at level 80 in Icecrown Citadel raid gear it wasn't much of a challenge.
The reason I chose Araj the Summoner actually relates to another personal feeling about the game. As I mentioned, I levelled to 60 in the Plaguelands back in the pre-Burning Crusade days. This was around the time that the original Naxxramas preparation grind was patched into the game, and Light's Hope Chapel was suddenly surrounded by dozens of NPCs from the Argent Dawn and even the Scarlet Crusade. I became very interested in the Argent Dawn and its anti-undead mission; I remember discussing how cool it would be if you could actually join in-game factions in a meaningful way, leading to exclusive quest chains and the like.
That never quite happened, although in a way the Argent Tournament works by unlocking extra daily quests once you've achieved the Crusader title is kind of like a pale shadow of it. Still, I never lost my fondness for the Argent Dawn, so a couple of months ago I went through Stratholme over and over, farming reputation with them, until I finally earned the Argent Champion title (Ascanius and my paladin Concepción have been Crusaders for a long time).
The same day that I earned Loremaster, I looked over my achievements, and realised that I was one heroic Oculus run away from earning five achievements: The Oculus, Heroic: The Oculus, Northrend Dungeonmaster, Northrend Dungeon Hero, and Champion of the Frozen Wastes. Yes, it turned out that I had never even run The Oculus on normal mode, let alone heroic, despite earning all sorts of raid achievements.
I queued myself up, and surprisingly only had to wait about three minutes. As it turned out, I earned six achievements with that single run, because my group also got the Make It Count! speed-run achievement. I did have to endure a comment of "eBay IMO" from one of my group members when I announced at the beginning of the run that I'd never been to the dungeon, given my Icecrown Citadel-10-level gear score.
Finally, after a bout of sickness yesterday, I managed to finish another achievement on my orc shaman this morning:
Yes, Mithridates is now the proud owner and rider of a Venomhide Ravasaur. The twenty-day daily quest process to earn the mount took me about a month, since I kept missing days here and there, but in the end I'm happy to have done it - and, once I inevitably transfer Mithridates to the Alliance and turn him into a dwarf or draenei, he'll have a Wintersaber without having gone through that much more tedious grind. Of course, I expect Blizzard to replace the Wintersaber grind with something much more palatable in Cataclysm, but still.
Future achievements I'm planning to earn are mostly related to raiding. Last night our guild attempted Algalon the Observer for the second time; we didn't really come close to success, but I feel like we'll get it either next time or the time after that. Starcaller Ascanius has a nice ring to it.
Once he's done, we're planning to finish off Glory of the Ulduar Raider; Ascanius only needs I Love The Smell Of Saronite In The Morning and One Light In The Darkness to earn his lovely Rusted Proto-Drake. I actually think it's the best-looking of all the raid reward mounts in the game, so I'm delighted that my preferred raid size matches up with my preferred reward in this instance! Of course, not everyone has earned the same achievements as I have; unfortunately our guild leader wasn't there when we finally earned Firefighter, so getting him that will be painful.
Then, of course, there's the Lich King. I honestly have no sense of how long it will take us to finally knock him down; even once they patch in the final 30% Strength of Wrynn buff, I expect we have a lot of work to do to nail the execution. Still, again, Ascanius the Kingslayer has a nice ring to it too!
I guess I'm fortunate that I have plenty of things left to do in the game. I still haven't been to the Ruby Sanctum, since I didn't raid last week. I'm really looking forward to the Operation: Gnomeregan and Zalazane's Fall events, whenever they become active (and I hope to have Mithridates to level 80 by that time). Then, of course, there's also the actual pre-Cataclysm events, which promise to outdo the excellent zombie plague event that preceded Wrath of the Lich King. I have my alts to work on - Mithridates is at level 74, my gnome warlock Burnadotte is at level 42, and I have my dwarf hunter Sigehelm at level 74 waiting for my wife to feel like playing her human mage again. I even have a dumbass night elf death knight bank alt, Khasemekhwy, if I feel like fucking around with a death knight some more.
Next time I post, I hope to have more to say about the information coming from Cataclysm testers. Let's hope Blizzard pushes some updates for mages or Engineering in the next beta patch!
Monday, June 14, 2010
Cataclysm Changes
After a recent press tour, we have some new information about some of the features that we were told about at BlizzCon 2009.
Disappointing!
No, let's be fair. I am disappointed that the Path of the Titans mechanic is being taken out of the game, to be replaced by "medium glyphs" presumably created through the existing Incription profession. I was very interested in the "Titan cult" lore behind the Path of the Titans, and in the link with the Archaeology profession.
On the other hand, I can see why they took it out. Tying a mechanic which Blizzard themselves compared to a replacement for the 5 levels of questing content Cataclysm is "missing" compared to The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King to a secondary profession which everyone will be working on would be like tying it to fishing pools and daily quests: a veritable cock-block for 98% of the playerbase. Gating that content by making it rely upon the progressive release of raids and dungeons in each patch cycle creates further balance issues between patch cycles. It's a complicated prospect.
Still, I hope something remains of the "Titan cult" story in the game. Since they plan to include Archaeology and make it a lore-focused sideline endeavour, perhaps Blizzard can keep the Titan cults in the game and tie it to the minor items and whatnot that we're supposed to still be getting through Archaeology.
On the other hand . . .
. . . I'm pleased by the news that the guild talent system is being dropped. Even a small, coherent guild like has members with very different focuses from each other; some of us care about raid progression, some of us care about PvP achievements, some of us like creating a million alts (guilty), et cetera. Having to make choices about what the guild's talents would focus on would be difficult for us, and not make the game any more enjoyable.
I like the idea of earning "reputation" with your guild, and buying fun things like mounts that can display the guild crest and whatnot. I hope some of the mooted "talents" still make it into the game, though, like raid-wide resurrections or cheaper repair bills.
The other news is all pretty interesting but less relevant to me. I don't care about the new battlegrounds or battleground modes, for instance, nor does it matter that guilds can split one 25-player raid into three 10-player raids, since I'll never be participating in the former.
I'm looking forward to fighting Cho'gall at the end of the Bastion of Twilight raid, and Al'Akir at the end of the raid in Skywall - and in very minor news, the addition of a second "marketplace" area in Stormwind with a bank and auction house in the Dwarven District is good news.
Hopefully the general NDA on the Cataclysm testing period will be lifted before too long! I imagine I'll have more to say when it is.
Disappointing!
No, let's be fair. I am disappointed that the Path of the Titans mechanic is being taken out of the game, to be replaced by "medium glyphs" presumably created through the existing Incription profession. I was very interested in the "Titan cult" lore behind the Path of the Titans, and in the link with the Archaeology profession.
On the other hand, I can see why they took it out. Tying a mechanic which Blizzard themselves compared to a replacement for the 5 levels of questing content Cataclysm is "missing" compared to The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King to a secondary profession which everyone will be working on would be like tying it to fishing pools and daily quests: a veritable cock-block for 98% of the playerbase. Gating that content by making it rely upon the progressive release of raids and dungeons in each patch cycle creates further balance issues between patch cycles. It's a complicated prospect.
Still, I hope something remains of the "Titan cult" story in the game. Since they plan to include Archaeology and make it a lore-focused sideline endeavour, perhaps Blizzard can keep the Titan cults in the game and tie it to the minor items and whatnot that we're supposed to still be getting through Archaeology.
On the other hand . . .
. . . I'm pleased by the news that the guild talent system is being dropped. Even a small, coherent guild like
I like the idea of earning "reputation" with your guild, and buying fun things like mounts that can display the guild crest and whatnot. I hope some of the mooted "talents" still make it into the game, though, like raid-wide resurrections or cheaper repair bills.
The other news is all pretty interesting but less relevant to me. I don't care about the new battlegrounds or battleground modes, for instance, nor does it matter that guilds can split one 25-player raid into three 10-player raids, since I'll never be participating in the former.
I'm looking forward to fighting Cho'gall at the end of the Bastion of Twilight raid, and Al'Akir at the end of the raid in Skywall - and in very minor news, the addition of a second "marketplace" area in Stormwind with a bank and auction house in the Dwarven District is good news.
Hopefully the general NDA on the Cataclysm testing period will be lifted before too long! I imagine I'll have more to say when it is.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Beta Testing
Everyone and their surprisingly computer-savvy dog knows that the public testing phase for Cataclysm is starting in the near future.
Imminent!
I am very interested in news about and previews of the expansion. When MMO-Champion had leaked screenshots, models, and information from the pirated friends-and-family test client available, I spent a lot of time looking over it all. I'll be following all the news that comes out before the launch of the expansion, eager to hear about cool new places to see, things to do, and people to set on fire.
One thing I won't be doing, however, is playing the beta test myself.
Even I think it's a bit of a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, I enthusiastically seek out spoilers and previews, and I get excited to see screenshots of radical changes to the world I've been playing in for five years, or models of the new creatures and zones. On the other, I have exactly zero interest in actually seeing any of this stuff for myself in game before the official launch.
I think, for me, it's similar to the difference between a trailer for a film and the film itself. No matter how many trailers a film studio releases to get the prospective audience excited to see their movie, they never show you everything (even when it seems like they're trying to!), The experience of sitting down in the cinema, or in your living room with a DVD, and actually watching a film is very different from watching a trailer even a dozen times (and there are some movies, like The Dark Knight, where I probably watched the trailers three or four dozen times).
Likewise, as exciting as it is to see the new look for Orgrimmar or the ruined portions of Stormwind, it's just a teaser. It gets me excited to see it for myself. The difference, however, is that the beta test for Cataclysm, as close to final as it might be, is not going to be the "real deal".
I had some experience of this when my wife, Lexa, acquired an invite to the beta test for Wrath of the Lich King. Of course, I was excited to watch her explore Northrend, and even tried out a death knight for myself - but that quickly made the downside of beta testing evident. Not everything worked as it was intended to. When it did, every quest popped up a feedback form that seriously interfered with my experience of the game. I'm not the kind of person who gets "immersed" in my character even at the table for a face-to-face game of Dungeons & Dragons, much less in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, but I do like the experience of the game to be interrupted by "outside" things only when I choose.
The other reason I'm not interested in the beta test is that, frankly, I want what I do to count. When I create my worgen rogue, I'm not just doing it to experience the new starting zones and then put that character on a shelf or even delete him; I'm doing it because the new starting zones and race give me an opportunity to level a character of a class I haven't successfully played before. I don't want to do all that and then have the character wiped away at the end of the beta test! Likewise, I don't want to explore all the new zones with my mage and then have him reset to level 80.
To return to my film analogy, playing in a beta test is like watching a "screener" cut of a film before all of the visual effects have been completed. Yes, it's 90% of the final film, but I'll never feel like I've actually seen the film properly until I've seen the final version - but, having seen the "screener", my experience of watching the release version of the movie will never be as satisfying. So it is with Cataclysm; I want to know what to expect and will be following all the spoilers and previews as they come out, but for me that's about building anticipation and excitement for the day when I can play the finished version of the expansion for myself.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Raiding in Cataclysm
I'm sure that we've all seen the announcements from Blizzard regarding the changes to raid sizes, lockouts, and rewards in Cataclysm.
Different!
From my personal perspective, I welcome the changes wholeheartedly.
I'm not interested in 25-player raiding. I've done my fair share of it, during The Burning Crusade and even up through Ulduar in Wrath of the Lich King. My preference, though, is strongly for 10-player raiding; I prefer the camaraderie of a smaller group anyway, and since I don't really enjoy playing with strangers all that much - there's a reason I've barely taken advantage of the Dungeon Finder - the fact that my guild isn't large enough to run 25-player raids suits me very well.
In all honestly, although I said that I welcome the changes, they're not going to make very much of an impact on me at all. If the current system continued, I still wouldn't be raiding 25s, and therefore I wouldn't care that the people who did were getting better gear than me. The fact that Cataclysm raiding will give me the same rewards as people who raids 25s is a nice bonus - I'm not being "penalised" for my preference for 10-player raiding.
If Blizzard can get the difficulty tuned to the same level between 10- and 25-player raids, I think this is eminently reasonable. It's clearly part of their recent "play the way you want to play" philosophy.
The other side of the coin is the change from the current emblems/honour points/arena points system to the new system of PvE and PvP rewards.
I really like these changes too. Maintaining the same two-tiered system throughout every new . . . tier . . . of raiding and PvP content makes a lot of sense, and certainly avoids the problems of the current system where we have five different kinds of badges, three of which only still exist in the game for legacy reasons - they don't drop, and you can only acquire them in order to spend them by going to an NPC. True, it's not exactly hard, but what it is is unnecessary.
I also approve of the weekly cap on Valour and Conquest points. Anyone who has given it any thought at all will realise that when you can earn rewards for logging in every day and doing a random heroic, that becomes a strong pressure on players until they feel like they must do so in order to "keep up". Now, as I alluded to before, I'm not one of those players; you can count the number of random heroics I've done without taking off your shoes and socks. I do, however, have friends whose desire to be "competitive" means that they end up running dungeons every single day, even when they don't want to be doing that.
In Cataclysm, these friends of mine might end up just doing their normal weekly raiding, the weekly raid quest, and a couple of heroics - leaving them more time for other hobbies, or (more importantly from Blizzard's point of view) giving them an incentive to devote time in World of Warcraft to other forms of content, like rated battlegrounds. Many of my raiding friends are also interested in PvP, and I predict that my guild is probably going to have a regular rated battleground night just as we have a regular raiding night today.
In other news, I think my next post will probably talk about what I'm specifically up to in the game these days. Hopefully it won't be delayed too long.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Women in the World of Warcraft . . .
. . . are, in my experience, neither very rare nor particularly different in any way from male players.
Surprising!
At least, it's surprising if you buy into stereotypes. I'm not interested in performing a demographic analysis of World of Warcraft players, because that sort of thing has been done elsewhere by people who know what they're doing. Nor am I planning to say anything in particular about why I think that gender stereotypes about WoW players exist, because in all honesty I think they're tied into gender stereotypes about not just computer gaming but also hobbies in general.
Instead, I'm just going to write about my personal experiences with female WoW players.
As I mentioned in my first post, the reason I started playing the game was because of Lexa, my then-girlfriend who is my now-wife. Lexa had been exposed to video and computer games while growing up with her brother Brian, who was five years her senior, and ended up playing Dungeons & Dragons with her brother and his friend Ian. Later, Ian and his girlfriend Yoli were involved in the beta testing of World of Warcraft, and encouraged Lexa to try it out with them.
When the game launched, I ended up playing with them on the Doomhammer server in Ian's guild,
Later, when most of our members were at the level cap of 60, merged with a larger guild, . I'm not sure how accurate my recollections are about all of this, especially since I wasn't directly involved, but I'm fairly positive that didn't have any women among its officers, nor any prominent regular members.
Though Lexa and I have remained friends with Ian and Yoli, we haven't played WoW with them for some years now. On the Nagrand server, as I mentioned in my introductory post, we now play in is fairly natural; although the guild leader was a man, the first player made an officer was his girlfriend Sarah, and the couple were honestly more like co-leaders right from the start. Lexa was the second officer appointed, and in fact it wasn't until within the last year that the leadership of was "gender balanced" by the addition of Andrew to the officer list.
The third guild with which I have the most personal experience is no longer in quite the same shape as it once was, but it provides another set of examples of prominent female players and leaders. Towards the end of the Burning Crusade era, we formed a raiding alliance with as their old guild started to break up.
Just off the top of my head, I can name a half-dozen prominent players, raiders, officers, and leaders from - and, while it's true that men appeared to have been the majority population of that guild just as they are in ours, I think the fact that they had so many prominent female members speaks to a similarity of underlying culture that contributed to the longevity of our raiding alliance, just as the dissimilarity in underlying cultures caused the dissolution of 's merger with .
I'm not suggesting that the extent to which a guild includes women is the only marker of its value, or even the compatibility of its attitudes with my own and those of my friends with whom I play. It is true, though, that none of the people I like and respect in World of Warcraft would tolerate the stereotypical attitudes that I've seen reports of in other players' experiences: ideas like "female players only get attention by flirting with the men in the guild, not because they're skilled or valuable", "chicks can't raid", "female officers are useless", and so on.
I'm glad that I have the opportunity to play with so many skilled, experienced, knowledgeable, and fun women: Lexa, Sarah, Ingrid, Kate, Ellen, Jamie, Sophie, Angela, and many others. I wouldn't enjoy the game half as much without them.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Mage changes in Cataclysm
Here they are.
Revelatory!
Obviously, as a dedicated Fire mage, I'm really excited by everything that Bashiok announced.
Raiding
The first thing I want to do is look at the impact of these changes on the talents and spells I currently use. There are undoubtedly a lot of unannounced adjustments and changes which will render everything I'm about to say imprecise, but from the standpoint of a raiding Fire mage in the current game I do have a few comments.
Scorch - "Our goal is for Scorch to be part of the mage's rotation and a useful damage-dealing ability"
I think this is a very necessary idea. Currently, I don't use Scorch when someone who can provide the same debuff is in the party or raid; their application of that falls into their normal rotation, whereas Scorch is something I don't cast in groups except for the sake of the debuff.
If there is a good reason to throw Scorch into my normal raiding rotation, then obviously my rotation becomes that little bit more complex, which contrary to expectations is actually probably going to be more fun.
Pyromaniac - "Pyromaniac will grant Haste when three or more targets are getting damaged by the effects of your damage-over-time (DoT) fire spells."
Also good. The passive spell critical strike chance and mana regeneration of the current Pyromaniac talent shouldn't be an issue in Cataclysm; the first is rolled into our second passive Fire spec bonus, and the whole shape of mana pools is going to be changed as a consequence of the stat changes. I do feel like dealing with trash packs and adds leaves me few options besides throwing Living Bomb, so casting faster spells will help without necessarily ratcheting up my performance on bosses.
Burnout - "The Burnout talent will allow mages to cast spells using health when they run out of mana."
Definitely unexpected, but in a way it makes sense. I'll be interested to see how this is intended. Currently, Burnout is the single talent in the second-to-last tier in the Fire tree, increasing spell critical strike damage at the cost of extra mana when spells crit; if it stays there with no alternative, that possibly implies running out of mana and having to use health will become a part of PvE encounter design. If it's moved elsewhere, it could become a PvP talent with no real PvE design intention.
Ignite - "All direct-damage fire spells will add a damage-over-time (DoT) component when cast."
If you'd asked me before I saw Bashiok's post, I would have predicted this would be Fire mages' Mastery passive spec bonus in Cataclysm. I even said so to Lexa last night, as we were getting ready for bed and I was gleefully speculating about what today would bring.
It makes a lot of sense to me. Ignite is a talent no Fire mage skips, and it's iconic to the class. I'm delighted that I will literally set my enemies on fire with every fire spell I use.
New Spells
The new spells Bashiok announced are pretty exciting.
Flame Orb sounds like fun, and useful for trash packs as well as some add-heavy encounters; I'm sure it will have plenty of PvP utility I don't care about, too. One thought about PvP, however: can you send a Flame Orb into a rogue's Smoke Cloud, and will it hit a Camouflaged hunter?
Time Warp is a real surprise. I suppose I had imagined that eventually Blizzard would make a Bloodlust/Heroism-like effect available to another class, but I hadn't guessed that it would be mages. The funny thing is that Ascanius already has his Engineering rocket boots, so giving him yet another way to zoom around even when Exhaustion is up is just icing on the cake.
Wall of Fog seems pretty useful in PvP, but again it obviously has uses in PvE encounters with lots of adds and trash. I want to note here, though, that it's interesting how Cataclysm is (intentionally or not) taking some cues from Dungeons & Dragons in its mage design; wall-type spells like this have been in D&D forever, and the potential for Fire mages to get a big kaboom when Flame Orb stops moving is exactly like one of the variants of the tabletop Fireball spell I mentioned in my first post.
Everything Else
I'm surprised and pleased by the changes to Arcane Missiles. I used to enjoy throwing this spell in while levelling Ascanius back in the old days. The fact that it will now be based on a proc like a Hot Streak-enabled Pyroblast is pretty cool, and might even mean that I use it - at least while questing, if not while levelling.
I can't say too much about the changes to either Arcane or Frost specs, but I do think it's interesting that Arcane mages will have more potency at the start of a fight and less as it continues; likewise, that Frost mages will have incentives to use spells other than Frostbolt in a way that doesn't simply replicate the proc-based incentives of Arcane and Fire.
Well, hopefully we'll either learn something more about mages in the next few days, or Blizzard will throw in some information about other aspects of Cataclysm to tide us over while we wait for the final class preview, for paladins. Either way, I'll have more to say in the near future - about my current plans to level a worgen rogue, if nothing else.
Revelatory!
Obviously, as a dedicated Fire mage, I'm really excited by everything that Bashiok announced.
Raiding
The first thing I want to do is look at the impact of these changes on the talents and spells I currently use. There are undoubtedly a lot of unannounced adjustments and changes which will render everything I'm about to say imprecise, but from the standpoint of a raiding Fire mage in the current game I do have a few comments.
Scorch - "Our goal is for Scorch to be part of the mage's rotation and a useful damage-dealing ability"
I think this is a very necessary idea. Currently, I don't use Scorch when someone who can provide the same debuff is in the party or raid; their application of that falls into their normal rotation, whereas Scorch is something I don't cast in groups except for the sake of the debuff.
If there is a good reason to throw Scorch into my normal raiding rotation, then obviously my rotation becomes that little bit more complex, which contrary to expectations is actually probably going to be more fun.
Pyromaniac - "Pyromaniac will grant Haste when three or more targets are getting damaged by the effects of your damage-over-time (DoT) fire spells."
Also good. The passive spell critical strike chance and mana regeneration of the current Pyromaniac talent shouldn't be an issue in Cataclysm; the first is rolled into our second passive Fire spec bonus, and the whole shape of mana pools is going to be changed as a consequence of the stat changes. I do feel like dealing with trash packs and adds leaves me few options besides throwing Living Bomb, so casting faster spells will help without necessarily ratcheting up my performance on bosses.
Burnout - "The Burnout talent will allow mages to cast spells using health when they run out of mana."
Definitely unexpected, but in a way it makes sense. I'll be interested to see how this is intended. Currently, Burnout is the single talent in the second-to-last tier in the Fire tree, increasing spell critical strike damage at the cost of extra mana when spells crit; if it stays there with no alternative, that possibly implies running out of mana and having to use health will become a part of PvE encounter design. If it's moved elsewhere, it could become a PvP talent with no real PvE design intention.
Ignite - "All direct-damage fire spells will add a damage-over-time (DoT) component when cast."
If you'd asked me before I saw Bashiok's post, I would have predicted this would be Fire mages' Mastery passive spec bonus in Cataclysm. I even said so to Lexa last night, as we were getting ready for bed and I was gleefully speculating about what today would bring.
It makes a lot of sense to me. Ignite is a talent no Fire mage skips, and it's iconic to the class. I'm delighted that I will literally set my enemies on fire with every fire spell I use.
New Spells
The new spells Bashiok announced are pretty exciting.
Flame Orb sounds like fun, and useful for trash packs as well as some add-heavy encounters; I'm sure it will have plenty of PvP utility I don't care about, too. One thought about PvP, however: can you send a Flame Orb into a rogue's Smoke Cloud, and will it hit a Camouflaged hunter?
Time Warp is a real surprise. I suppose I had imagined that eventually Blizzard would make a Bloodlust/Heroism-like effect available to another class, but I hadn't guessed that it would be mages. The funny thing is that Ascanius already has his Engineering rocket boots, so giving him yet another way to zoom around even when Exhaustion is up is just icing on the cake.
Wall of Fog seems pretty useful in PvP, but again it obviously has uses in PvE encounters with lots of adds and trash. I want to note here, though, that it's interesting how Cataclysm is (intentionally or not) taking some cues from Dungeons & Dragons in its mage design; wall-type spells like this have been in D&D forever, and the potential for Fire mages to get a big kaboom when Flame Orb stops moving is exactly like one of the variants of the tabletop Fireball spell I mentioned in my first post.
Everything Else
I'm surprised and pleased by the changes to Arcane Missiles. I used to enjoy throwing this spell in while levelling Ascanius back in the old days. The fact that it will now be based on a proc like a Hot Streak-enabled Pyroblast is pretty cool, and might even mean that I use it - at least while questing, if not while levelling.
I can't say too much about the changes to either Arcane or Frost specs, but I do think it's interesting that Arcane mages will have more potency at the start of a fight and less as it continues; likewise, that Frost mages will have incentives to use spells other than Frostbolt in a way that doesn't simply replicate the proc-based incentives of Arcane and Fire.
Well, hopefully we'll either learn something more about mages in the next few days, or Blizzard will throw in some information about other aspects of Cataclysm to tide us over while we wait for the final class preview, for paladins. Either way, I'll have more to say in the near future - about my current plans to level a worgen rogue, if nothing else.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Introduction
My name is Chris, and I'm a Fire mage.
Confessional!
I've been a Fire mage since January 9, 2005, when I logged into World of Warcraft for the first time. Ascanius, level 1 human mage, popped into existence in Northshire Valley, on the Doomhammer server, and unwittingly became my anchor in the world of Azeroth for the next five years and counting.
I started playing because of a girl. My wife Lexa, who back then had only earned the title "Girlfriend", was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, while I was here in Sydney. Her friend Ian had encouraged her to try the game during the open beta period, and had set up a guild called
Ian, Lexa, and a couple of other people had already been playing since the game launched in November 2004, and even back then a two-month delay meant I was well behind them. Lexa and I discussed what kind of characters were available in the game, and I settled on the idea of playing a mage.
I wonder to this day how many people ended up quitting the game, or sticking with it, based solely on the issue of how well their expectations for their first character lined up with the reality of the game. I came to World of Warcraft from a background in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, and chose to play a mage because of my experiences with wizards and other spellcasters in those pen-and-paper games.
In fact, Lexa still likes to mock me for the way I ran screaming (metaphorically, anyway) from the wolves and kobolds a level 1 human is asked to kill in Northshire Valley, convinced that a mage couldn't possibly survive melee combat - all because D&D wizards start with a tiny number of hit points and can easily be dispatched by a single blow.
That wasn't the only difference from D&D, of course! I soon learned that WoW's single-target Fireball spells are quite distinct from the area-of-effect explosions in D&D, and as my experience with the game grew I learned about the distinctive features of the world of Azeroth - the primal culture of the orcs, the anachronistic technology of gnomes and goblins, and so on.
I haven't played the game continuously since that day back in 2005, but I certainly have been playing for most of that time. These days, Ascanius has moved to the Oceanic server of Nagrand, a member of the
- Catilina, a human Arms warrior
- Concepción, a human Retribution paladin
- Fulvia, a draenei Shadow priest
To the latter end, one of my biggest enthusiasms in the game is the Engineering profession. Ascanius is the proud possessor of a Turbo-Charged Flying Machine (the reason I took up the profession during The Burning Crusade) and a Mekgineer's Chopper (earning the gold for which gave me a serious tolerance for daily quests). I was disappointed to learn that the two-seater X-53 Touring Rocket wouldn't be constructable by engineers, but at least Lexa and I can acquire one for Ascanius through the Recruit-A-Friend program.
So what is the point of this blog?
I'm going to write about a few things:
- First, the experience of playing a Fire mage in Cataclysm. It's not a coincidence that I'm establishing this blog the day before we expect to hear from Blizzard about the changes to my class in the new expansion.
- Second, the general experience of the changes and new zones in Azeroth from the point of view of someone who enjoys questing, exploring, and levelling. This includes the new dungeons and raids, and I will be playing a worgen rogue to experience the changes in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.
- Third, professions - especially Engineering, of course, but between my various characters I have an interest in Enchanting, Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing, Tailoring, and Leatherworking.
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