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    Fish feasts, word beasts


    2011 - 09.03

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, Enthusiasm, General purpose whinging, Raiding for fun (profit be damned) | 5 Comments »

    The title rhymes for a reason.

    I was getting bored of buying my own food for raiding ‘n stuff, so decided we needed to get the recipe for the lobster jacuzzi. A fishing competition seemed like the thing… but with a little guild like ours, a “first person to get X number of fish” competition wasn’t going to work. Neither would a “everyone get together on X day and fish”, unless we decided to forgo raiding for an evening to do it (no thanks). So… the fishing and poetry competition was born.

    Entry requirements: 120 fish from pools plus one poem, haiku or limerick. Delivered in about a week or less.

    Results: well, we got the fishing achievement before all of the entries were in. And guildies are now voting on their favourite poems, with the winner taking away a unique guild rank (tbd) and their choice of a pet from the Blizzard pet store OR a bike mount. Whichever one is left will then be awarded to another entrant by that most capricious of judges, Lady RNG.

    To give you an example:

    There once was a man called Ano
    Who thought he could play the piano
    But his thumbs were too big
    On just his first gig
    They compared his recital to guano

    He sat at his desk with a pen
    And thought about hobbies again
    Where is the thrill
    When your hands have no skill?
    And you fail nine efforts in ten

    He decided to put us to shame
    And started a dragony game
    “But which class to be
    With these phalangees
    I’m tired of being to blame”

    So he took up a paladin mace
    And flourished in dungeons with grace
    But his method was flawed
    We thought he tapped the keyboard
    But the whole time he just played with his face

    And no, I didn’t write that. Bastards.

    –

    Also, I’ve been playing too much to write, but I have been reading. This morning, I read this post on wowhead news, linking/quoting from a couple of articles about “why cataclysm is bad” or “why WoW is dying”. There’s very little point in commenting on it there, and not much more point in writing about it here, but what the hell.

    1. “Most people dislike Cataclysm”. Really? I see no hard data on that (feel free to point me at some). I see a lot of forum bandwagon jumping, but that’s normal. I see a bunch of people who don’t like specific things. I’m not sure that adds up to “most people dislike Cataclysm”. Not even slightly. Anecdotal: I’m having a good time. So are the people I’m playing with.

    2. A study quoted in the Gamasutra article surveyed 2865 self-selected WoW players, 72% of whom were from the US, 70% of whom had played for three years or more. And which was published six months before Cataclysm was released. It’s an interesting study on the subject, but as far as I can tell it’s got nothing to do with the article quote from the author, who says “I think people get bored more quickly”. Than what? And, er, ok.

    3. Again from the Gamasutra article, there’s a quote from a staff writer and wow player who says ”There isn’t a lack of content in Cataclysm. The problem is the lack of strong appeal for anyone in particular. The gear doesn’t carry enough psychological weight for the hardcore players, and the raids are too difficult for more casual players, especially relative to the rewards they provide. The last raiding tier was significantly nerfed in 4.2, but its rewards are now behind what casual players can acquire by doing 5-mans, so there’s no incentive to raid older content beyond doing it once or twice just to see the new bosses.”

    The thing is, that’s not really true. You can buy chest, legs, hands, bracers, one ring, one neckpiece and a relic/wand from the VP vendor, all of which are better than gear from tier 11 but it’ll take you several weeks of dungeon running to buy them all. You can buy boots, a trinket, another ring and a cloak from the JP vendor, which are *as* good as, not better than the drops from tier 11 (give or take, depending on your stat priorities), plus you can pick up t11 chest, legs and hands which might be better than raid drops once you have two items (for the set bonus). The rest is raid only, unless you want to spring for BoEs or crafted items.

    Also, there we go with the whole “casual” bullshit again. What’s a casual player in this context? Someone who doesn’t raid regularly? Someone who only pug-raids? Someone who can only commit 90 minutes to any one gaming session? If you’re that “casual”, you’re hardly likely to be drowning in VP/JP so … eh? That has a bit of a smell of the old “if I raid, I want to be massively, visibly and demonstrably better looking/better geared than you nooby scrubs” thinking, which I tend to dislike. If you’re interested in that sort of boasting, send people links to the RSS feed/screenshot of your battle.net character newsfeed, with the date of your first kill prominently visible1.

    –

    That last point comes back to something that makes me twitch a bit. Are there really so many people who play until they’ve ticked off every item on their “I want this” gear list, and then unsubscribe until the next patch adds in a few new weapons or what have you? The reward mechanism for WoW (group content) is pretty well known, but I always thought it was a combination of things: exploration (new bosses/mechanics), teamplay, social interaction (raidchat/voicecomms), personal performance (execution), group performance, progression (next boss/harder mode/achievements for difficult things), “tangible” rewards (loot). Is the last item >>>> all of the others?

    --
    1. PS: if you do this to me as some sort of boast, it’s possible I will conclude you’re a knob. [↩]

    Productivity


    2011 - 08.05

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in Enthusiasm, Raiding for fun (profit be damned) | 4 Comments »

    There are, of course, more “productive” things I could be doing with my WoW-time.

    • I could be making sure I do my firelands dailies every day.
    • I could be doing those dailies on one of my level 85 alts, preferably one with a useful crafting profession (vs Ano’s leatherworking/skinning combo).
    • I could be making sure I hit the VP cap
    • I could be running heroics/trolltroics: with Tremble to replace his pair of <333 tanking trinkets, with Grammy to replace the various bits of PVP gear she’s still wearing, with Cent to replace her remaining blues
    • I could be attempting to earn cash and stockpile materials for a new weapon, or at least remembering to make use of Grammy’s transmute cooldowns more profitably.

    I really struggle with doing things I “ought” to be doing, unless they’re things I’d do anyway because I like to. I’ve actually VP capped a couple of times already, not because I feel I should do but because I like running dungeons and find bad pugs a) generally rare, and b) easily dealt with or ignored. Anyway, that aside, I’m not really doing any of these things. Instead, I’ve been playing with my baby bear and pugging a few T11 raids.


    Pugging tier 11 

    Blizzard did say that part of the reason for the huge nerfs to T11 was to encourage and enable pug raids, and this seems to have worked. Entertainingly, now pug raiding is common (as it was at the end of Wrath) a familiar annoyance has resurfaced: gearscore. Well, not “gearscore” per se, but looking in trade I see an awful lot of “LFM BoT, must have ilvl 361+, /w spec and chiev” which puts us straight back into “can a bunch of overgeared players please carry me? kthx” territory. I even found myself forced to intervene in one conversation  in trade1, in which a person whose average ilevel was 350 was told that wasn’t enough for t11, and that he should run more trollroics to gear up. *wail*

    I’ve now joined a couple of different PuG T11 runs. Firstly, Centrella the mage was  reunited with an RP guild she accompanied on a few ICC runs towards the end of Wrath. While definitely not cutting-edge raiders even by my standards, they’re a friendly and fun bunch, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Another guildie joined us on her DK and we were able to amble through the first four bosses, in what turned out to be the first visit to Cataclysm raid content for a number of people in the group. Sadly, the run offered fairly conclusive proof that Centrella’s RNG-defying streak of luck is definitely over :’(.

    I also joined two guildies to form an all-Enthusiast healing team for a group with Atramades and Nefarian left to kill. It was interesting to note the people who hadn’t really processed the nerfs to T11 content, with a vocal segment (including the raid lead) insisting that if we didn’t get Nef down to 65% or less during the pillar phase, it would be a wipe. That might have been the case before 4.2, but most certainly isn’t now. In any case, after a couple of false starts we got it together. Still no bloody loot, though :( .


    Angry baby bear

    The other thing I’ve been doing is chainrunning low-level instances on my little druid, who’s journeyed from ~30 to ~50 exclusively via dungeons and dungeon quests. It’s been a mixed bag.

    The good: I just like being a bear. It’s nice that my in-game avatar is hairier than me and has a fatter arse, for example. Also, the snarling sounds are great, as are the angry ghost bear effects for some of the abilities. It’s pretty simple to play (at this level) so I should, in theory, be able to concentrate on awareness/positioning rather than mastering ability usage. Being able to switch to kittyform and sprint is handy for all sorts of out-of-combat things. The cat dance is great, the bear dance is awesome. Bears have the most brilliant “sit”.

    The not-so-good: Bears (and presumably warriors) with no rage are sad, pitiful creatures. It seems that, in the lower-level dungeons, this is a common occurrence with trigger happy or just plain asshole DPS present. Heirlooms and enchants notwithstanding, there’s only so much a bear can do if someone else pulls at the wrong time. The most extreme case I’ve encountered so far was a run with three hunters, two of whom would open with multishot on every pull, and took the appearance of a skull over the head of a target as their personal green light. Cue desperate taunting and praying for rage, and a decent amount of cursing on the human side of the screen. After 5 minutes of this, I said in chat “Just so you know, if you open every pull with multishot when I’m not yet in melee range, I’m not going to bother chasing them down.” The current “easy” state of low-level dungeons relative to your typical lowbie dungeoneer (often an alt fully loaded with heirlooms) meant this didn’t have quite the “behave or you’ll die” severity I might like, but they did ease back a little so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

    Also, I’m sure there’s more to play with later, but right now I have what feels like an odd mix of abilities. I’ve got loads of charges, stuns, debuffs and taunts, but only three abilities that do damage. It seems rather odd — for pretty much every low-level bossfight, once the pull is underway and I’ve applied my debuffs, I can just drum the 1, 2 & 3 keys like I’m tapping my fingers on the table until the boss falls over or I do. I have no survival cooldowns yet (potions are all I’ve got) and from the bosses I remember, there’s only been the occasional knockback to interrupt me, easily dealt with by feral charge or skull bash.

    Perhaps this is because I’m supposed to learning the mechanics of the pull rather than the mechanics of a rotation/priority system, and I understand that Blizzard have said that they want tanks to have less-complex threat rotations to allow more time/focus for the other parts of their job, but right now it’s a bit… plain.


    Productivity

    Actually, since this was first drafted, I have done one “productive” thing. Last night we ventured into the Firelands2. After a couple of calibration attempts, where I got the measure of the Shannox tank’s incoming damage, we killed him. On the fourth pull. This slightly confounded all of us, as we’d made no real plans for the evening beyond “try to kill Shannox”, expecting that we’d kill him in a ok-last-pull-of-the-night-guys-concentrate moment. When he was dead shortly after 9pm with another 90 minutes remaining before end-of-raid, we were completely flummoxed.

    Sensible folks that we are, we elected to do some exploring before heading to Baradin Hold, and found an interesting miniboss (whose name I don’t remember) who pelted us with fireballs and meeeleons of little adds on the way up to him, to the delight of our warrior tank whose name was glued to the top of the recount list.  We also had an amusing death: while considering a proposal put forth by a guildie that we should be pulling and interrupting some little fellas who were channelling a spell  at a nearby portal, a *giant* flame elemental appeared and smooshed us all.

    “Perhaps so,” we concluded. Fun times.

    --
    1. which is much like discussing politics or religion in the pub: never a good idea [↩]
    2. my first trip with the guild as I missed last week’s unsuccessful attempts [↩]

    How not to fight Nefarian as a Ret paladin


    2011 - 07.27

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, Enthusiasm, How not to ..., Raiding for fun (profit be damned), Things I'm learning | 4 Comments »

    Yes, I know, who does BlackRockWingLairDepthsDescentSpire1 these days? Well, me. Us, even. With only seven guild raiders available on Monday we decided to pass on our first Firelands run in favour of the only T11 raid we hadn’t cleared on last week’s lockout. There are still plenty of upgrades in there for people (and tier tokens) after all.

    Our recent player shortage left us with more melee DPS than ranged, and a shortage of healers, so I’ve been healing in every raid I attended since… March? Add to that my general impatience and the considerably shorter LFG queue times for healers, and the result is that other than running the Molten Front dailies, I’ve spent very little time in my retribution spec. Don’t get me wrong, healing has been a lot of fun, and I’m finally starting to make better use of my healing cooldowns (although I still forget HoS/HoP until it’s too late), but a chance to hit things with a big hammer?

    /sign.

    It’d be fair to say I’m a bit rusty, but thanks to the reduced dangers of T11 post 4.2, decent raid DPS and frankly overpowered healing, all went well. Until we reached Nefarian and my realisation that, as the only melee DPS, I’d be kiting the skeletal adds.

    How not to fight Nefarian as a ret paladin

    1. Make sure you’ve absolutely no idea where Hand of Reckoning is. Well, since they removed the damage component, why would you need it? Leaving it bound just increases the likelihood of hitting it with an ear.
    2. Be sure to get completely distracted by DPSing Onyxia at the start and fail to position yourself to collect the adds.
    3. Once you’ve collected the adds, be sure to run as far as possible from the healers. They love that. Healing spells have infinite range, dontchaknow?
    4. When you *do* manage to collect the adds nicely together, be sure to be both a) out of healing range (see above) and b) in front of Nefarian. If the tank can stand there, why can’t you?
    5. Run in bizarre lines to generate a nice conga line of skellies (ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-HEY!), the better to leave them scattered all over the room. Your Onyxia tank enjoys sprinting around trying desperately to collect them from underneath Nefarian in phase three.
    6. Once you’ve found Hand of Reckoning, it becomes an I-win button. Press it frequently. Under no circumstances check to see if you’ve accidentally targeted Onyxia. Eep.
    7. Rumours of paladin bubbles temporarily removing the paladin from aggro tables are just that — rumours.
    8. Righteous Fury is an unattractive thing — no-one likes an angry zealot. Be sure to not use it, especially if you’re having problems picking up the adds.
    9. Righteous Fury is a DPS boost. If you did switch it on for the adds, leave it on for phase 3. Your Nefarian tank was coasting, lazy so-and-so, he needs to work on his threat anyway.
    10. If for some reason you’re feeling kindly to your Nef tank (why??) and want to switch RF off, make sure that some combination of addons/errors/PEBKAC prevents you from doing so2. Stand still in the middle of the raid frantically clicking and reclicking on the buff in the forlorn hope that “the 14th time it’ll work, I know it”.
    11. When you finally give up on spam-clicking your buff and try a different approach, be sure to forget how to spell /cancelaura. Do this several times.
    12. Bonus points if you can spend the entirety of a heroism/bloodlust mistyping “/cancelaura Righteous Fury”3.
    13. Double bonus points if you are outrolled for the tier token by one of your pugged raiders.
    And there you have it. Aren’t you proud to know me now?
    --
    1. I can never remember the name of the damn instance [↩]
    2. I use ElKano’s buff bars, and it wouldn’t let me right-click to remove RF? [↩]
    3. At least I didn’t whisper it to anyone. I don’t think [↩]

    Long overdue guild post


    2011 - 07.21

    Tags: , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, Enthusiasm, Raiding for fun (profit be damned) | 11 Comments »

    We’ve had some changes here in Enthusiasm over the past couple of months.

    We were pretty low on numbers at the end of Wrath, and we struggled mightily with the attendance boss when making our final kills. Moving into Cataclysm, we probably made some mistakes in setting tone and expectations, in not recruiting to give ourselves a little more strength in-depth. So we started raiding late, and cancelled a lot of raids. Disatissified variously with the game and with the guild, a number of players left both and went to play Rift. In total five people left within a couple of weeks, including both our raid leader and our guild leader.

    As the only actively playing officer, I became the new guild leader roughly a week before disappearing for a month or so on a working binge. Not the best timing!

    It took a strongly-worded post on our forum to shake us from our ennui and get our act together. It wasn’t the nicest thread to read, especially as one of the first things I came across on my return, but it was what we needed. Changes were made, and our new officers did more in a week than I’d done in the preceding 8 months.

    So where are we now?

    Well, we’re still not at full raiding strength, although as I’ve complained (jokingly) before, it doesn’t help that we’re a bunch of people with busy lives. There are about 20 of us in the guild at the moment, if I include the few non-raiding members we have and cherish. Of those 20, four have just moved house and are only just returning now they have Internet access at home and one has just returned from a three-week absence for work- and holiday-related travel. One player had an accident while caving and missed a raid through injury. We need more shut-ins!

    That said, I’m feeling pretty positive. We have a couple of new recruits who are busily seeing if they like us and if we like them. Two of the five who left WoW for Rift are back, and as far as I can tell, thoroughly enjoying both the game and the guild.

    We still need some more players. Having five players unavailable because of house moves/travel is fairly exceptional for a guild our size, but there’s always something. For example, this is the first week since… since I can’t remember, actually, that we’re going to have raided on all three of our scheduled nights. And we had to bring in pugs/helpers from our buddy guild to make it happen.

    In spite of that, I think we’ll be ok. With a little luck, another new recruit or two and a following wind, we’re going to have a great time in tier 12.

    So: here’s the elevator speech.

    Enthusiasm is an Alliance 10 man raiding guild on Darkmoon Faire (that’s EU). We like friendly banter, raiding, and complete sentences (yes Mrs Eff, that’s in our official “mission statement”). And cake. We really, really like cake.

    Find out more about us by visiting enthusiasm-guild.com1, fill in our little form (there’s only one question about cake, but don’t let that give you the wrong impression) and/or say hi to us in-game. We’re not Ensidia DREAM-Paragon and we don’t have 900000 members, and we like it that way. Maybe you would too.

    --
    1. excusing the current default design if you please — I’m working on it, I promise [↩]

    Verily I doth admire the players of roles


    2011 - 06.13

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in People of WoW, Raiding for fun (profit be damned), Things I'm learning | 6 Comments »

    I’m not a role-player. I think I might be RP-curious though1.

    The first time I thought about roleplaying in a Warcraft context was probably when I came across Righteous Orbs, reading Tam’s early stories of the prettiest elf et al and the character of his … er … characters. I know this isn’t roleplaying per se, and I certainly didn’t think of it as such, but it was much more characterisation than I’d previously considered.

    Fast forward a bit. Until I read some of Pilf’s RP stories2 I hadn’t thought of roleplaying as anything other than a suspect extension of childhood make-believe. It’s stupid, I know, but that roleplaying is storytelling mixed with improvisation — two things I particularly enjoy, and skills I wish I had — simply hadn’t occurred to me3.

    When I moved to Darkmoon Faire (a European RP-PVE server) I was intrigued by the idea that RP would be taking place around me, even if I didn’t plan to do any roleplaying myself. Of course, in Europe the *real* roleplaying server is Argent Dawn, and whilst there are role-players on DMF I think there are probably considerably more people here because “RP servers have less obnoxious types”4. Anyway, aside from the occasional IC silliness when bumping into a guildie by the auction house, I’ve remained a largely RP free zone. It probably doesn’t help that my main is largely characterless, and try as I might I can’t seem to retrofit a personality to him. He’s just me, wielding a mightier weapon *eyebrows*.

    To that end, I love to read the blogs of people who I think do RP well or are able to get inside the game world and the minds of it’s denizens, and I was delighted by this particular post from Glorwynn at Heavy Wool Bandage about what it means to be a paladin5. Obviously, I have a bit of a personal interest in followers of light, despite Ano-the-character’s persistent Keanu-level characterisation, but it’s with the backstories and lore summaries that I find myself most taken, and the obvious-now-I’ve-been-told revelation that “paladins are people too”.

    I might not be a role-player but even I’ve heard the term “Mary Sue“. One of the problems I’ve always had when considering the character of MY characters has been finding the balance between interestingness and believability. It’s hard to care about the life and times of Brian Q. Bland. It’s harder still to talk to Jeb “Dagger” McDangers (they say he once killed a bare with his bear hands — perhaps he’s a druid) without sniggering. It seems to me that Glorwynn’s post could go a long way towards helping someone get it right.

    –

    So last thursday I was able to join my first raid since… a long time ago, it feels like. I was healing (!) as we had a slightly odd mix of people available, so as a nice gentle introduction we went to Baradin Hold for the first fight.

    The second fight was Cho’gall. *whimper*6 Does anyone else think this makes our raid leader a meanie?

    After 90 minutes, we seemed to have hit a wall in terms of improvement so toddled over to Blackwing to quickly kill the first couple of bosses; a cheerful end to the evening.

    Next on the to-do list: the troll dungeons — I did most of one of them before I left but haven’t had a chance to go back, and now I’m all nervy about going in clueless. *whine*

    --
    1. to mangle a popular phrase [↩]
    2. I must have followed a recommendation from something; it’s not something I would have sought out. I’m glad I did though. [↩]
    3. handily, I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be smart on mb.com [↩]
    4. that’s the impression I get at least [↩]
    5. it made me go back and read her blog from the beginning, an activity I’d highly recommend if you find yourself with a little free time [↩]
    6. a disadvantage of my not having played for a while, and not being a main spec healer, was that it was hard to know exactly how badly I was doing during the Cho’gall encounter. Wiping to tank death on pretty much every attempt probably offers a hint or tw, mind. Certainly, the difference in stress level between the Cho’gall fight and the Golem council fight (which is reasonably complex from a moving-and-mechanics point of view) was very noticeable. [↩]
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