Tales of the Aggronaut

Week In Gaming 12/5/2015

December 6, 2015 by Belghast

Sunday Madness

Today my posts and the AggroChat podcast are coming out a little late, because reasons. My wife has this thing at church this morning, and stuff was not going very much as planned. So instead of wrapping up the podcast when I got up, I went into the mode of attempting to support my wife as she flailed around the house trying to get everything ready. I don’t really do the religion thing, but it is important to my wife so I’ve always attempted to support her in whatever way she needs. Normally speaking I would have been further along in the podcast creation process by the time I slept last night, but instead I decided to have a knock down drag out fight with Amazon. There is an item that starting last Tuesday, has been updating daily to tell me it would be there by 8pm the next day. This has drug on for several days… and the FedEx tracking that I finally received shows that there is no way it is going to be here until sometime at the end of next week. Needless to say I was more than a little perturbed, and ended up trying to get to the bottom of it.

Where I feel bad however is that I know I took out some of my frustrations on the agents that were working the case. I realize why companies hide their chat functionality, but overall it is a horrible practice, that only leads customers to be pissed as hell by the time they FINALLY get a hold of a person to talk to about their issues. I know I probably came off as a mad man, but seriously… I’ve been an Amazon customer since around 2000, and been a prime member for I think as long as the program has existed. I keep that active so that I can have items here in two days… and there have been a lot of times in the past where they actually have it here next day. Since the swap to using the US Postal Service however, I have had several delayed orders… and this one just seems to be another in that line of problems. The worst part about it is.. that after spending over an hour last night trying to get someone to tell me where the ball was dropped… no one seemed to have any answers. I did however get two months of prime added to my account apparently to appease me, so I guess that makes up for some of the frustration. I have no doubt that the item will arrive and be just fine… but man this situation has been annoying. It is nothing nearly as bad as Tam and Amazon quite literally losing his shipment.

The Week of Warcraft

For the most part this was in fact the Week of Warcraft as I am attempting to play both characters on Argent Dawn Alliance side… and the joined The Scryers server Horde side. This means there are two different communities that I am trying to be an active part of, and as a result pretty much everything else I am doing has fallen by the wayside. Part of my Sunday ritual is to go downstairs and watch a sequence of television shows until ultimately it is time for bed. However during this sequence I got pulled into the Horde side guild raid with my friends in the awesomely named Facepull. Between some gear upgrades from drops and some crafted gear by the amazing Brerhoof it took me to around the 670 range. Now after some LFR this week I am sitting at 679 so a stones throw away from 680. I have two parts left to do of LFR and my hope is at some point before this evening I can actually get them knocked out and will hopefully see some more upgrades. My lowest piece on the Paladin is his necklace which is still the level 640 boosted green gear. In theory if I get lucky I could get a baleful item to drop while I am doing dailies… which I also need to do at some point. I have everything enchanted and gemmed… at least with cheap enchants and gems so my performance as a whole should be better tonight… that is if they still want me to come and pewpewpew things.

Then Wednesday night I was invited to raid with some twitter folk that I have known for ages. There I brought my Alliance Warrior Belghast, and similarly have made some jumps in gearing as the week went out. I started the week at 680 and have bumped it a little bit up to 684. This is still a long ways off from the 705-710 range that I need to be in order to really function in Heroic for the Friendship Moose fun, but whatever I am enjoying the process. In both cases I was mostly a fly on the wall as the raid went about their business, but I could see myself enjoying both situations greatly. It is my hope that in both scenarios are am invited back for future weeks, and in spite of my crummy gear I still managed to end up I think 3rd in total damage done for the raid. My burst dps is still on the weak range, but I am throwing out a lot of total damage which still is nice. Gladiator is such a fun spec that I am really going to hate losing once the expansion ships. I guess there is hope at a later date that they might revive the spec, but I seriously imagine it was just too hard to balance when it essentially took all of the same gear that tanks did… which means that my overall survival is among the highest of the dps classes. In any case I am having fun… and that is what really matters right?

Reaching Diamond City

The original plan for this week was to record our final Fallout 4 show last night, and because of that I felt this overwhelming need to have completed the storyline. This means that a good chunk of this week I was pushing hard to get through the main story, and I have to say… it was some of the most miserable I have been playing Fallout ever. My play style is very much a “forget the story exists” method, where I wander aimlessly and go explore whatever happens to suit my fancy. This means there is a lot of ADD induced gaming as I see what that building over there in the distance is, or go explore that wrecked vehicle there because it looks interesting. The result is that I spend a lot of time playing, but not a lot of time getting anywhere specific. With the severe content density that is the Commonwealth, it means I had at 70 hours not gotten anywhere vaguely close to Diamond City. I knew where it was, but I was busy wandering around the Cambridge area and exploring lots of little nooks and crannies.

Instead this week I forced myself to follow the storyline, and while it is really awesome… and there are lots of interesting characters… the entire process feels forced. I mean it IS forced, because I am trying hard to play in a style that is not natural to me. I talked about this for quite a bit on the podcast last night, but essentially most of the time I don’t like it when games end. In Mass Effect 2, I enjoyed every moment of the side missions… but it felt like all of my fun was being sucked down a drain the moment I started that sequence of events that lead to the end of the game. I want these worlds and settings.. and characters that I have created to essentially live on forever… and the sooner I “beat” a game… the sooner that fun for me is over. I think in part this is why I like the MMO so much, because my characters never have to go away… they just keep going on and changing and adapting as new content is released. So as it looks like we are pushing off the Fallout 4 show a bit… I am going to try and find a happy medium where I alternate between following story… and also spending some time following my heart.

Reconstructing Garrisons

December 5, 2015 by Belghast

Largely Academic

With my recent return to World of Warcraft, I’ve been readjusting to the rhythm of Warlords and one of the big parts of that is the Garrison. As is always the case when I start to think about parts of the game, I begin fabricating ways that I would improve it. I am not sure if this is the armchair designer in me, or the programmer… but whatever case the instinct is always there. You can hand me the best possible implementation of something, and I will find ways I would tweak and improve it. Before even starting to write this, I realize that Garrisons like so many new and interesting ideas in Warcraft… are being utterly abandoned when it comes to Legion. So I am largely going through this as an academic exercise, because it has been on my mind. This line of inquiry all started as I once again began trying to dig into the Shipyard for my Garrison. Everything about that minigame feels like an worse in every way version of the Garrisons. With Garrisons there was at least a clear path to success… and with Shipyards the answer seems to be throw oil at the problem until you get something interesting. This of course lead me to start sifting through the design of Garrisons as a whole… and this mornings post is the loose collection of those ideas.

A Mobile App

I have said this point numerous times, but I am going to highlight it here again… for the purpose of hoping that if we ever get another garrison like feature… Blizzard will rethink the implementation. Everything surrounding the Garrison should have been available through a mobile app. I took the time to crudely mock up an ipad version, and I think for the most part it works. Of course this a mocked up version of the Master Planner addon… but whatever… I feel like anyone who is actually using their garrisons is using that addon. The fact that we can stroll around our garrisons is awesome… but the aspect that I dislike about it is how much it takes us out of the game. The garrisons I think were meant to be this place for the player in the world that is just theirs, and it does a great job of doing that. The problem being… people just live in their garrisons now. Before and after a raid… you can look at the guild list and see every single player sitting in the garrison fiddling with whatever they need to fiddle with to get ready. For both factions, Ashran was supposed to be this Dalaran like experience to bring us all together in the same place… but it was generally so poorly laid out that people have just adapted to doing everything they need to do in a combination of the Pandaria Shrine and their chosen set of Garrison buildings.

The negative side effect is there has been this daily maintenance ritual that takes us out of the game… instead of causing us to dig further into it. I know personally I have ten characters with garrisons, and four of those with level three fairly maxed out ones. I feel this obligation that if I do ANY of them… I should just go ahead and sift through all of them making sure every machine is optimally humming. This style of interaction is what we tend to expect from Tiny Tower/Fallout Shelter style mobile games… where we check in every so often and make sure all of the parameters are working like we intended them to. If I could have fiddled with my Garrisons from my phone, when I was stuck waiting in line at the pharmacy, or any other time I am forced to sit idle… it would have felt like a much better experience. As cludgy as the web based integration with Destiny is, it has given me ideas of how well it COULD work if someone did so properly. In Destiny I can fiddle with my inventory, or check the status of quest all from the web… or as a result of that api third party mobile app. That means I can do things like… if I forgot a consumable in the bank… I can drop it straight into the active characters inventory. Mobile integration of the garrisons would turn what feels like a lot of busywork, into a resource that is valuable and helps the players get more out of their game time.

One Garrison Per Account

I think pretty much everyone agrees that Garrisons are essentially a mobile app already… but now we are going to get into the more controversial tweaks. I think there should have been a single Garrison that is being built by ALL of your characters on your account. Now this would get a little weird when it comes to someone who plays both Horde and Alliance… so in theory I would also be fine with having one Alliance Garrison per account and one Horde Garrison per account. This means that all of the resources you are gathering would be shared in one big pool… and similarly all of your followers would be shared. Now in order to make this work, you would need to keep adding new followers as you add characters that gain the ability to access the garrison. The idea is here that you start with a base of like ten followers, and then each additional “garrison eligible” character would add 5 more followers to the pool. There would need to be a cap to the maximum number of followers, but we could safely place that cap somewhere in the range of 40. That would allow you to have upgraded your follower count with six more characters before capping out. This gives you a real reason why you would want to be playing more than just the one character, because alting becomes a path to access more perks.

Similarly I would make it so that the Garrison footprint itself expands as you get more characters to the level cap of 100. Much like the garrison expands when you shift from TownHall 1 to 2 or 3… or add the Shipyard. There would be additional annexes of your Garrison that would add building slots when you get any of your alts to level 100, allowing you to eventually build all of the buildings to support your characters. This also serves the purpose that I originally hoped Garrisons would do of allowing you access to tradeskills that your current character doesn’t have. When you are a multi-crafter like myself, you spend a silly amount of time not playing the game.. and swapping resource between characters. To facilitate this better I would have added a new kind of bank that came with the Garrison that was shared by all characters on your account. Once again the bank would start small but each additional character you get to the level cap would increase the bank by a number of slots, essentially giving you something in the end that is around the same size as void storage. While you could never store EVERYTHING you would want to store in this… it would serve as a place for shared crafting resources or raid materials among your stable of characters.

Characters in Your Garrison

One of the things I love about the Garrison is seeing the NPCs that I have picked up as followers, running around and at least “acting” like they are interacting with each other. In my perfect version of the Garrison, each of these followers would be more fleshed out… and through a sequence of talking to them and doing tasks for them… it would eventually open up a side mission. What I am thinking is the same sort of interaction that you have with the NPCs that you gather up in say a Mass Effect game or Dragon Age. The side missions might unlock new cosmetic items, or simply have a decent gold or whatever the raid currency happens to be pay out. This would make them feel more like actual characters, and less collectibles to decorate your sorta kinda home…. that just happens to look like everyone else. Currently there are a handful of followers that offer quests, or sell merchandise… and that is awesome. I just wish they were all so well thought out as those, because right now it feels like an awesome mechanic that only goes about half of the way to really being great. Especially with a shared Garrison, it would allow players to feel a greater connection across multiple characters to the same batch of NPCs.

As cool as the NPCs are however… I think the best possible thing for Garrisons would be to see your OTHER character wandering around in them. Ultimately where I am getting at with a lot of my changes is to give the players a reason to roll multiple characters. I realize there are folks out there that only have the one character that they care about… and that is fine… but for most of us multiple characters is the way we stay engaged with the game for long periods of time. There would be this huge sense of accomplishment in seeing your other characters wandering around in the same setting, highlighting the fact that your entire stable of characters is a “team” of sorts and that you are all together working towards some common goal. So for all of those people who take painstaking care in transmogrifying to just the right look… you would get to see your characters strutting their stuff together decked out in any fashion you would like. Additionally I think a nice feature would be for you to have the ability to interact with one of your characters that is wandering the garrison, and do some pretty simple things. Like hand off an item to them, or ask them to craft something for you. Essentially I am looking for ways to allow you to keep from having to do a constant sequence of swapping characters instead of actually going out into the world to play the game.

The Problem with Garrisons

There is a lot that I love about the concept of Garrisons, but my large problem has always been and continues to be today… that it keeps me from playing the game. Sure you are thinking… “but Bel, Garrisons are part of the game!”. To that I say… “Sorta”, they are this package of busy work designed to keep players coming back to the game… but in truth they also end up keeping the player from really going out into the world to play it. It is so easy to get stuck in this rut of logging in every night, and doing nothing but collecting garrison loot and sending more followers out on missions. If you add harvesting the ore or herbs, you can easily end up with a two hour or longer ritual that means… that is a couple of hours that you weren’t going out engaging in the world. You weren’t raiding, or running dungeons… or even completing the content in areas like Ashran or Tanaan jungle. You were essentially sitting at “home” doing paperwork, while there was a bigger and more interesting world out there… simply because we as players end up feeling an obligation to do it… or in some way we will “fall behind”.

When I left the game last time… I had run into a rut where I was simply doing nothing but garrisons and two nights of raiding a week. There was nothing pulling me outside of the tiny walled garden and thrusting me out into the more interesting world as a whole. The idea with these tweaks falls along the lines of making Garrisons feel more important to all of your characters at a whole, while speeding up the interactions so that you can get done whatever you need to do and get right back out into the world. World of Warcraft as a whole needs to do more to support the alting lifestyle, and I feel like most everything that is soul bound should really be account bound. I’ve also long felt that currency like Valor should be accumulated at an account level, allowing players to play whatever class happens to be needed by their guild or their friends… but at the same time support the development of the characters they really want to be gearing. Basically there are a ton of tweaks I would do to the game, but this morning… I simply focused on Garrisons and some quality of life improvements. I am sure I will catch hell for some of the things I have said… but at the end of the day its my blog and my opinions.

MMO Ecosystems

December 4, 2015 by Belghast

What is a Game

Yesterday I got involved in a long winded discussion about the effects a major guild dying, has on a game… the game in question of course was World of Warcraft. There were a couple of different points of view floating around, and they largely centered around what the definition of the game meant to each person. Some folks chose to take the literal view and focus on the mechanics of the game itself, and argue that the loss of a big guild does nothing to change the way the game functionally plays. I however choose to view the game like an ecosystem, where quite honestly the actual game mechanics become one of the least important parts of shaping daily interaction. When a game launches, it ceases to be all about the pushing of buttons and the getting of loot. Much like a workplace has little to do with the rules and regulations that you set up ahead of time… but instead the interactions between the employees and the general sense of morale. If you have a great cohesive environment created by the players, you can overcome a lot of the technical shortcomings a game may have.

When a game is server based, like World of Warcraft, the game for most players is narrowed to a very specific niche… namely the things that occur on that individual server. Sure you can re-roll anywhere, but once someone has set down roots in my experience they are highly unlikely to move. I have 11 characters on Argent Dawn for example, and the vast majority of those characters are over level 90. So when I contemplate changing servers… the will to do this is pretty non-existent. My experiences with the game have largely been shaped by those individuals I have had interactions with on that server. With the switch of focus from group based activities to largely solo interaction… this might have changed, but I find it hard to believe that any given player is not in at least some way influenced by the forces at play on their home server. A large chunk of that environment is the large guilds that populate its ecosystem. So when one of those guilds leaves… it is felt not only in the social channels, but also in the economy and the general activity of the server. Crafters need time pressed raiders to buy their potions and “raid mats”, and casual players benefit from having those raiders regularly participating in group activities.

The Ecosystem

I’m going to break out and talk about a non-Warcraft example of the importance of a guild. In Wildstar on the Entity server, there is a guild I am part of called the Black Dagger Society. While I happen to be a member and might be a little bit biased, I think they represent one of those guilds that is for lack of a better term “too big to fail” when it comes to the health of that server. I would be willing to bet that there is not a single Exile player that does not benefit from them being on the server, and to some extent I would be willing to bet that even the Dominion players feel their presence as well. The big event that they organize is ThaydFest which is a weekend player run festival that serves as a focus point of getting players interacting with each other. The scope of this thing is massive, and you simply cannot exist on the server that week without feeling its pull. Similarly the BDS are the sort of guild that is constantly interacting with the world and the players that are not in there guild. I’ve rode along as they rolled into a zone… and started asking anyone there to join them in the taking down of this world boss or that. I’ve also watched their members be the first to respond when someone publicly asks for help. They embody the spirit of what an amazing community focused guild is like.

So if something were to happen to the Black Dagger Society, the effects would ripple to the core of the Entity server. There are a lot of things that would simply stop happening because I’ve not seen a similarly community focused force stepping up to offer the same level of interaction. Carbine as a company would do well to do whatever they can to nurture the fact that a guild like this exists, and they have done some community spotlight pieces on ThaydFest in an attempt to help them out. But when it comes to World of Warcraft, I have lived through the effect of guilds just like the BDS dying on a server, and watched the community as a whole contract. Cataclysm was the great changing of the guard on Argent Dawn, and when I came back at the end of it… all of the rich social network that I had when I left… had shriveled up and died. When one big guild leaves… it has a trickle down effect touching the satellite guilds that also interact with them. So to the players… that played on Argent Dawn, and stayed there during this transition… the game was absolutely traumatically changed for them. I know this… because I’ve talked to many of my friends that probably at least a little bit feel betrayed because I left them.

The Important Parts

Essentially this discussion is one about definitions, and how narrow your focus is. The trap that we can all too easily fall into is assuming that every player plays the game the same way as we do… and even more so… gets the same enjoyment and stimuli out of the game as we do. For a socially motivated player… the “game” is all about the interactions they have with other players. For a challenge focused player… the “game” is all about taking on new experiences and defeating them one by one. For an exploration motivated player… the “game” is all about seeing and experiencing new things. So while functionally the “Game” with a big G didn’t change… because the mechanics didn’t actually change when a group of players left the game… the environment and the atmosphere absolutely does. The problem is for me at least that a server is a snap shot in time. I will never be able to get back the Late Night Raiders from Vanilla Warcraft, even though I still keep in contact with dozens of them on a regular basis. I might be able to play a game with two or three of those people at a time… but I will never be able to set up another situation where the hundred plus people that circled that raid will still exist in the same setting.

The “Game” for me is this sequence of vignettes in time, of certain players and certain situations… that either positively or negatively influenced my experience. When they are gone… there is a void that is irreplaceable. So while you can still find Pixi peddling her “extra special pixipacks”, there will never be a Duranub Raiding Company, or a No Such Raid… or any of the countless other groups that I have interacted with and loved over the years. There was a time when on my server every single raid leader communicated with every other raid leader, and that infrastructure is just gone now. What is left is a sequence of walled gardens that no longer try and reach out to the other walled gardens and set up communication lines. As a result the server seems so much smaller than it used to, and while I love hanging out with the people there still… the experience is tarnished by the former grandeur that I remember. Did any one one of those players make the difference? Probably not, but it was the cumulative effect of losing a large group of players at the same time. There will always be a wistful nostalgia for the way those days felt, even though there was also a bunch of bullshit that went along with it.

Care and Feeding

Some companies do a great job of nurturing the community environment. Wildstar and Carbine for example seem to really be trying to focus on the players and their communities in trying to make that game a great place to inhabit. The challenge with Warcraft is that the game is just so insanely huge at this point, that it is really difficult to highlight every part of the community that is working. I do think that Blizzard does a bunch of things that actively harm communities, without really thinking about it. When you look at the “Game” with a large G… they have been regularly applying the sledge hammer to it every couple of years as they roll out a grand new scheme that is going to “improve the game”. The first of these fall-outs for me at least was when they shifted the focus from 40 player raiding to 25 player raiding. This created the “guildpocalypse” as I refer to it… and my own raid… the Late Night Raiders was one of the casualties that never successfully transitioned to a smaller raid size. Similarly the events that caused me to leave Warcraft the first time, were brought on by the shift in Cataclysm to greatly incentivizing guild based raiding. Prior to that our raid was a thriving ecosystem made up of House Stalwart and a bunch of smaller and more personal satellite guilds that together created one vibrant non-guild raiding landscape.

The focus on guild based raiding however meant that if we continued to raid in this fashion… that ultimately some of the guilds would see zero benefit from defeating this boss and unlocking this achievement. Instead we attempted to squeeze all of these guilds into House Stalwart and we went from being a guild of 600 characters to a guild of around 1000 characters over night… and this change was just too much for me personally to adjust to. There is a huge difference in raiding with someone two nights a week, to having to interact with them constantly in your guild. Blizzard is constantly fiddling with the dials… introducing Valor, taking it away… and introducing it again in a different way. I cannot count the number of times classes have changed so much that they end up causing players to abandon what was previously their main. I’ve done this myself numerous times because of a change in the game making the experience no longer enjoyable. Each of these decisions also has a social cost associated with it, that it often feels like is not being taken into account. Essentially the point of this post, and the eight paragraphs that it is ending up being… is that a game is more than just its mechanics, especially when you are dealing with a hugely social game like an MMO. For me the most important parts of this game, or any other for that matter… are the ones that have no direct relationship to the game itself, but instead are a side effect of the ecosystem that builds up around it. My game is always largely influenced by the people I happen to be playing it with.

A Gladiator in Hellfire

December 3, 2015 by Belghast

Change of Plans

Are you an alliance dps or healer looking to get raid exp/gear for #FriendshipMoose runs? Tonight 5-8 PST N HFC we can teach you fights!

— Jed (@jedsblog) December 2, 2015

Yesterday when I got up in the morning, I had every plan of coming home after work, hoping that what I was making in the crock pot was actually edible, and then sitting down to an evening of Fallout 4. I do after all need to finish up the main story line, so that we can properly talk about it for Saturday’s podcast where we in theory review it. Then I saw the above tweet come across my timeline. Now I have known Jed for ages, but never really had much of a chance to hang out with him in game. I can’t be for certain, but I believe our connection dates back to the Blog Azeroth community, and the subsequent IRC channel associated with it. While he hasn’t really blogged all that often in recent years, I still think of him… mostly as one of the many bloggers making up my twitter feed. Now we zoom ahead to the above twitter message, and it scrolling across my screen. Friendship Moose is this awesome thing that was started more or less on accident from what I understand by Thomicks. The idea was to have a community for running Heroic Hellfire Citadel for the purpose of getting people the moose mount prior to the launch of Legion.

Now I am not technically on any of the lists, but my hope was that if I got one of my characters geared I could maybe just maybe work my way into a raid at some point. I like the concept of getting that mount, but I am not going to be super disappointed if it doesn’t happen. Nonetheless when I saw someone that I kinda sorta know, doing an open call on Twitter for folks to join in on an Alliance side cross realm raid for the purpose of getting in training… yeah I was down with doing that. Also traditionally Wednesday nights are an excellent time for me to do anything raid related, since until 8 or 9 at night I am pretty much at home alone until my wife gets out of church. So I signed up, made some flasks and armor potions… and was ready to go. I was idling outside of HFC when the invites came through… at which point I was straight up ganked by some hordies while waiting. I guess it turns out that the folks leading the raid… are on a PVP server, so that was a bit of weird sequence of events since I am pretty much a dedicated carebear who has always played on not even PVE servers… but Roleplaying Servers.

More Fun Raiding

There was a period of time when as one of the leaders of NSR and eventually Duranub… I used to farm my alts out to other peoples raids to help them when they were running short a person. One of my great pleasures was seeing how the dynamics of these different raid groups worked, and what their cultural norms were. I am not completely certain if this was a regular group of people, or a group thrown together specifically for the purpose of Moose practice, but whatever the case it was an enjoyable group to hang out with for the evening. Since I have been mostly playing my MooCowAdin, it was a bit of an adjustment to get back into playing the very APM based Gladiator spec. The Retadin feels like it has some breathing room in your attack sequence to chill a bit, whereas as a Gladiator it feels like there is always some button I desperately need to be pushing. As much as I dislike the fact that I know the Gladiator spec is going away during Legion… I can absolutely understand why. It is a quirky spec, with quirky gearing requirements… and that requires spastic button mashing to really make work well. While we were actively raiding last, I made the conscious choice to uninstall recount because watching the meters actually made me play worse. So I have no clue how I did, but last night Jed said he was going to upload the logs at some point today.

We made it roughly as far as we managed to make it in the Facepull raid horde side on Sunday. We had a bunch of issues with Kilrogg, and that fight is significantly more technical than I realized. During the Facepull run I pretty much just killed adds constantly, stayed out of the poo… and made sure the poo didn’t drop in the raid. Past that I had no deeper understand of the mechanics, and this time around I actually got to play one of the technical roles of the fight. Namely there is a phase where three players have to run into these portals and get transported into another realm… where they attempt to deal as much damage as possible to wave after wave of adds. When they come out they have a large dps buff, and can make stuff dead faster. I ended up in the third wave of folks going into the portals, and this is something that I absolutely took for granted that folks must have just been handling on Sunday night. After several tries we defeated Kilrogg, and man when we did it was satisfying. We hit essentially the same stumbling block that we did Sunday as well… with the Gorefiend encounter, but I am thankful I am getting quite a bit more work in on learning that fight. The problem with the last fight of the evening always seems to be the same… whatever you raid before you stop, is the point that people are starting to lose focus, and over the course of the evening we had also lost a handful of people. The problem with raid scaling is trying to keep that appropriate mix of healers and dps… and just like Facepull it felt like we were short one healer from making it feel stable.

Transmog as Endgame

All in all I had a pretty great night, and the timing of the raid was just about perfect for me. It started around 7pm CST and ended around 10pm CST… which is just about the ideal parameters for me. If a raid goes much longer than that, I am honestly going to start fading horribly. It sounds like this is a weekly thing, so I am probably going to offer my services more often… that is if Jed will have me. Overall I had a pretty shitty night as far as loot went… I spent a lot of tokens and don’t have much to show for it. The thing I am in most desperate need of is a new weapon… but unfortunately while we did Heroic Blackrock bosses, I never got any of them to drop me an upgrade so I am sitting on using Taner’s Terrible Skinner the 670 version. It is my hope at some point this weekend to pop into LFR and focus on trying to get one of those bosses to drop me a weapon and shield upgrade, since both are severely lacking at this point. I did manage to pick up Warforged Shell-Resistant Stompers and a decent ring… that doesn’t actually sim out to being better than the slightly lower ilvl prismatic slotted ring I was already using.

So babysteps forward in catching up my gear level I guess… I am still largely sitting at 680 with the ability to jump up to 685 if I really needed to. However because of the quirks of Gladiator… and how important the Blackrock Foundry four piece set bonus is for that spec… I will likely be running several ilevels lower than I could be at all points. This is the point where I actually wish we had managed to raid Heroic Blackrock a bit more… so that maybe I could have gotten slightly higher ilevel versions of the set gear. This is the problem with set loot… because if you happen to get one of the few amazing bonuses… you simply cannot upgrade out of it without taking a significant hit somewhere. I remember that was the problem with Hunter Tier 2 loot back in the day… that eight piece bonus was so phenomenally good… that even though we were getting Tier 2.5 gear… there was no way we could actually take it and make it viable. I know my friend Thalen would argue with that point, because he wore a lot of 2.5 back in the day… but it certainly felt like it at the time. In any case… I just hope I was still acceptable dps, because I had a fun time last night. No matter how much I try and push raiding out of my system… it remains there clinging desperately… just waiting on me to come back to it.

Since I just rambled on for two paragraphs without talking about what I set out to talk about… after the raid I popped into 25 man Heroic Icecrown to clear it. Now that I am writing this… I am realizing that apparently I left after Sindragosa so at some point I will have to actually go finish up and do the Lich King. I guess in my head… I got the item I was hoping to get so it was a successful run for me. For awhile now I have been collecting the bits of the Red/Fel Green set of Deathknight look alike armor out of there for my warrior. When mixed with the similarly colored set of armor from Sunwell, it crafts a transmog that I am pretty happy running around in. I guess this is my nod to all of the fel themed stuff in the tail end of this expansion… and the next one. Transmogging after all is the TRUE end game of World of Warcraft. So I ended the night on a really high note by completing an outfit.