World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 134 of 139

Halloween 2013

October 19, 2013 by Belghast

Spooky Pasta!

One of the things I love in the various MMOs I play or have played… are the varried Holiday events. Some of them make an extreme effort to fit them into the lore of their world, and others just cut and paste a real world tradition onto their land. Both have their merits and both are enjoyable so long as they don’t involve too much grinding. Each game seems to pick and choose holidays, but there are two that every game seems to have… Christmas and of course Halloween.

Halloween time is generally my favorite holiday because the traditions itself usually involve killing lots of dark denizens of the night. Additionally the playing dress up theme usually means some cool weapon and armor skins that you can use throughout the rest of the year. Currently we are in the run up to Halloween itself, and as a result pretty much every MMO has some form of event going on marking the holiday. Going to take a few minutes this morning to talk about some of the cooler ones.

Nights of the Dead

This event runs in Everquest 2 from 10/15 through 11/11 and is probably the grand daddy of all Halloween events. Each year they keep adding new content, but still leaving all of the old content in place. Zam has a really great guide to the various quests and events. If you are one of the new to EQ2 folks who just partook of the free level 85 event… I highly suggest checking it out. However even with a brand new account you can still participate in most of the fun. My personal favorite event is the hedge maze that drops lots of nifty cosmetic gear.

Blood and Madness

Guild Wars 2 supposedly has a really amazing event called Blood and Madness that kicked off on October 15th that involved a series of limited time events (one day only) finally culminating in a big event that only exists Halloween night. Dulfy has a pretty comprehensive guild to the events, but for the most part if you are not already doing this series you have missed out this year. This has been my key bitch about Guild Wars 2 to date… I hate the concept of short run limited time events. The amount of busy work needed really only allows someone who ONLY plays GW2 to keep up… and because of this I just can’t be bothered to attempt it. I would love to see this as a long term event that ran the entire length of the holiday, but until then it will be out of my reach.

Autumn Harvest

Rift has an event called Autumn Harvest that starts on October 17th and runs through Halloween and potentially a little bit past. They have chosen to focus on the harvest aspect of the holiday and as such have sent you to a special version of the Realm of the Fae where you help Atrophinius and his minions bring in the amber sap harvest. There are a ton of cool things you can get, including a phantom version of several popular mounts. The coolest feature of the event however is that you can get these short time use potions that make tons of artifacts show up on the ground in the realm of the fae. This is a huge catch up on collections event. This year around there are a ton of new items to be gotten and you can check out this preview guide on Rift Junkies.

Hallow’s End

Hallow’s End is an event that occurs in World of Warcraft from October 18th through November 1st. There are tons of nifty things going on like trick or treating, but the meat and potatoes of the event is the Scarlet Monastery Headless Horseman instance. I have a love/hate relationship with this holiday. Every year it has been available (and that I have been playing wow) I have participated in the event… all for a shot at the extremely awesome flying headless horseman mount. Every single year I have come up empty handed. When a game company places an item in an event, like a mount… that is usable every day… and makes it a super rare random drop… I want to stab them.

All Saints’ Wake

Currently there is an event going on over in FFXIV that is completely new to me. All Saints’ Wake started a little early, but was intended to run from October 18th through November 1st. All of the time zones get a little discombobulated in the translation. While I am not partaken in the event yet, so far the other one I have seen has been what I would call “Holiday-Lite” in that there is a FATE going on that awards some sort of currency that you then use to purchase things off a vendor. Since the vanity gear system is not in place yet, this makes the things you can acquire super limited, but I plan on gathering them up just in case. One of the most humorous observations from last night is that apparently the Pumpkin helms… are repaired by Cullinarians.

The Rundown

That is the rundown of the big ones I know of that are going on, but like I said in the first part of the post… this is the one holiday that pretty much EVERY MMO celebrates. I can even remember in Hellgate: London there being a Halloween event of sorts that took its form in a Guy Fawkes day celebration… that happened to have a lot of Halloween themed stuff. I would be curious to hear about any events that are your favorite that I missed.

Fighting Nostalgia

October 11, 2013 by Belghast

Familiar Itch

Over the last few days I have been feeling immensely nostalgic about World of Warcraft. This tends to happen to me as we near Blizzcon time, and I start to see twitter a buzz with people excited to be attending the convention. Some of my tweeps have even resorted to Blizzcon countdown clocks, and yesterday they finally reached the 20 somethings in days left til the conference. With this wave of nostalgia comes the all too familiar desire to re-up my account and play some of it. It would not have been the first time I did so on a whim, and is more than likely not going to be the last.

However I am wise to this trickery, or at least have a contingency plan in place. I have come to the realization that I like the idea of playing WoW a lot more than actually playing it. As a result I keep a trial account at the ready for when of these urges strikes, and last night I patched up my client once more. I figure if I make it through playing the trial account with the desire to play more WoW… then it is probably time to re-up. I figure this is a decent litmus test to see whether or not the desire to play is real before I spent $15.

Fighting Nostalgia

As a result I rolled a brand new Worgen Warrior on my trial account and proceeded to play. Immediately the buzz of the nostalgia started to wane. I had honestly forgotten just how spammy playing a low level warrior was, and by example EVERY World of Warcraft melee character. The unpredictable nature of rage and to a lesser extent energy left me with a decision. I either spent the entire time fighting watching my bars to optimize cooldowns… or I could just spam whatever basic attack I wanted to ALWAYS go off. Being a relatively impatient player… I always chose the spam route.

After a few minutes of spamming Heroic Strike… I remembered just how much my fingers used to ache after a dungeon run, always banging on the key I wanted to fire next because I could not be bothered to actually watch my bars. Basically my master plan of fighting the wave of nostalgia worked, all too well. I made it to about level 5 on my baby Worgen, to the point at which the forsaken show up… at which point I was supremely bored and logged out of the game. Having a taste of the gameplay reminded me that it really was not as fun as my mind had built it up to be.

Project Phoenix

Sometimes a game is much more enjoyable to remember fondly, than to actually play it. Right now there is a kickstarter going on called Project Phoenix. The goal of it is to essentially recreate the magic that was City of Heroes/City of Villains. I had so much fun playing these games, and regularly descend into bouts of nostalgia swapping with another friend of mine on mumble. The problem is… I think CoH is another game that is much more enjoyable to talk about fondly than to actually play it. I remember so much about the game, but every time I tried playing it again during its later free to play years the whole experience just felt lacking.

I wish this project the best of luck, but super hero games for me seem like they were a phase of a bygone era. I have tried Champions Online and DC Universe Online and in both cases… I was carried into them on the nostalgia of City of Heroes but found both gaming experiences somehow unable to live up to my memories and as a result my expectations. I think World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are both games for me like the original Everquest… extremely enjoyable to sit around and talk about the “good old days” but not really fun for me to play any longer.

Thing is… I think that is perfectly okay. I think nostalgia works that way, it makes us romanticize things that would now be trivial. For example I can remember being amazed at just how huge the sandbox that my father made for me was, and how I spent hours playing in it with my Tonka trucks. However were I to evaluate it from adult eyes, I would likely find it tiny and boring… and be ready to stop in a few minutes. Often times things we remember so fondly end up tarnished if we go back and re-experience them. This has been the case for Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft and a long list of other games that I have moved on past… but tried to rekindle that flame.

Trade Cartels

September 14, 2013 by Belghast

Forgive me father for I have sinned… it is roughly 8 pm before I am sitting down to write today’s blog post. In my defense I have been out running around all day. Firstly to my hometown to go see my grandmother, and then later gallivanting all around the countryside in search of cheap Legos. But that is a tale for another day… namely tomorrow. Today I have a topic I have been wanting to write about since yesterday afternoon. I just have failed miserably at being near a computer today to be able to do so.

Trade Cartels

Yesterday a number of us got into a rather length discussion over twitter relating to my loot commentary, or on the lack thereof in Final Fantasy XIV. Shortly into the back and forth I got this comment from @DesslynStorm. Essentially to paragraph, they believe that all loot should come from crafters. I guess in an idyllic situation this would probably be an alright thing. The problem is that I have seen far too many games where a specific branch of crafters got a monopoly on a specific item and abused the hell out of it.

I love crafting systems and by extension generally love crafters, but in every game I have played where specific items were ONLY obtained through crafters, the Trade Cartel has reared its ugly head. Essentially this is when a group of crafters collude to price fix a specific item so that everyone can turn a specific profit on it. Without a doubt the most heinous of these has generally been the bag makers in each game I have played.

The Threats

On Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft, my warrior was a bit of an oddball. He was an enchanter and tailor, namely so that I could have someone to make bags. Bag space is one of those things that I put a premium on in whatever game I happen to be playing, and will generally go to whatever lengths it takes to make sure my characters have a decent amount of them. I occasionally made a bag and threw it up on the auction house undercutting the competition by a large margin. It was at this point I was approached by my first trade cartel.

A seemingly reasonable mage mentioned that I really should price my bags higher. I told him that I was making a profit and I wanted them to move quickly, so I was fine with where they were priced. This is the point at which the threats started pouring in… another crafter joined sending me tells. Going so far as claiming that they would ruin me on the server. Something that I laughed off because at this point I had been the leader of one of the largest guilds on the server for roughly three years. I was in a pretty active raid and knew the guild leaders of most of the other larger guilds personally.

The Retaliation

But the I am pretty sure that had it been real life, the next step would have been them trying to send someone over to my house to break my knee caps. They proceeded to start buying the bags and relisting them whenever i posted a new one. So at this point I made it my life’s work for the next few days to flood the market with cheap bags. If I was online I was farming humanoids for cloth and turning around and dumping them on the market at cost. No one puts babby in a corner! For awhile they were ravenously snapping them up, but at some point they lost their fervor and simply waited for me to get bored.

I imagine that I had run them out of their current gold, and probably made a handful of enemies for life. But I have encountered to a lesser extent these price fixing schemes in several other MMOs. Each time my instinct is to break the regime because I have seen what it is like when someone has fixed the market. Early on in the life of Argent Dawn, there was a single player that had almost all of the rare enchants. He was part of a big raid guild on my server, and as a result he had a few of the raid drop only patterns that no one else seemed to have. Additionally he could do crusader in a time when it was not commonly known where that dropped.

Since he had 100% of the market on these enchants, he charged truly ridiculous prices. When I finally figured out where Crusader dropped… I decided to break up his monopoly, but standing in Ironforge (the only auction zone at the time) and offering free crusader enchants so long as mats were provided. Again came the threats, because I was cutting into his profit margins. I am sure I had nothing to do with it, but as more people started offering free enchants with mats, he ultimately quit the server and went elsewhere. Functionally I just really dislike when someone tries to profit unfairly on others.

Exclusivity is Bad

If you had a game where the only source of gear were through the crafters, the average player would end up having to pay far more than they do currently to outfit themselves. I realize that Desslyn’s experience comes mostly from Star Wars Galaxies… and I feel that game is vastly different from the modern MMO in innumerable ways. Additionally I feel like the average player within that community had a level of altruism that we will likely never see again. So I feel like what worked in SWG will never likely work again in another game.

An example in Everquest 2, crafters can create what is arguably the best available gear in many occasions, the Master-crafted sets that occur every 10 levels. These require some rare materials, but not so rare that they are unattainable. Since only crafters are the source of them, they have total control over the market for them. On the brokerage system, almost all gear is extremely reasonably priced, however a level 10 set of Mastercrafted gear will go for several hundred times the amount of gold a level 10 character would ever have to spend without buying currency. Crafters have priced the privilege of having a good matched set of gear out of the hands of most players.

Multiple Paths

My personal stance is that all games should have multiple paths to acquire your gear. I feel like different kinds of players want to play the game in fundamentally different ways. Players who deeply care about crafting for the sake of crafting…. will always do it regardless if they can profiteer from it. I feel like there should be viable options for end game gear through Crafting, Quests, Exploration, PVP, Dungeons and Raiding. Any given player may like a mix of those things, and giving multiple options to achieve their goals in a game, allows each person to tailor their journey to suit their own tastes.

I have always thought it would be great, if you could really gain the best possible gear… by doing a series of extremely long and arduous epic quests. By the same token I think it would be cool if crafters could complete a series of trials to synthesize rare materials and with that craft top end gear as well. I see it as a risk vs time type equation. Dungeon and Raid loot might be instance, but it requires a large group and repeated running to get everything you want. Whereas with quests and crafting, it is more a cast of slow and steady wins the race… the end goal is achievable but likely takes a considerably longer amount of time.

Fallacy of Profit

I feel like the hidden root of the whole concept that all good gear should come from crafters, is that crafters by default should be able to make large amounts of profit from their trade. This is just a foreign concept to me. I am one of those people that crafts because I enjoy the relaxation sometimes of crafting. I am not a rabid crafter, but when I do craft I tend to do it because I like outfitting my friends in gear. In Rift I regularly farm up cloth to set new players and new characters up with a full set of 24 slot bags to begin their journey. I enjoy making things for people, and making them happy in the process.

So to view crafting from the point of a cold profit based calculus just makes no sense to me. Sure I feel like crafters should be able to get their money out of the items they make and maybe make a meager profit… but I feel if you go into a trade skill with the purpose of making money you are likely crafting for the wrong reasons. Crafting and the self reliance that it gives you should ultimately be its own reward without any need to tie it to monetary gain. So I guess I question the notion that a certain class of crafter has that they should automatically be able to get rich quick through their crafting endeavors.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though I rattled on more than enough. Additionally I am tired and sore from the days excursion. Right now I want to relax on the sofa and boot up Final Fantasy. One of my good friends managed to get onto Cactuar so I want to get him invited to the guild. Tomorrow hopefully will be a much more relaxing day. I hope all of you had a great day and that the weekend has turned out to be awesome.

Once upon a Cleric

September 5, 2013 by Belghast

Morning all you people out in internet land. For the second day in a row I feel absolutely miserable. I think overall it is just a massive overload of allergies, but it has managed to go and piss off my asthma. As a result I ended up at home about halfway through the day yesterday and have been juggling breathing treatments ever since. I have yet to decide if I am going to attempt going in today, but right now it doesn’t seem likely. I feel worse than I have felt in a long time.

Once upon a Cleric

Today’s post has been spurred on by a comment on twitter to yesterdays post. Essentially a friend of mine said that they would make a healer out of me yet. To which I replied… that few would believe but I actually started out my MMO gaming “career” as a healer. The friend of course could not believe that… so I figured today I would regale you all with the tale of how I ended up being so damned tank centric. We are going to have to step into the way back machine and go backwards through the years quite a bit to around 1982.

My mother was a high school teacher, and as a result I spent large amounts of time milling around the high school after hours as she finished up with her lessons. There was a traditional at the end of school each year… that essentially anything left in the lockers by the end of the day was thrown away. As a result the janitorial staff and by proxy us teacher kids got to rummage through whatever was left in the lockers. Stuffed in the bottom of the locker I found the thing that would begin my descent into madness… an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook.

From that point onwards I was obsessed with all things D&D and roleplaying, and I was especially hung up on the cleric class. I loved the concept of a battle priest, fighting undead and wielding both weapon and holy spells. This obsession was only further cemented when I read the novel “Pools of Radiance” and was introduced to the Tarl the Cleric of Tyr. I loved the fact that he was just as good with a weapon as it was with turning undead. I thought it was a cool concept and the idea was only furthered with the awesome images of battle priests in the Warhammer games.

Tiny Elvis

Scan forward a decade and in 2000 I got hooked on Everquest by a friend of mine. He introduced me to the whole mythos by having me play his second character on a Vox raid. Pretty much the most epic way possible to get introduced into MMOs. I pretty much went out the next day and picked up Everquest, the Kunark expansion and the newly released Scars of Velious. When it came time to choose a class, there really was no option but a Dwarven Cleric of Brell. I was completely enamored with the concept of battle priest fighting undead. That concept lasted pretty well into my late 30s… when I began to realize that my life as a cleric was that of a heal bot.

The end game reality for a cleric was the Complete Heal rotation. For those of you who are not familiar with this concept… essentially each cleric establishes an order and it is agreed upon before the fight. Each of us then set up a macro that shouted “Casting CH – Ready Cleric #X” whereas the X was replaced by the correct priest in sequence. When that cleric saw their number scroll by they were to count to 12 and then press their own macro. Then return to a watching for their number to scroll by state. The end result is that the tank received a complete heal every 3 seconds… instead of the normal 12 second cast time of the spell.

I have to say this made combat in the dungeons and raids and extremely boring and binary system. Watch chat for your number, cast your heal, return to not paying attention until your cool down was up. It was not until I dabbled with EQ1 a bit recently that I realized just how much downtime that game had. You were still chained to the screen of sorts, but I can remember healers knitting, reading books, all just waiting on their complete heal rotation. The thing that soured me on the experience however was not having any control over my own destiny. I essentially followed someone else into a dungeon and was there until they determined it time to leave. This experience has forever soured me towards healing in general.

The Celt

The game we played after we fell out of love with EQ and the hours spent standing around doing nothing… was Dark Age of Camelot. The above image is the very first incarnation of Belghast Sternblade. The Celt Champion was a really amazing class, in that it had ranged spells to pull with, loads of debuffs and was equally proficient in the tank, off-tank and dps roles depending upon how it was specced. Most of the time I tended to favor two handed weapons and served in a dps and offtank in a pinch role for the various excursions. My friend juggled the roles of both main tank and main healer by dual boxing a Dwarven Warrior and a Celt Bard together.

This is the point at which I should note that the bulk of my time playing DAoC was spent on Gaheris… the carebear server… largely because it gave us three whole realms worth of zones and dungeons to explore instead of the rather claustrophobic single realm setup. Adding to this trio we had a Lurikeen enchanter that served as our primary dps. It was amazing the amount of things we could pull off with the small group we had. There were many times I had to offtank a mob just to spread out the damage enough to get through the fights.

When I started doing Keep and Dragon raids… I got drafted into the full tank role a few times and really enjoyed it. This is essentially the game in which I got my first tastes of tanking. I liked the taste… and ultimately ended up doing quite a bit more with our alliance. As we moved on to other games I started favoring the hybrid/offtank role because it gave me soloing versatility and a key group dynamic that I could fill. When we played City of Heroes, I was a blades/regen scrapper which in many ways was one of the more tanky classes in the game. Once again a friend played the full bore earth tank, and I alternated between dps and off tanking as needed.

Bait and Switch

This is Exeter, a tankadin… and my intended main when World of Warcraft released. In beta the Paladin had been the ultimate synthesis of Battle Priest and Tank. I had so much fun running around with my friend who was playing a nuking priest at the time. My attacks would debuff the target against holy damage, and he would come in for the kill and demolish it. It was like the perfect symbiotic match… then Blizzard completely destroyed it at the 11th hour right before release by introducing the “Seal” system to replace the “Strike” system. Over night Paladin went from being the most amazing thing I had played so far… to feeling absolutely awful and confused.

With release… I stuck to my guns and tried to make a Paladin work… and so long as I had friends to level with I was doing awesome. Then tragedy struck… we had a death in the family, and I simply was not around for a few weeks. When I came back all of my friends had long since leveled past me, and I found trying to solo on the paladin a thoroughly frustrating mess. Since the one thing above all else Hunters were renown for was their soloing ability… I started playing Lodin. I was able to catch up to my friends with surprising speed and I played a hunter just effective enough to not be a horrible strain on my party.

Hunter Happened

I never really intended on playing Lodin as a main character… I just intended on using him as something to catch up to my friends… then later leveling Exeter on my own and returning to the intended role of Tankadin. However one thing lead to another… and a good friend of mine ended up starting a raid, that needed hunters… and before I really realized what I was committing to, I was a half GiantStalker decked out raiding hunter. The funniest and most ironic part is… that I ended up on the one class that had a cast rotation similar to the complete heal. Once we entered Molten Core I got indoctrinated into the Tranquilize rotation. Just like complete heal… hunters would set an order and we would then “tranq” the next enrage effect.

I had a lot of good times raiding with the Late Night Raiders, and I met a ton of people that have become permanent fixtures in my gaming life… but quite honestly I was never a good hunter. I could pass as one, and I could sit around 3rd in damage when compared to our other hunters if I really pushed it… but I just did not care about the class the same way the others did. My instinct was always to get up in the face of the mob and beat on it with something… and I hated pet management above all things. I managed to get Exeter to max level… but it ended up feeling just horrible. At that point Paladins tanked with Seal of Rage… which was a glorious mess that never really worked at all for holding aggro.

Priest Enabler

Around about this time a good friend of mine mentioned that she would like to level a healing priest, but didn’t really want to go through the grind that was leveling a healing priest. I had been kicking around the notion of leveling a tank, but again leveling as a tank was a painful experience. So as a result we decided to level my human warrior Belghast and her dwarven priest Finni together to make the process easier. This was probably a bad thing… because it was the first moment that I realized how amazing priests are. They enable me to make really bad decisions… like pulling ALL THE THINGS in an area and then living to tell the tale.

I loved this new play style of making everything hate me… then getting bailed out of my bad lifestyle choices by someone else. The two characters shot up extremely quickly, and before I knew it I was tanking the unofficial raid nights for Late Night Raiders. The problem is… the more I got into tanking… the more I hated playing Lodin. The only problem… Lodin was geared… and there was no way to get as geared as the LNR tanks. So I bided my time, continued getting tanking experience and “apprenticed” of sorts under the various really good warriors that we had in our raid.

One of the best things about an expansion… is it is a complete gear reset. As a result I used the Burning Crusade expansion to be my springboard to ditch the hunter and move forward as a “real” tank. From that point onwards I have essentially played nothing but tanks as main characters. Be it my Warrior in Rift, or my Marauder/Warrior in Final Fantasy… I always gravitate towards tanking. It took some time… but I finally found that one role that really suits me. Which I guess in a way is why I am so passionate about tanks being a thing going forward. It is a role I feel that I play fairly well.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… the tale of how I went from being the most healery of healers to playing absolutely nothing but tanks. I figured it was a tale worth telling, especially since there are folks that still have trouble thinking of me as ever playing anything but a tank. The ironic thing is… there are a group of folks I raided with at the time that still think of me as Lodin the Hunter. I was a really horrible hunter. At this point… I am going to go crash on the sofa as I feel absolutely terrible. I sincerely hope you are having a much better day than mine.