Category: Warcraft

Finding Our Place

Posted on by Gazimoff

As we drift towards the end of Wrath and eagerly await the launch of Cataclysm, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on how magecraft has fared. From the new spells the expansion brought through to the talent changes each patch, we’ve been through considerable change. And yet I can’t help but think that we’re not as special as we once were.

What started this all off was the movie Yesterday’s News. It’s about how the Meeting Stone crafter copes with a changing world where the LFD tool makes meeting stones redundant. It struck a chord with me – I’ve been seeing increasing numbers of mages struggling to get groups with both PuGs and their own raidgroups. Even my own raidgroup only tend to miss a mage when they don’t have any free strudel – other than that, there’s not really an issue.

The current state of mages was really brought home for me by Larisa’s great analysis of Paragon’s world first kill of Arthas in 25-man heroic mode. If you look at their raid setup you’ll notice that they decided not to bring any mages. There’s a thread explaining the choice on Paragon’s forum, where they pinpoint the slightly lower DPS output as the reason. A pure DPS class would get benched, with other DPS classes and hybrid classes specced as DPS being used instead.

What about the other tricks that mages have? With the homogenisation that’s taken place during Wrath, mages have only two unique tricks left up their sleeve – polymorph and strudels. Arcane Intellect can be swapped for Fel Intelligence, while even the recent Arcane Empowerment buff can be matched by Retribution paladins and Beastmaster hunters. Crowd Control has been sidelined for much of Wrath, with AoE tanking being the preferred method for the majority of trash pulls and offtanks used for adds during bossfights.

Larisa is right to be concerned – even though the difference is slight, she’s worried that raid groups will look to Paragon’s results as a reason why their own groups are underperforming, and may choose to run without mages as a result. This argument only stacks up when each player is equally skilful at their class and you’re purely relying on statistics to minmax, but that point may be missed on those looking to form groups, raids and so on. They’ll point to the Paragon forums and say that it’s official: mages don’t cut it any more.

The whole situation is compounded further when you have scenarios like the one described by Krizzlybear on their blog. Considering that with a mage’s three talent trees that you have one that still doesn’t compete against other classes and another that’s laughed at completely, you begin to wonder what the point of playing a mage is. Even the skill of the player is discarded entirely, despite when they demonstrate that they’re just as capable of keeping up.

I’m not trying to encourage anyone to change their spec; I had to go through Molten Core as a Frost mage even though I much prefer Fire. Rather, I’d prefer to see the three specs brought in line with each other so that they all bring solid DPS but also provide additional benefits depending on the chosen tree. I’m hoping that this will arrive with the complete talent revamp for Cataclysm, so that the differences between each tree aren’t in terms of damage output but in terms of playstyle and what else the mage can do besides damage.

These things are cyclical – I remember when Warlocks, Paladins and Warriors were all in the same position that mages find themselves in now. I’ve also got faith that thes problems will be resolved and that once again all three specs will be matched on a spreadsheet (even if the skill of the players can vary wildly). It’s an agonising wait though, considering that we’re currently at the end of March and Cataclysm is predicted to land in October. We might be looking at six to eight months before the pre-expansion patch is released and all the talent trees get revamped.

Till then, mages have a job to do. It’s up to us to show the rest of the Warcraft-playing public that in the 99.99% of cases that aren’t a Lich King heroic world first kill that we still have something worthwhile to contribute.

Hitting the Reset Button

Posted on by Gazimoff

Videogames seem to be full of choice these days. It could be the moral choices presented by games like Mass Effect 2, or the theoretical choices of gear selection in World of Warcraft, Heck, it can even be something as straightforward as choosing a driver in Mario Kart. But if you lost your saved game or started a new account, would you make the same choices? Would you choose the same character and take the same path, or would you try your hand at something new?

I’m trying to tackle this question for the BlogAzeroth Shared Topic this week. For me it breaks down into three chunks – would I still play a mage, would I still do the same things at endgame and would the character be roleplayed differently? I’m only going to try tackling the first one this time round – I’ve already covered how my playstyle has changed, while my roleplay histories would be another post entirely!

I’ve tried three other MMO’s while I’ve been playing Warcraft, and with each of them I tried something different. My mage was sitting unloved and unplayed while I saw healers and tanks become the heroes and stars. I decided that when I started a new game that I’d play one of these roles – that I would be the one that everyone would be wanting in their party or raid. As a result, with Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan I thought I’d try and be clever.

With LOTRO I tried playing a healing Minstrel, while with AoC I rolled a tanking Dark Templar. Both ended up as dismal failures – my minstrel felt unwieldy under my fingers, while the Dark Templar didn’t have many opportunities to actually tank leaving me with a boring solo grind.

After three months of play in both games I ended up cancelling my accounts. To this day I don’t feel that I gave the games a fair chance. I’ve since tried to go back and give LOTRO another go since but keep on getting stuck on a known issue between Windows Vista and the client software.

Aion was a different story. I rolled a mage and had a great time. I levelled up, specialised for even more damage and killed things even quicker. I felt like I was in my element, and general game engine clunkyness aside it kept me entertained for a while. The problem emerged when I started looking outside of magecraft and towards other areas like professions, crafting, dungeoneering and so on. It’s strange, but although the “mage” aspect was solid, the other aspects of the game weren’t sufficient to hold me. As with the others, I eventually unsubscribed.

So if I had to start over, would I stick with what I have or would I try something new? To me it’s pretty clear that when playing MMOs I have an affinity for a particular role. I’ve even played all the other classes in Warcraft to some degree and still keep coming back to my mage. That’s not to say that the other classes aren’t as good, but it’s because I know who I am as a player. I’ve tried to prioritise other roles in other games and it’s harmed my enjoyment of that game as a result. I’ve come to learn that being honest about what I prefer to play is better than trying to be tactical about what role I select.

I think that there are other players who feel the same –who have a core role or class that they’re happiest playing, but might occasionally dabble in other roles in order to try something different. Even though we might be playing a priest or a paladin, we always know that there’s a class that we’ll go back to.

Angry Mage is Angry

Posted on by Gazimoff

I managed to get pissed off at so many things yesterday. It seems laughable looking back on it, how can a videogame get me so worked up? It’s stupid, right? I mean, I’m a grown adult, so why let a game affect my mood so much? Why let it get to me?

Right.

I’ve been getting seriously annoyed with the loading screen bug. The one which seems to have only started in 3.3.3, where you’ve chosen your character and you’re waiting for the game to load. The progress bar fills up and seems about to run then just sits there. I can hear the dulcet tones of Dalaran zone music in the background, so I figure it’s just taking a while before flipping to in-game. Maybe some data got dropped between here and Paris, and it’s just taking  while to resync. It’s like some kind of digital tease, tormenting me while it sits there and does nothing.

No point waiting though. The game has hung, so it’s back to alt+F4 then going through the whole thing again. Email address, password, authenticator code. And I’ve usually got one of those bits wrong, so I usually end up typing it again, hammering each key deliberately as if my keyboard is being held personally responsible for my failure to type.

Trouble is, it won’t stop happening. It’s like an itch that you can’t scratch, growing more and more irritating. It feels like I have to log in two or three times just to get the game to load. When I’m switching servers or hopping between my two accounts, it’s a real bugbear.

That’s just one issue though, and a technical one to boot. Getting worked up about it is a bit like having a rage against a server. Sure, you might want to pull on your steel toecapped boots and punt it round the datacentre a bit, but that isn’t going to suddenly make it work. You might feel better, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The thing that made me throw in the towel today was just sitting around in Dalaran. I figured that after a successful raid on Wednesday that I’d try my luck in VoA. There’s badges, there’s Tier 10, so it’s worth a go. We’ve just won Wintergrasp so I pipe up in Trade and LFG that I’m looking for a VoA group. As soon as I do it, there’s something like 4 or 5 other mages all saying “Take me, take me instead!” It’s reminds me of a birds’ nest, with a clutch of mage chicklets all chirping away hoping to be the one to get the invite worm.

I don’t know where they all came from. It feels as if everyone just said “You know what, I’m going to play my mage today.” So I go sod it, I have alts, I’ll play them instead. Sod the competition, I’ll see if I can do something in the guild another time.

I fire up my priest. I figure that he’s got the tier 10 robe, so there’s a good chance I can find a ToC or ICC PuG for him to join. Earn some rep, get a few badges, maybe snaffle a few drops at the same time. I find an ICC10 group looking for a healer and tank, so I join up. I should have realised something was up when there were only 7 spots filled, but I shrugged it off. I alt-tabbed, fired up Google Reader and scanned through some blogposts while I waited for the raid to fill.

From there things went from bad to worse. An hour later we finally enter the instance after suffering numerous joins, dropouts and so on. We have a resto druid attempting to MT heal with 1FPS. A resto shaman who is watching TV half the time. Another tank who has to leave because “something else came up”. One wipe at Marrowgar later and the raidleader’s having to replace people.

We finally get a group back together with a replacement for the tank and resto druid. We’re all set and ready to have another attempt at the boss. Only the resto shaman is AFK. She’s watching TV, asking us to wait while her programme finishes. At that point, the tank that just arrived sees the group for the joke it is and leaves.

I follow shortly after.

I know this is an MMO – that it’s supposed to be Massively Multiplayer. I get that this is the point. But sometimes the biggest selling point of the game is also it’s most crippling weakness. The sheer amount of asshattery that goes on in the game is a nightmare, and it feels like it’s something that’s only become worse since the cross-server LFD tool. It means that the decent people – the guilds I’m in and the people I play with – are all the more valuable.

It also means that sometimes I just want to treat it like an RPG. Like Dragon Age without all the cut-scenes and dialog trees. I just want to choose an anonymous alt, sit somewhere and go questing. Everyone else can shove off for a few hours. Just play it like a single-player game with a chatbox and mash buttons for a while.

There are always going to be asshats. You’ll find them in every game, from Counter Strike to Checkers. No amount of programming wizardry or karma system has been able to remove asshats from a game, or to generally discourage asshattery so much that it’s no longer worthwhile. All you can hope to do is minimise the effect that they have on your game, or ensure that the density of asshats is so dilute that their overall impact is negligible.

Meanwhile I’ll sigh, shrug my shoulders and carry on playing. After all, it’s only a game.

Isn’t it?

UI Quest: Staying on Target

Posted on by Gazimoff

Continuing in my series of UI customisation, I wanted to spend some time focusing on what most people call unit frames. These small boxes display how much health and power (mana, rage, energy or runic power) you have, along with a bar to show you how much is remaining. They also do the same for your party members, raid members, your target and so on. As a result, they’re a popular target for customisation.

There are several popular unit frame addons available, including X-Perl, Pitbull, ag_unitframes and Shadowed. I’ve used X-Perl in the past, but I’ve never been a fan of the blocky way that frames are presented by default. I’ve also tried ag_Unitframes in the dim past, but wanted to try something that would fit more with the streamlined look I was going for while still being easy to configure. In the end I’ve gone for Shadowed Unit Frames as they’re cleanly presented and easy to configure.

Once installed, a dialog box appears asking if you want to disable anchoring. You should do this, as otherwise all your unit frames will appear glued together and you won’t be able to pull them apart. When you’ve removed anchoring, use the command /suf to bring up the configuration window.

As you can see, I can immediately start moving the frames around, then just tick the Lock Frames box when I’m done to fix everything in place. The first thing I’ll want to do is put the frames where I want them, so I start by dragging them into place above my button bar. If you remember the original plan I drew up, the idea was to keep the top three quarters of the screen as clear as possible.

After a bit of tweaking, each frame is tucked up above the button bar. From left to right I’ve got a focus frame, my character’s frame, my target’s frame (with the portrait on the opposite side), my target’s target and my target’s target’s target (phew!) You can pick which unitframes you have enabled from the Enabled Units menu. I’ve decided not to have Party or Raid Frames shown by Shadowed, as I want to use something else for these. I’ll be covering party and raid interfaces later on in this series.

You might not need all of these frames visible – a lot of them can be hidden and it depends on your playstyle if you’ll find them useful. The focus frame is useful to me for tracking polymorph targets, so if you’re in the habit of using crowd control it’s very useful to keep an eye on. Knowing who my target is targeting is also useful to me, because if I’m solo farming I want to make sure the mob I’m looking at hasn’t been tagged by someone else. It also means in a dungeon or raid that I can see if the tank has aggro or I do.

The target’s target’s target sounds like a bit of a mouthful, but is only really useful in raiding when a tank is tracking multiple targets at once. If I’m targeting a mob, I want to know if that mob is targeting the tank (target’s target). I also want to know if the tank is focusing on building aggro on the mob, or if he has a different target that he’s attacking. Because I can now see which mob the tank is building aggro on, I know if I can nuke the target safely, if I need to drop my DPS slightly or if I need to swap to whatever the tank actually has targeted.

Once I’ve got the unitframes I’m interested in displayed and the rest hidden away, I can then work on the detail for each one. Options like portraits and bar colours are first on the list, but there’s also some tweaks I want to make.

Each unit frame can be individually customised to suit my needs. The first check is to make sure Combat text is enabled – this means that I get a visual flash on my unitframes during combat. if you’ve ever used Scrolling Combat Text, you’ll know that it can get spammed up with stuff really quickly. By having something unique that’s only affecting what I’m interested in, I won’t miss something in the spam.

I’ve also made a couple of changes under the Aura settings. By default all the buff icons would be below the unit frame, ending up right over my action bars. Under the Auras tab I can change these so that they appear above both my unit frame and my target’s. I’m not really interested in the auras of other unitframes, so I’ll leave those disabled. By enabling buffs then setting the position to the top of the unitframe, they’ll grow upwards. I can also tag debuffs to anchor to buffs, so they’ll follow suit. I’ve even ticked the Enlarge Your Auras option under debuffs so that the Arcane Blast debuff appears larger than the others and is easier to track.

The final part of any unit frame is deciding on the text that should be shown. Again, this is one of those things that you’ll need to decide as part of your playstyle – do you want to know the absolute health of a mob or just the percentage? The former’s useful in raids where you have a boss that switches phases at a certain percentage of remaining health, while solo players just want a feel for if they can take on a mob or not. The best thing here is to experiment with options until you find something you’re comfortable with.

Wrapping up, the Hide Blizzard option means that I can hide parts of the default UI if they make up part of my unit frames. In this example, I’ve decided to hide the default Focus frame and Buff Frames, as I have them covered elsewhere.

There’s a lot more that Shadowed can do and I’ve only covered the basics here, but hopefully this will have helped to point you in the right direction. As always, feel free to leave questions, suggestions and observations in the comments.

The UI Quest Series (in progress):

Amusing the Muse

Posted on by Gazimoff

About a week ago Windsoar from Jaded Alt was celebrating six months of Warcraft blogging. In order to celebrate hitting this milestone she offered herself as a muse to anyone who asked. While I’m still new to this myself I thought that it would be fun to try, expecting something related to magecraft. Unexpectedly, the suggestion from my muse was a completely different.

I peruse a lot of new blogs as I welcome new bloggers to BA. Yours was one of those that really stood out–professionally laid out, and quick, tight posts right from the start.

What’d I’d like to know is, why’d you start? When I read a post, I feel like you’ve been doing this forever, but I know darn well that I only welcomed you to my reader in the last couple of weeks! Curious minds want to know.

It’s true, I’d only started blogging about Warcraft at the beginning of the month. I’d been playing the game since the day of release here in Europe, but only now felt that I wanted to write about it? It definitely sounds unusual, and like most unusual things it has a bit of a tale behind it.

The journey that led me to creating The Mana Obscura is a haphazard one that probably starts before I even started playing Warcraft. I was involved with a couple of hobbies and used to make little community websites for them. Forums, galleries and the like – helping them to keep in touch and share ideas. Some of them are still running, although most have been handed on. It was a start, allowing me to build up experience in how to develop content-based websites – how to lay them out, what information to put where and so on.

When I started playing Warcraft Earthen Ring famously didn’t have a realm forum. An enterprising player created one, but it went out of service once Blizzard gave us an official realm forum. Part-way into Burning Crusade a crackdown started on the same official forums, with raidguild recruitment threads being locked or deleted. In response I banded together with a couple of other players and set up EarthenRing.EU. It’s a project I’ve since handed over to other players, but it’s still used and has some interesting content.

So this explains the technical stuff but not the writing. For that I need to pull on a different thread.

For my job I write a lot of technical documentation, with most of it being designs for new telecommunications products and services. It’s mostly translating an image that I hold in my head into words on a page, explaining how whatever it is would work so that other people can go off and build it. Sometimes my blogposts sound a bit like an excerpt from one of these documents, particularly if I’m trying to explain something. It has it’s own form of language – quite formal and unemotive – that can creep into whatever else I’m doing.

I’ve worked on Wikipedia, in creating new articles and cleaning up existing ones. It’s something that’s fun for a while, but it started to feel restrictive to me. I wanted to express my own opinions on what I was writing about, but was limited to quoting other “reliable sources”. Eventually the limitations, coupled with an ongoing degradation of the community, persuaded me to call time on it.

I’ve also blogged before, keeping a geekBlog of all things technology. While it was an ambitious project, it was also fairly restrictive. I ended up having to research everything heavily just to justify the opinions I held, referencing everything out and spending a heavy amount of time on each blogpost. In the end it became a chore to update, and as a result I’ve put it on hiatus. I would like to restart it at some point, but it’ll probably have a new format and shorter, snappier posts.

While I was working on the geekBlog I also did some guest blogging for Media140. This was great for me as it taught me the value of editing – chipping away at an article until it’s honed to perfection and polished to a shine. While my own editing is nowhere near as good as the the professional editor I wrote for, I like to think it taught me a few things.

Looking back on it now, it feels almost inevitable. I had a desire to write about videogames (particularly World of Warcraft, but some other stuff from time to time), but I also wanted to have fun writing it. I wanted to feel like I was having conversations with people instead of presenting a formal argument or specification. I was also thinking that I got a lot of fun out of playing games, and that writing about that fun would give me a chance to relive it.

So there you have it – the story of how The Mana Obscura came to exist and why I started to blog about Warcraft. I wonder now if my tale lived up to my muse’s expectations…

(image credit: Parnassus by Andrea Mantegna, currently held at the Louvre)

Battling the Burnout

Posted on by Gazimoff

Last night’s raiding was fantastic. We had a bit of silliness and fun, but we cleared up to (and including) Festergut, leaving the rest of the week clear for progression work. I also picked up Abracadaver, with the additional hit and haste making that transition to a Fire spec more possible if the numbers stack up. I’m not sure if the guild will go for it though – they’re already hooked on the Arcane Empowerment change.

My raiding schedule is pretty light though – I might spend two or three nights a week in a raid. I’m also pretty much exclusive to 10-man stuff – while I might pick up a 25-man VoA or ICC rep run, it’s not essential to me. It means my time is free to do other things like work on alts, roleplay, work on crafting or whatever else I fancy. I like to mix up my game like this – it means I’ve always got stuff to do.

It’s strange in a way. Back when I was hardcore I used to log in, raid, log off. I’d then repeat this cycle six or seven times a week with raiding being the only thing I’d play for. I had other people farming materials for flasks or other buffs for me. For those five hours a night, I’d focus on the screen and nothing else. Dinner would go cold on the plate next to me. The only thing that mattered was the next server first, the next boss, the next raid.

In the end, I burnt out. Raiding was impacting every aspect of my life. I would go to sleep at 2am, only to get up again at 6am and shuffle to work for nine hours. I’d snatch tokens of sleep on the train to work, running on coffee day and night. In all, it wasn’t a great way to live and I called time on it. I ended up quitting completely for a while and going cold turkey. I think Protflashes brings out a great example in this post. It’s well worth reading because it really shows what burnout feels like – you want to change  what you’re doing, but you feel you can’t because others are relying on you. There’s this sense of moral obligation that hangs there.

Anyhow, after a while I realised what I liked about the game – what kept me playing. I’ve already touched on the people side in previous posts – the strong team spirit we had as a raidguild was something that spurred me on. But more than that, I also realised that there’s about five or six different games that I play within Warcraft. Each of these smaller games like questing, gathering and crafting, duelling or PvP, dungeoneering etc. all work together to make this overall meta-game. It’s one of the things missed by other MMOs that I’ve played, which is why people tend to play them for a short time after release but then end up cancelling once they’ve finished with the few micro-games they like.

Larisa’s got a further point about it in her post about making our own Cataclysm. She suggests trying something completely new, like trying out PvP or experimenting with roleplay. It’s solid advice because it encourages mixing things up. Similar recommendations came back on Twitter, with taking a break, playing a different game, switching focus to a different game aspect or even just rerolling a new character.

The thing that gnaws away for me is inevitability, like we’re destined to go through this cycle of play-burnout-break-play. And even though we can mix things up by introducing new elements to our game, I’m not sure if it’ll help eliminate burnout completely – it feels like it’ll just extend that time between trying something new and growing weary of it. Then again, I can’t exatly talk from experience – I don’t know of anyone that’s avoided burnout or how they managed to do it.

I’m also beginning to feel that although we each have a personal responsibility for keeping our game fresh, there’s some responsibility to the guild or raidgroup to help keep their players interested in logging in. After all, we want people to feel motivated and wanting to play, not that they feel obliged to out of some kind of moral responsibility. How that should work, I’m not so sure. It’s like I can feel the shape of it, but not the detail. Maybe I’m too distant from guild leadership these days.

I hate leaving on a low note, but it’s something I see happening all around me and I can’t help but think that there’s something broken about it. If we can understand how to avoid burnout it’ll mean we feel happier about playing the games we love. If we don’t, I can’t help but think that this cycle is going to continue. Not just for Warcraft, but for every future MMO we choose to play.

Patch 3.3.3: Twisted Firestarter?

Posted on by Gazimoff

For us over in Europe tomorrow is Patch Day, while those players in the US are already downloading, installing and waiting for servers to come back online. Regardless, the theorycrafters have been out in force, pouring over every talent change and glyph update. But while some classes get some interesting updates, the changes for mages seem bland by comparison.

Before I get into my opinions though, let’s look at what’s been changed in the patch.

Arcane

  • Arcane Empowerment: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc off of critical strikes. The self damage buff remains unchanged.
  • Incanter’s Absorption: This talent now only grants additional spell power when damage is absorbed by Mana Shield, Frost Ward, Fire Ward, or Ice Barrier. The limit of 5% of the mage’s health on the spell power buff has been removed.

Fire

  • Burning Soul: Threat reduction is now 10/20%, up from 5/10%.
  • Combustion: The cooldown on this spell is now 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
  • Empowered Fire: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.
  • Torment the Weak: This talent now also applies to Pyroblast damage.

Frost

  • Frostbolt: Spell power scaling on this spell has been increased by approximately 5%.
  • Brain Freeze: This talent now allows your next Fireball or Frostfire Bolt to be instant and cost no mana. There is a small internal cooldown to keep the Frostfire Bolt from immediately triggering Brain Freeze again.

Glyphs

  • Glyph of Fireball: No longer increases critical strike chance of Fireball. Instead, it now reduces the cast time of Fireball by 0.15 seconds.

Bug Fixes

  • Arcane Empowerment: Fixed a bug preventing Rank 3 from granting 3% damage.
  • Burning Determination: This talent will no longer sometimes have its effect removed by the same spell that triggered it.
  • Dragon’s Breath: Druids can no longer remove the disorientation effect from this spell by canceling their current shapeshift.
  • Enduring Winter: Tooltip corrected to match actual Replenishment mana regeneration numbers.
  • Fingers of Frost: Mages with Molten Armor active who have the Shatter talent will no longer lose Fingers of Frost charges when Molten Armor causes reactive damage. In addition, the effect from this talent now displays the number of charges on the buff icon.

In a nutshell, Arcane mages get a flat-rate buff instead of one that relied on crits, but lose out on the Incanter’s Absorption trick. Let’s be fair though, only the high-end mages were using this trick – for the average mage it’s no great loss. Fire mages get some interesting changes in the form of threat reduction, more crits and more damage when they crit often. It means that hitting the Hot Streak proc and getting that Instant-cast Pyroblast is becoming even more important. Frost mages get some slight love, mainly from the Fingers of Frost bug fix and the Frostbolt scaling changes.

Will this change anything? I’m seeing a lot of talk from the high-end about Arcane mages going back over to Fire, but the difference I’m seeing is marginal at best. I’m more worried about the practical rather than the theory, and how it’ll translate into bossfight combat.

While theory is great for when you’re standing still and just tapping your hotkeys, most Wrath bossfights involve some kind of movement or rhythm. Looking at the relative casting time of Arcane Blast versus Fireball, I think that Arcane will still win out for most fights where movement is important. It might be that the extra range from Flame Throwing will compensate for some of it, but I’m thinking more about encounters like Blood Princes or Marrowgar.

I also think that a fair chunk of mages just won’t bother. We ditched a ton of hit gear when Arcane became the spec to have and I reckon that there are several who can’t be bothered to collect the additional hit gear again just to go back. This is another one of those reasons why Hit modifiers really need to come out of the talent trees.

Frost will still be the spec for PVP mages, but the buffs still don’t push it up next to Arcane and Fire for raid suitability. It also feels like the tweaks and bugfixes are tinkering around the edges. I don’t think that Frost players will be on a level playing field until much later.

I think the real excitement will hit with 3.9, when the talents get their full revamp along with the Cataclysm stat changes. Until then, it feels like we’re just waiting for people to run the numbers before we go out, change our specs and regem our gear.

The Crutches, They Do Nothing!

Posted on by Gazimoff

Over the last few days I’ve been raiding slightly more than usual. I’ve been back into Icecrown a couple more times, where it feels that we’re around the Festergut-Rotface level of progression. I’ve also been back to ToC10 in order to pick up more badges and test out my new UI. It’s been a pretty interesting experience, as I’ve suddenly realised a couple of things.

The first thing that struck me was how I didn’t miss my boss mods, although it feels a bit weird playing without them. I had it drummed into me after blowing up the raid on Baron Geddon in Molten Core that I needed to download CT RaidAssist and pay attention to the pings. As I progressed through content, I moved to BigWigs then DeadlyBossMods, but I’ve always had something installed. I thought that it was one of those essentials, like raidframes.

Back in the day of Baron Geddon, you needed the boss mods. The debuff was a subtle effect, so unless you were watching out for it the first thing you’d know about it would be when everyone yells at you on Vent. Nowadays it’s like a giant Christmas bauble has landed on your head, making it blatantly obvious that Something is Wrong. Even The Bad is more blatant now – Blizzard famously changed the flooring in the Koralon encounter to make the flames easier to see.

As a mage it’s even easier – you don’t need to watch for when the boss is doing his Super Special Ability as he’ll usually shout it to make it blatantly obvious. The XT-001 fight is a typical example – you have plenty of time to prepare for the heart to drop, pop your trinkets and nuke your face off. The only time I was missing things slightly was during the Lord Jaraxxus Fight, and that’s only because I was missing out on some great spellsteals.

I know it’s different for healers. When I’m on my priest I like to pre-empt the nasty AOE ith a precast AoE heal. I’m not doubting that it’s different for other classes as well, who either struggle to see The Bad from their perspective, or need to track debuff stacks etc. But even though I’ll probably get round to reinstalling DeadlyBossMods, I don’t think I’ll rely on it much unless the fights change drastically later in Icecrown.

The other thing that rebuilding my UI has brought out is this incessant need in me to tessellate everything. The action bars must be square, which must line up with Recount and Omen. Everything must be the same colour, and have the same style, and fit together.

And there must be NO GAPS

Which causes a problem when the minimap is round, but I want it in the bottom corner with my other stuff. I could make it square to fit neatly, but then it doesn’t look all shiny. But with it being round there are gaps, which wastes space, which drives me nuts. Still, I’ll relax. I’ll go and flick through the Warcraft Ikea Catalogue that is Curse Gaming’s addon site, and find something that works and fits.

Finally, I’ve promised that if I ever get the Argent Resolve on my priest, I’ll race-change him to Gnome as soon as Cataclysm launches. People will hate me for it.

Standing in Awe

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s an old saying that we experience entertainment with all of our senses. We might watch in amazement at a breathtaking movie, or rock out with a CD from our favourite artists. We might enjoy the smell of a rich cup of coffee or a freshly baked loaf of bread, or savour the taste of a succulent steak or fine wine. The theory is that by tickling the senses, we generate an emotional response – we cheer at a movie, cherish the coffee. The question is, can the same be said of videogames? Moreso, can those feelings be rekindled time and again?

This shape of question was set as the BlogAzeroth shared topic this week, and it’s a tough one to tackle. This is partly because trying to recall the experiences I felt five years ago when the game launched is a struggle in itself. But also there’s the bigger question – does a game need to continually need to entertain us in order to survive? Or does it become like a soap opera – we log in, we see the same familiar names and faces and feel warmed by just by being part of something?

To tackle the first, I’ll go back to where my videogaming was at the end of 2004. I’d been cajoled into playing an MMO called Horizons (now Istaria) by my girlfriend. It was a clunky experience, but provided a contrast to my usual fare of first-person shooters. I’d been brought up on the rich visual fare of Quake (proper 3d!), Unreal (emerging from the crashsite-wow!) and so on.

In the lead up to the European launch of World of Warcraft, I’d been getting heavily into Half-Life 2. If you’ve played this game, you’ll know that it’s a visual feast. You’ll also know that it’s jammed full of loading screens – go down a pipe: loading screen, open a door: loading screen. Even so, you get the idea – I liked to go stomping around places while being hideously overpowered.

Once I’d got past the installation-patching-account creation-character selection malarkey, my patience was wearing pretty thin. I remember thinking that this game needed to impress me a ton if I was going to stick with it.

The strange thing was that I did. There were so many things that impressed me about the early days of the game – the flight from Thelsamar to Ironforge and back was spectacular, really showing off what the game was capable of. It didn’t bother me that the graphics weren’t up to my usual fare – the atmosphere and style had been loaded in by the bucketful.

I remember being taken on a journey by the guild I was with to the Shimmering flats, running through Dustwallow Marsh and the Thousand Needles just to make it to the raceway. I remember climbing the mountain in the Barrrens just to see the Shrine of the Fallen Warrior. The little touches, the way the world had been crafted, it constantly amazed me.

Of course, there comes a time where you’ve seen every location. You’ve seen the sun set over Freewind Post, or the hidden treasure of the Crystal Cave. The awe started to fade, the novelty to wear off. It was just at this point where my game changed.

My girlfriend told me that there was a raid forming to Molten Core, and that they were looking for mages in Ironforge. If I was quick, I might be able to get invited. I’d never raided before and was only dimly aware that it happened, but I was keen and adventurous (and importantly, attuned to the dungeon!) so I contacted the raidleader. I instantly got an invite and got told to head out there.

The next five hours were some of the most intense, chaotic and riotous that I’ve ever spent inside any game. It was also a ridiculous amount of fun and I’d definitely caught the bug. I’d walked away with the Arcanist Belt and was determined to collect the rest of the set. Two weeks later the girlfriend joined me on a raid and won the Core Forged Greaves. I phoned her afterwards and all she said for half an hour was “Shooooess!” For a self confessed pure roleplayer, she was thrilled to bits to have earned them.

I’ve seen this cycle repeated in the subsequent expansions. The initial discovery of new content will always be a visual feast, from the lush plains of Nagrand to the lore-rich steppes of Zul’Drak. The excitement of getting new spells is never something that will wear off, particularly when it’s things like Spellsteal, Invisibility and Mirror Image. But like anything, this awe fades over time, until the arcane becomes the mundane.

In between the content patches and expansions when there’s nothing new to explore or experience, it’s what’s created by the players that keeps a game fresh. People to team up with and raid with, friends to have a laugh and joke with. Podcasters that remind you why you’re playing the game, or bloggers that share their own tales. In the end, it’s all this that keeps filling me with awe and surprise long after the novelty fades.

UI Quest: Mashing the Buttons

Posted on by Gazimoff

For the first step in rebuilding my UI, I’m going to concentrate on what I think is the second most important part: the buttons. These colourful icons are usually laid out like strips of candy, just waiting for you try one. What I’m going to try and do is make them more useful, ensuring that only the important ones are shown while the rest are tucked out of sight.

In case you’re wondering, the most important element of any user interface is the collection of video settings. If you’re thinking of playing around with these, this excellent forum post should help to get you started. A good baseline is to go for around 40 frames per second (FPS) while in a 25–man raid or a busy battleground before you start using any addons. You’ll probably find that your FPS will vary wildly from area to area, so it’s a good idea to design your UI based on where your computer will be working the hardest.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m using a 20.1″  TFT monitor set at 1680×1050 (that’s a 16:10 aspect ratio) and hooked up using a DVI connector. If you’re using a different screen resolution or aspect ratio you’ll probably want to tweak things to suit your own needs.

Before going through the button bar changes, it’s worth taking a look at the default UI and explain what I’m hoping to change. As standard, the default interface comes with a single action bar (configurable row of buttons), the minimenu and a row of bags. There’s also an XP or reputation bar that runs above the buttons. The XP bar and bags will be tackled another time, but for now we’ll focus on the action bars and minimenu.

There are a few addons that will replace your action bars but by far the most popular is Bartender4. This addon adds a beer tankard shaped icon from your minimap, from which you can control where the bars sit on the screen as well as adjust each bar’s settings. I’ve started off by enabling bars one through four, and dragging the first three to the bottom of the screen.

I’ve left bar 4 floating to one side to start with, but then start using it to hold actions that I don’t need in combat. Abilities like crafting professions, mounts and conjurations can all be moved to this fourth bar. I’ve deliberately left off portals completely, as there’s some useful addons that I’ll cover later that are great for these.

Now that I’ve got my block of three actionbars, I can start to tidy the others.

My fourth action bar – the one with all the stuff I rarely use – will end up on the side of the screen. Likewise the minimenu will be changed from being a long strip to a block. By playing with the Rows attribute for both of these, I can change them from their default appearance so that they’ll fit where I place them. I can also change the size (scale) and spacing (padding) of these buttons to suit their low usage.

I also want to make some further tweaks to bar four so that it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the action. I’m going to make it more transparent out of combat by setting a fade, but I also want it to vanish completely during combat.

By setting the visibility of the fourth action bar to Hide in Combat and by giving it a suitable Fade Out Alpha, I can make it look transparent unless I hover over it with the mouse cursor. As soon as I go into combat it vanishes completely.

To finish the look, I’m going to use two further addons: ButtonFacade and OmniCC. The first one allows me to change the shape and look of the buttons in a process called skinning. You can find several different skins from minimalist boxes to cog shapes as separate downloads from addon sites. OmniCC adds an overlay on top of the button to show what the cooldown remaining on an ability is. I’ve used the default settings on OmniCC and the Zoomed skin that comes included with ButtonFacade to complete the setup.

I’ve not covered macros in this guide as they tend to be class specific. And as I’ve said before, I’ll be coming back to that bag bar and XP bar later on.Of course, this layout may not be to your taste, so feel free to experiment!

The next one in the series will be around unitframes and making sure you have enough information about your character and your target. As always, if you have any questions or if you spot something I’ve missed, feel free to shout in the comments.

The UI Quest Series (in progress):