World of Warcraft Archives - Page 108 of 109

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.

The Illusion of Choice

June 26, 2012 by Belghast

Before this past week, I had not really followed the news about the Mists of Pandaria expansion apart from a mention here or there in my RSS reader. So now that I am leaving the wow-free zone that I have created for myself, I am trying to catch up on all the tidbits of progress. I admit, when I first got wind of the expansion I was just as bitter and cynical as the rest of the “kung-fu panda and pokemon” complainers. I am not sure if it is the long leave, or the news I am reading itself but I am looking forward to it.

Never a Real Choice

One of the big complaints that did manage to invade upon my fortress of wow-less solitude, was the “dumbing down” of the talent trees. When I first heard the news, like a good chunk of my friends, I was full of rage over them needlessly simplifying a process that already worked “just fine”. I bemoaned switching to a system that gave up choice in favor of “hand holding”. My talent trees should be tall and full of many widgets to click on, the way they always were!

I have come to the realization that despite the “illusion of choice” and multiple options, in each tree there was really only one viable path. There are roughly 68 DeathKnights in my guild, and apart from no more than a 5 talent difference, each us has almost the exact same blood tanking build. For each class, and each tree, there has always been one spec agreed upon by the community to be head and shoulders above the rest. So while it always felt like we had tons of options, in reality if we wanted to play on any serious level, we were going to go with the agreed upon path.

The thing is, this has been the case in every game I have played that has some sort of a talent system. Rift added a bit more depth to the system, but the same winning combos were there as well. This was so much the case that between my times playing it, they have added this nifty system that tutors you through speccing into one of these agreed upon paths. This was a breath of fresh air, since with 9 potential talent trees to juggle per class, plotting a course became extremely arcane.

Freedom to Fail

The point of view I have eventually come around to is one that I would have argued until I was blue in the face a few years back. In the end, all having a talent tree does is really give a player a chance to screw their character up to the point of being unplayable. I had a friend, who shall go unnamed that decided to try and build a “Jack of all Trades” hunter in vanilla WoW. Instead of focusing on one tree and then some secondary talents, he spread his points out evenly trying to pick up the best all all the early talents.

The end result was a character that had no glaring weaknesses, but no real bonuses either. He could solo just fine, but when it came to running dungeons he lacked the raw damage output needed to support a team effort. Believe it or not, I have seen many people make this mistake over the years. The freedom of picking talents, also gives you the freedom to make characters that simply don’t work. Ultimately the designers have intended us from the start to try and reach those top tier talents. As such when a winning hybrid spec exists it usually gets “fixed” to restore the balance.

Less is More

So in returning to what outraged myself and others, at face value the Deathknight talents are going from 41 points to only 6 points. Initially like everyone else I thought to myself, my god they are watering these classes down. Last night I copied my Deathknight out to pandaland and quickly found out that my assumptions were completely wrong. In truth the new system is going to give us far more personalization while still remaining viable.

Just like with Cataclysm, when you first open an empty talent tree you are asked to choose a specialization. Previously this just gave you whatever the signature ability was for your class. Keeping with the Deathknight analogy, choosing Blood gave me Heart Strike, Veteran of the Third War, Blood Rites, and Vengence. However my talents gave me all the other abilities that made tanking as blood viable, namely all those handy “oh shit” cooldowns.

What it took me a long while to understand, is that in Mists of Pandaria, when you choose a specialization you are essentially receiving with one single click that previous “optimal spec”. Instead of getting those signature abilities from before, I receive 17 active and passive abilities that made up the golden path everyone chose. What this really does, that has never existed to this point is set a clear baseline of abilities that one can expect every possible spec to have. This completely takes the guess work of whether or not a player has some critical ability out of the mix.

Fluffy Goodness

Basically the talent points are now a series of decisions that occur at level 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, and 90. Each of these decisions changes the flavor of your abilities, or adds new functionality to your class. When I switched my Deathknight from Human to Worgen, the thing I really missed was the Every Man for Himself racial. Previously in Wrath it was not terribly difficult to build a viable tanking spec that included the ability Lichborne. However in Cataclysm, you had to give up some high threat talents and utility to get it.

With the MoP talents at each level you are basically making a choice and in essence sacrificing other abilities. Most of the tiers, for the classes I have seen all are similar abilities with a similar theme. In the case of Lichborne, I can take it as my level 30 pick, but I am giving up on having Anti-Magic Zone and the brand new Purgatory ability. None of the choices really take away from my viability, but each shapes the flavor of my character.

So while at face value it looks like you have less freedom, in reality I personally feel like I have more than ever. I cannot count the number of times I have respecced just to change one or two points. That was the only real control I had, and in general I have had less than 5 points that could realistically be juggled. This time I am getting to make 6 choices, each of which has some pretty significant ramifications. I can be a tank with Bladestorm, or a Deathknight with AOE Deathgrip (Gorefiend’s Grasp), or Combat Rogue with Shadowstep. I get to make these fun choices knowing that I am not trading my viability for flavor.

Ode to the Trinity

I have to say I am honestly shocked after writing this all out, that I am really looking forward to the expansion. I made as many catty comments about it as the next person, but the more I read about the changes the more I like. The funny thing is, I know I am contradicting things I have said I wanted in the past. I have seen enough of the “post-trinity” games that I know that I don’t really enjoy them. At the end of the day, I really like having clearly defined roles.

The main problem I have had with abolishing the “trinity” is that without them I feel like I have no purpose. While this is great for soloing, grouping in games like Guild Wars 2 has been sheer and total chaos. The classes that generally get hurt the most are the melee, and those are the only thing I have ever been interested in playing. I cannot be happy unless I am sinking a weapon in monster flesh. Playing a “finger wiggler” just lacks the visceral quality that I crave.

So when I would try and take on a difficult/elite/etc encounter with group members, this little scenario would play out. I would run in and begin to attack, sword and board in hand. Sooner or later I would pull aggro, and begin trying to back out. Ultimately I would fail at shedding aggro and die while trying to heal myself. The fighting to stand up would fail as well, since we are fighting a big monster and not easily killed by throwing stones at it. At this point I rez, and try and run back into the action which may or may not be all the way across the current map.

Even in games that have blurred the lines a bit, without going into battle knowing your role it feels like every bad pvp experience I have had. “Lets all run in and throw ourselves at the enemy, I am sure they will fall to one of our flailing bodies.” I like knowing who is the tank, who will be providing dps, and who will save all our asses by healing us when we do something phenomenally stupid. A well balanced party was the key to pen and paper RPGs and honestly it still makes sense for MMO grouping.

Solo Friendly

I think the nugget at the center of every “post-trinity” argument however is pretty simple. Everyone wants to be viable in both a group and while soloing. SWTOR tried to solve this by giving everyone companions that essentially turned you into an instant somewhat balanced group. WoW has added in a lot more self heals, and other ways to save yourself when things are going wrong. Ultimately, everyone wants to be able to play the way they want to play and still be viable doing so. For me that is usually tanking, which I guess places me firmly as a pillar of the trinity.

This post has rambled on a lot longer than I had originally intended. I guess in hindsight I should have broken it into multiple posts, but at least in my mind all of these things are connected. I am still pretty shocked that I am looking forward to roaming around Pandaland. What I have seen of the areas, I have enjoyed. I will go on at length another time, as to why I feel Cataclysm failed whereas Wrath and Burning Crusade did not. Suffice to say, I feel Pandaria will be a return to the world building experience of the first two expansions. I am looking forward to exploring this new and beautiful world.

Rediscovering Dungeons

June 25, 2012 by Belghast

Here in Oklahoma it has been insanely hot and by Thursday it is supposed to be in temperatures over 107F. As a result, I have been actively trying to avoid leaving the comfort of air conditioning. This meant that this last weekend, I spent the vast majority of it logged into Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft. The game still has a pretty firm resurgent hold on me.

Am I Really Back?

Honestly at this point I am still not 100% sure if I am really back, but I have moved from seven days of free time to actually paying for the first month. I had planned on doing this anyway, just to make sure my friend got his mount, but I have to say I am already finding myself making plans for the future. Right now I have a stable of sub 85s, and I admit I am looking forward to leveling them.

I spent the largest portion of the weekend working on Exeter, my Paladin. This was actually my very first character in World of Warcraft, and I had grand ideals about playing it as a main. Due to not being able to keep up with my friends, and the failings of protection paladins early on in vanilla, this never quite panned out. But nonetheless the character has always had a special place for me.

When I last played the character over a year and a half ago, I had just started on Vashj’ir and decided to swap from Retribution as I played in Wrath, to full on protection. With some minimal ability swapping, I was able to pick up the character pretty quickly and continue on questing. I have to say the Cataclysm Tankadin is a blast to play. I have given paladins crap over the years, even on this blog, but the gameplay is extremely infectious.

Over the course of the weekend I finished Vashji’r, quested through Hyjal, mined my way across Deepholme and finally reached 85 while doing the first few quest chains of Uldum. I have no clue how many actual hours of play it took me, but with all the perks granted by a level 25 guild, it seemed like it just flew by. Instead of watching my xp bar I found myself just following along the quests, and before I knew it I had hit the cap.

While I have complained about “kill ten” quests before, I have come to realize that at the end of the day I really do prefer them. Having a traditional questing structure gives me a sense of purpose as I check things off my list. When I have played more open ended games, like Guild Wars 2, I have felt like everything I did lacked that same sense of purpose. As much as I had complained about the disconnected feeling of Cataclysm, the quest flow is pretty nice and has enough other kinds of quests to break the monotony of the kill tasks.

Grouping Should Be Fun

When I left WoW originally it changed my game play deeply. I went from being the center of each group as the main tank, to actively avoiding grouping all together. I had developed a phobia of being needed at all, since I had spent the previous seven years responsible for the happiness of so many others. I grouped when I absolutely had to, but the rest of the time I was off by myself and seemingly happy.

With the release of SWTOR, I gave grouping another try. However choosing to level as a dedicated duo, left me feeling chained to having to play whenever someone else was online. When it came time to run flashpoints, I just found them not as much fun as I remembered dungeons being. I think in part, I just didn’t like the design of the Star Wars hard modes. I don’t mind hard encounters, but I have always felt that they should be an endurance game, not twitch reflexes.

Many of the SWTOR hard mode flashpoints, just felt cheap and irrationally punishing. Colonel Daksh in Maelstrom Prison for example, goes into this phase where you have to avoid getting in line of sight of him. Essentially 2 or 3 times per fight, everyone in the group has to do an intricate dance avoiding being seen. If you are seen at all, it is essentially a one shot death. If you aren’t dpsing him fast enough, you also die from the incredibly short enrage timer. As we wiped over and over to one thing or another, the attempts just ceased to be enjoyable, and given time flashpoints were just something I completely avoided.

Remembering It Can Be

Thanks to the coaxing of my friend, coming back to WoW I have been grouping again. I eased into it by duoing some old raids, until I built back up my tanking ability to some extent. Once I got back into the swing of a heroic, including the “new to me” hour of twilight five mans, it felt like coming home. Unfortunately it seems like we can only muster full guild groups on Friday or Saturday nights. But those last few nights, have been some of the most enjoyable gameplay I have experienced in years.

Friday night we gathered up to work on various achievements, that each of us had outstanding. We knocked out a couple still remaining from the Icecrown five mans, and then moved on to the redesigned Zul’Gurub. ZG has always been one of my favorite places in Azeroth, and in vanilla I spent hour after hour there both tanking and healing it. When I heard they were removing the raid and making it a heroic, I was extremely disappointed. However, considering they went from a raid to a five man, they’ve done the zone justice. While none of the fights are exactly the same, they each feel very similar in nature and still have a very epic feeling to them.

In an hours time, we had knocked out every available Zul’Gurub achievement. While there really wasn’t much in the way of gear upgrades for anyone involved, we had a complete blast doing it. I am remembering the side of gaming I used to love so much, but the circumstance of having to be both guild and raid leader robbed me of. Running around with my friends taking down baddies, has re-awoken a piece of my inner child I thought was too jaded to ever feel this way again.

Well Rested Return

One of friends, mused that I just needed some time away from the game to get my perspective. I think that honestly might be the case. Too much frustration had built up, over too many things not directly related to gameplay. Coming back now, I have a new pair of rose colored lenses and my buffer of bullshit has been emptied out. I never thought it would be WoW I was returning to however. I really thought with my recent return to Rift, that it would be the one that held my attention. As much crap as we have all said about “pandas and pokemon”, I think the upcoming expansion will breathe some life back into the game. I just hope that my return, others will be willing to give it a fresh start as well.