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.

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.