Tag: raiding

What Is Hardcore?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Just what is a hardcore guild anyway? And how do you define a hardcore player? This has been a pretty big question for me and the guild I’m in. Ask around and you’ll probably get a different answer from every person. It’s one of those hard-to-define attribute that means different things to different people.

In my own mind, hardcore is raiding six nights a week, farming for flasks and food when you’re not raiding, sitting standby outside instances in-case someone’s internet goes down and letting the GM have you on speed-dial in case he needs to pull you in for the night. It’s about progress and performance, where being server first is everything and where players live or die by their World of Logs parses.

Casual is where I see myself at currently, in a guild where fun is more important than progress and attendance is a mere two nights out of three. It’s something I’ve grown comfortable in, like the grizzled veteran who still likes to show what he can do occasionally (read: pull aggro, make sarcastic comments). It’s this comfort that got disrupted a little when the Guild Master decides to convene a Guild Meeting to discuss The Rules.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not a huge fan of blogging about my guild, especially when it’s about the more rocky moments. I don’t want to antagonise or make things worse. After all, if you’ve raided with a bunch of people for a while it’s better to work things out than throw it all in, right?

Fear not though, for this tale is not without a happy ending!

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The Merits of Old Content

Posted on by Gazimoff

One of the discussions I hear popping up every so often is about old content. It’s a bit of a shame that every time a new tier of raiding comes out that the old tier gets abandoned, gathering dust and cobwebs. The Justice and Valour point system means that new raiders can skip old content completely, using heroic instances to buy raid gear and get into the current stuff.

Content from old expansions is even less less used unless there’s a mount or a legendary weapon that can be farmed from it. Molten Core is still useful for people wanting Thunderfury, but it’s not exactly a popular destination.

So what can you use old content for? Aside from mounts and legendaries, there’s a stack of achievements just waiting to be picked up. With the new guild achievement system there’s some easy points there for people that can get their guilds organised. Plus since most content can be zerged it’s a bit of fun, especially if you’re doing 25-man dungeons with ten people.

It also allows the veterans to give a bit of a history lesson on old raids…

How about you? What do you use old raids and content for? Are you hunting for all the guild achievements? Or do you something else to let off steam as a guild?

Mages and Patch 4.2

Posted on by Gazimoff

A lot of us have been in a kind of holding pattern since 4.1 came out. Some of us have been focused on mopping up the current tier of raiding, like a roast dinner with lashings of gravy that you just need a bit of bread to polish off. Others have been filling a few gaps here and there with the troll content, using the new epics to fill a couple of gaps in our gear.

Patch 4.2 is approaching. With it comes the new Firelands raiding and questing zone, the new Mage legendary staff, a new tier of armour (and a new round of sympathy for Priests) and a truckload of other stuff besides. Putting the new juicy content to one side though, there’s the inevitable class changes as well. It’s early days so far and there’s a promise of more to come, but Mages are already tasting both sides of the nerfbat.

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Playing Cards at the Carnival

Posted on by Gazimoff

Confession time: I like to take my time when levelling characters. I’ve tried levelling at breakneck speed and it just isn’t for me. Nowadays I prefer to take things at my own pace – I have a bunch of alts that still aren’t at level cap in Warcraft, while in Rift I’m only about two thirds to cap nearly two months after release. After all, what’s the rush?

Spinks recently highlighted an idea that the Everquest 2 developers are kicking around, where experienced returning players could trade cash for a max level character. I agree with her that the concept feels like a bad one, but that it’s getting difficult to justify why.

There’s a great analogy someone once made that compared MMOs to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Basically put, if the films followed the same path as many MMOs then the opening twenty minutes would be about getting the ring to Mount Doom. The rest of the first film and the remaining two would all be about getting the ring into the volcano. Feels slightly skewed, right?

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Burnout By The Numbers

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s ironic that almost a year ago I was writing about the same topic and how to cope with it. Back then, players were complaining about being burned out with Wrath. They’d done everything they wanted to, achieved what they wanted and were ready to throw in the towel. I was as well, which is why I wrote about how I cope with hitting a gaming rut.

Yet here we are, a slim 14 weeks since Cataclysm was released and feeling burned out already. These aren’t just isolated cases either – MMO Melting Pot reports that 75% of all respondents to a burnout article on WoW Insider are themselves struggling with the problem.

So what gives? What turns a loyal fanbase of players into burned out deserters in the space of three and a half months?
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Caster Legendary Staff: The Lowdown

Posted on by Gazimoff

UPDATE: I’ve done a big roundup of all the most important news relating to Dragonwrath, along with a guide on how to make sure you get one as quickly as possible. You can find all this and more here!

It’s only recently emerged in the Public Test Realm datafiles, but the internet is already rife with speculation about the new Legendary Caster Staff. The dataminers over at MMO-Champion have been diligently hard at work, while the folks over at WoW Insider have been putting their theories to the test. But if you’re looking at putting your hands on one of these incredibly desirable staves how would you go about it?

Possible Caster Legendary Staff (from MMO-Champion.com)

Much like a visit to your local Ikea, this new piece of raiding equipment will come with some assembly required. You’re going to need to do a lot of raiding in order to collect all the materials needed, as well as deep pockets to pick up all those vendor-only items. You’ll also need to work with your guild or raid team in order to ensure success, just as with Shadowmourne. At the moment though we don’t know the whole picture, so a lot of this is conjecture.

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Managing Limited Game Time

Posted on by Gazimoff

There are times when I miss my youth. Back when I was a student I’d be free to play the night away, blasting cyborgs in Quake 2 or bludgeoning head-crabs in Half-Life. I’d blitz through a game in four days straight, chomping through single player content like a man possessed.

The other thing was that back then I’d play through a lot of games. I’d consider buying a new title once or twice a month to give me something new to play. I’d adventure across a multitude of worlds, shooting my way to liberty, freedom or glory.

Warcraft has changed this. In the time I’ve been subscribing I’ve bought maybe a handful of other games for the PC. Gordon from We Fly Spitfires asked a great question recently about what the gaming landscape would be like without the game. For me and probably a fair few others we would never have entered the MMO genre.

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The Incredible Shrinking Raidgroup

Posted on by Gazimoff

I wanted to focus on a particular experiment that Blizzard’s been working on over the years – that of the optimum raid size.  We’ve seen raid sizes start at 40 players in Vanilla, but slowly drop to 25 in Burning Crusade and then 10 players in Wrath. With the new lockout system in Cataclysm, 10-player raiding seems to be becoming the default.

Is smaller raiding the best result through? From a content standpoint Blizzard certainly seems to think so – more groups are running 10-player dungeons than ever before, defeating more bosses and getting more loot from it. Don’t trust me – Lissanna  from Restokin did an excellent analysis of the available stats. The stats might encourage Blizzard to go further down this route by either dropping 25-player raiding entirely or producing 10-player exclusive content. After all, it’s easier to balance for ten players than both ten and 25.

Hang on a minute though – weren’t we raiding dungeons with 8 or 15 people back in Vanilla? And didn’t we think back then that they were just dungeons but nothing special? Sure, they might take an evening to clear but that was the same 5 years ago.

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Encounters That Rock!

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earthen Pantheon after their first Lich King 10-man kill

There’s a great shared topic over at BlogAzeroth right now: Naithin asks what causes an encounter to ‘click’ in our minds. When do we reach that point when a boss fight switches from being a difficult challenge to possible, then to trivial? It’s a good question, but I don’t think it’s just down to preparation, planning and persistence. There’s something else besides.

For me it’s the music.

I’m not talking about the melodies playing in the background, serenading us from the moment we’re greeted with the login page to the point we click the Exit button.  I’m talking about the soundtrack that plays in my head.

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Justice Points Are Useless

Posted on by Gazimoff

Gearing up for PvE content has always been a struggle, and with the difficulty dial set firmly on Cataclysmic you want to make sure that you have the best gear you have access to before you start raiding. But what does having the best gear actually mean?

  • Running heroics until you’re bored of them just to try to get a stupid item to drop. For mages there’s a big lack of iLevel 346 bracers (there’s two without Spirit, one dropping from an optional boss) and wands (again there’s two without Spirit).
  • Running heroics to grind reputation with factions until you’re guaranteed some nice gear once you hit exalted. (Flamebloom Gloves and Desert Walker Sandals are examples)
  • Running heroics to gather up the cloth and Chaos Orbs in order to tailor some epic items. Don’t expect any nice raiding gear from your profession as it’s pretty much only good for PvP starter sets.

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