Tag: raiding

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.

It’s Only Taken Four Years

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s great when you help others and get something from it yourself in return. As an example, I’ve recently been helping a bunch of level 60 characters work through some of the Vanilla WoW content. It means that they get a chance to face Old World dungeons and 40-man raiding, with raids lasting a few hours rather than several days.

The guild Sixty on Steamwheedle Cartel-EU tend to organise most of them, as it’s only made up of characters on accounts without any of the expansions added. I’ve joined them on a few runs now and while the loot generally tends to go to those that need it, there are other benefits. One of them being able to get those old world reputations up to exalted. There’s also other things that can be gained from running old world dungeons, from completing quests to gaining completion achievements like Classic Raider.

Why four years? Shortly after patch 1.9 hit the servers, I joined a raiding guild called Lost Chapter. It was a leap into hardcore raiding, going from 3 nights a week to almost every night. Although I don’t play at that level any more, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I’ve since moved server and last I heard they’d gone to Doomhammer-EU, but I still look back on it with fond memories. Back at the time though, I’d never managed to get to exalted with the Brood of Nozdormu. Yesterday I finally put amends to that, hitting exalted and picking up the final Signet Ring of the Bronze Dragonflight in the process.

So yay for helping out lowbies and yay for finally getting something thing finished.

Next up? Timbermaw Hold…

Being Late to the Party

Posted on by Gazimoff

I know I’m late to the Icecrown Citadel party, and that a ton of people are already doing it in heroic mode. Today I’m pleased to say that I managed to get in there, get some bosses down and bag some loot. I’ve managed to down everything including Festergut so far. And yes, I got some achievements for my trouble too. All in, the ride was pretty smooth despite some upset during the ship-to-ship combat.

I’m now using Frost Needle in my main hand, coupled with Igniter Rod in the offhand and managing to shed even more hit in the process. I’ve been battling to lose hit ever since I made the switch from Fire to Arcane as my primary spec back in the early days of 3.3, but it feels like I’m finally getting close to having all my statpoints becoming useful again.

One thing that I did get reminded of tonight was the concept of gear mastery coming in with Cataclysm. Basically, if a class has proficiency in a particular armour class (cloth, leather, mail and plate) then they’ll get a boost based off the item’s Mastery value. The idea is that it encourages Paladins, Druids and Shamen to stick to their own armour class rather than grabbing ones from a lower bracket.

I don’t think it’ll work.

The downgrading of armour types has been going on since Molten Core, when we had Paladins running around in cloth so that they could heal effectively. I don’t think that Mastery will help discourage them from rolling on gear outside of their armour proficiency. Instead, I think that the classes that loose out will feel even more bitter about missing out on gear and the additional boost from the Mastery stat.

Why not consider instead a penalty based system? Yes, you can wear armour outside your proficiency, but you face a penalty on your stats if you do. The question then changes from “is this an upgrade to me even without the mastery bonus” to “is this still an upgrade once I take the penalty into account?”.

It’s a difficult balance. On the one hand you want to make sure that players feel that they have fair access to gear, while on the other you want to ensure that gear is useful to as many people as possible before it’s trashed or discarded. It’s why I’m not calling for strict limits to armour proficiency to be built into the game.

At the end of the day, it’s about being selective who you raid with. If you’re with a raiding guild make sure you understand their policies on loot distribution, and if you’re not happy with them it might be that the guild’s not suitable for you. It’s when you’re raiding outside of your network of guildmates (pugs etc) that having game mechanics that nudge players in a particular direction can be a benefit.