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Blizzard Bits

Nov07

Blizzard today announced a new franchise, Overwatch. Not only does it look cool, and very Blizzard, but it looks like an interesting take on the FPS. Sort of combining FPS with League of Legends style characters/classes. And perhaps business model? This is an all PVP team play shooter. Probably no “campaign” in the traditional 1 player shooter sense.

The game play is in the above second video. Truth is, the real gameplay looks far cooler than the cartoon-style cinematic. It’s this stuff, and the implied highly differentiated character/classes that gets me excited. I’m just not that into running around in a traditional FPS and grabbing a collection of bigger and bigger guns.

In other news, there is a new Hearthstone expansion, Goblins vs. Gnomes. Well fine, but I’m kinda mostly over Hearthstone. And, BTW, trying really hard to NOT play Warlords of Draenor. We will see if I can hold out. I did pass Paragon 400 in Diablo 3 though. Oh, there’s also a third Starcraft II, Legacy of the Void. Never really got into Starcraft. Too hardcore for me.

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, BlizzCon, Diablo III, Overwatch, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void

Diablo 3 – from Good to Great

Oct06

Diablo 3 was very good out of the gate. I played extensively and farmed the endgame for 2-3 months during the sumer of 2012 — even clearing Inferno before it was nerfed. But my interest dropped off around the time the Monster Power patch released and I stopped playing until Reaper of Souls (the expansion). Now I’ve been addicted ever since. Blizzard is the only “big” game company I know that really continues to “fix” a big game long after release (fully online games tune over time as well). Diablo 3 had problems, and over the course of 2 years, without changing the fundamental gameplay, Blizzard managed to transform a good game into a great one.

Infernal Wall

Almost all of Diablo 3‘s problems centered around the endgame. Broadly, there were two main problems: the “gear/progress disconnect ” and the “Inferno Wall.” I discussed these both back at the time, but simply put, as originally designed, the endgame consisted of a single difficulty mode: Inferno, chopped into roughly 3 sub-difficulties (Act I, Act II, and Act III/IV). Because of the relatively small number of gradients it was just HARD. Brutally hard. And as the ONLY route at first to progress was gear, this whole problem was made worse by…

The Great Gear Disconnect

Basically, in Vanilla D3 you never got any gear you could use. Gear was so randomized, and so stingy, and the requirements of Inferno so steep and class specific, that even the Legendary drops you got were basically useless. Probably, they were useless to anyone, but certainly they were to your class. This all meant you had to buy them on the new “all player all world” Gold or Real Money auction houses. That meant that only gold was really useful — which is pretty boring. You were left feeling that to progress you had to either spend real money or grind mindlessly for gold ad nauseam.

If we establish the premise that in a “progress” oriented game, the player will pursue the activity which offers the best rewards, Vanilla D3 favored gold farming — super boring. There was no sense of direct progress from clearing actual content. I’m going to discuss Blizzard’s modifications and point out how they modified player incentive.

It should also be noted that Nephalem Glory buff really encouraged playing in 1-2 hour stints, which is kind of long.

Difficult Adjusts

The first thing Blizzard changed, and quite rapidly, was to adjust the difficulty down a bit. They also increased the relative power of Legendaries (initially they were pretty lame). These modifications helped a tiny bit, slightly incentivizing gear as good Legendaries could sometime sell well on the Auction House. Sometimes.

Paragon for the Win

Next up, they added a new “leveling at max level” system called Paragon. Basically, your earned experience leveled a separate Paragon Level that gave you small stat increases. There were 100 Paragon levels with steep experience brackets. It certainly took many hours per, and grew and grew and grew such that reaching high levels was only for the insane. Still, this system was a huge improvement. At least you “got” something for playing other than gold and the small increased attack and survivability actually felt like slow progress. In a month or so of casual play I only leveled to Paragon 7, which helped a little to power up my character.

Paragon further incentivized players to actually clear content, although the huge disconnect still existed.

Monster Power

Next Blizzard introduced “Monster Power”, essentially a difficulty slider within Inferno where you could adjust monster difficulty commensurate with gold/magic find bonuses. This more or less solved the Infernal Wall problem and moved things to the now familiar choice: “munch through monsters fast and easy” or “live on the edge, where a tough pack might be the end.” Progress then consisted of getting enough better gear to notch the difficulty up. This change evened out the difficulty in the various acts, allowing you to play a broader range of content disconnected from its difficulty (before you had to play the Act you could clear).

It should also be noted that Blizzard fixed tons of minor tuning and introduced Infernal Machines, a method to construct really difficult portals and fight Uber-bosses.

Gear 2.0

These early changes (in the Spring/Summer of 2012) helped, and pretty much fixed the difficulty problems. Still, for nearly two years, the relationship between gear and play was totally broken. You bought progress on the Auction House and that was it. Blizzard’s great Real Money AH experiment was (at least for players) a failure.

So they shut it down.

While patch 2.0 dropped just before the Reaper of Souls Expansion, I’m going to discuss both together because level 60 play on patch 2.0 forms an irrelevant (and brief) historical window.

Blizzard changed the whole gear system. The Auction House went away and instead gear was no longer fully randomized. All the affixes became at least relevant to your spec. They rearranged them into primary and secondary. Certain types of gear gained specific reliable affixes or special powers (still), but basically almost all drops became at least usable, and perhaps 1 in 10 well rolled for what they were. It’s hard to overestimate how important this was.

Before, you’d look at a legendary drop casually and 99% of the time it was for another class, or contained totally nonsensical stats (like Intelligence on a Barbarian Weapon), now it was mostly usable, if not ideal. They also redid lots of special power affixes and set bonuses and introduced lots of new Legendaries. I’ll discuss later how this affected things.

This drastically altered player motivation. Progress became much closer related to how many Legendaries you got. It was no longer purchased on the now non-existent AH, but earned in game by clearing mobs.

Enchanting Fun

The Mystic, a new craftsman who enchants and transmogrifies was also important. You can select one affix per item to permanently change, re-rolling it again and again to make it perfect. This substantially improves the odds that a piece of gear is well rolled. It need only be well rolled in all but one slot. You can replace the worst slot, and with sufficient gold, fix it.

Hop to 70

Reaper of Souls raised the level cap to 70. This short little grind, only a few hours basically served to invalidate the old 1.0 level 60 gear and start a new clean gear grind. Which was fine.

Extra Content

They also added a fifth act. It’s fine. It brings in more level variety. Great. Not a big deal, but fine.

They added a new class. I haven’t played him. If I make a new character I will. Again, something cool, and good for the really serious Altaholic, but not game-changing.

Torment is the New Inferno

Blizzard also simplified the old difficulty system of mode + monster power into a single mode slider with the top difficulty levels being labeled Torment I, Torment II, etc. (up to T6). It’s not really much different, and still gives that choice of how hard vs. how much reward.

Story versus Grind

One of the weird things about Vanilla D3 endgame play was that you constantly ran “sections” of it’s long campaign mode again and again to grind for better gear and experience (after Paragon). This always felt odd and only certain maps really made for good grinding. With ROS, Blizzard introduced a new Adventure Mode that allowed for hopping around anywhere in the world and earning XP bonuses from randomly generated “Bounties” sliced all through the map. This chunked up gameplay into smaller 5 minute chunks (or 15-20 if you pounded out the 5 bounty meta reward) and made the process of just killing monsters without skipping through dialog you had heard 100 times much more streamlined.

The also added a new mode, Rifts, where a special token (earned completing bounties) could be used to open a special monster heavy randomly generated monster free-for-all. 1-4 players race through this collection of 1-7 maps clearing. Once you’ve cleared enough a mini-boss pops up and gives you more goodies, XP, and Shards. Rifts featured a Legendary drop bonus.

All this served to mix up player motivation and encourage you to clear bounties or rifts all over the world. Increased drop rates for multiplayer encouraged that as well.

Shard It or Make It

With the auction houses gone, players need to grind out their gear IN the game — which is better. Shards, which are mostly collected from rift runs, can be spent at the Shard Vendor to get a chance at a Legendary in a specific slot. The odds are low, but reasonable, so basically, this allows you to accelerate the acquisition of a good piece in the slot where you need it most. Overall, it’s a huge boon and makes the Random Number Generator less frustrating.

In Vanilla, the Blacksmith and crafting in general felt useless. The odds of getting a decent piece out of him were so low as to be pathetic. But in 2.0, many crafted items are fairly competitive. Sure if you want a great roll you might have to craft 20 of them, but before it was probably 200.

Overpowered Feels Good

One of the other things that dropping the AH did was to allow Blizzard to adjust the balance. Before, weird extra affixes like Gold Find and the like had to be kept carefully in check, because earning gold too fast would draw too many players in. Now, gold showers down all over the place and if you want to stack it, fine. Which brings us to the new modes of endgame progress. The higher Torment levels (T4-6) are calibrated such that no normal build really cuts it. You have to go overpowered. The difference is just in which way you go overpowered.

Typically, the various strategies lie in some combination of 1 or more sets and a couple of build variants. For example, as a Barbarian there are a couple set builds that start to “break the game” like Leapquake and Raekors/Vile. But they don’t really break the game. They are needed to progress at the higher torments. Leapquake for example combines the Strength of the Earth bonuses that allow each Leap to also spawn an Earthquake with Lut Socks, which allows for 3 Leaps per cooldown. Stack Cooldown Reduction, align all your elemental damage to one element and stack that, and you can boost your damage through the roof. To clear T6, you have to do just that. Access to this many set items requires a serious play investment. Getting really well rolled pieces in each slot even more.

Really, it’s kinda brilliant.

The New Paragon

Paragon too got a nice retuning. Instead of a brutal climb to 100, with small predetermined gains, it became a more or less endless grind to (?) 800 or beyond. Each level takes roughly an hour. Each gives you a point that applies toward all your characters (encouraging alts) that can be spent on one of 16 stats in groups of 4. At first glance these seem like very small gains but by the time you reach the Paragon 200-400 range you have enough points to round out or adjust certain rare stats or ones your gear lacks. Don’t have enough Movement Speed on your gear? Put some points in it. Your build favors Cooldown Resist? Paragon helps. Need more healing and toughness? Go for it.

This also adjusts player motivation by incentivizing experience and making even a session with no useful drops (most of the time at high level) feel at least somewhat useful.

Greater Rifts and Legendary Gems

By the time patch 2.1 rolled around, many serious players (like myself) were farming Torment VI (T6) without too much trouble. So Blizzard added a new rift mode called Greater Rifts which allows for a kind of infinite rift progression. Rifts are ranked 1-100 in ascending difficulty. Much like regular rifts you kill monsters to unlock a boss, but in this case it’s under 15 minute time pressure. If you succeed you may upgrade your “key” to a higher level. If you choose not to progress, or fail, you can minorly upgrade the new Legendary Gems (which are pretty badass). Your chance of upgrades is related to the level of rift so that it is only really possible to upgrade your gems to roughly the level you can complete. The whole idea of Greater Rifts is fairly cool, but I feel they suffer from a number of motivational problems:

Your starting rift level is based on an annoying “kill a bunch of enemies” trial that often under ranks you, meaning you must slog through 2-3 low level rifts to reach the right level to test your skills.
The XP/Gold/Legendary rewards are FAR FAR inferior to just running regular rifts. Following the principle that players will go where the rewards are, this means that you need to run Greater Rifts to upgrade your gems, but they are not otherwise the best choice.
The luck of the map is a huge factor. If there is a high density of blue/yellow packs it is MUCH easier to clear in time. Some combinations of enemies are far more annoying and time consuming than others.
The time pressure can be very tight at high levels. This means you have to rush rush rush. That may test a certain skill, but I find it less fun then doing things at my own pace.
In multiplayer, the key system is very idiosyncratic and often leads to getting stuck in a rift alone or with less people than you intended. If it’s alone, but you had party members, you don’t get your NPC companion or the ability to change to solo gear (I run different gear solo) and it’s an automatic loss.

Overall, I’m not in love with Greater Rifts as a main focus of late endgame progression. However, many of these problems could be easily fixed. For example, if you could select your starting level from any level you have already beaten.

Conclusion

Blizzard has constantly tried to “fix” player motivation in the game to encourage broad balanced play. They experimented with some new ideas like the Auction House, and it failed, so they scrapped it and built a new gear system that better motivated serious and continual play. They seem to still be doing this. It’s an unusual commitment for a game that isn’t subscription or pay-to-play based. Most classic big games are just made, possibly patched to fix drastic bugs, and then left to run their course. Diablo 3, on the other hand, like WOW and other MMOs, is a sort of living evolving thing.

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Read my Hearthstone Beta Review!
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By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo 3, Diablo III, Monster Power

Warlords of Draenor Cinematic

Aug14

Blizard released the Warlords (WOW expansion 5!) cinematic today:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLzhlsEFcVQ]

Actually pretty cool. Oddly, and as usual, even after having played since launch, I don’t totally understand the details of the “lore” and even who all the players are. Guldan, Thrall, Hellscream sure. But who is that Burning Legion dude with the Illidan wings? It’s funny how much effort you’d have to make in order to actually understand the lore. I know all the factions and just roll with it. Now the gameplay, that I understand. Although I hesitate to actually play again, as it’s such a time suck. But usually my resolve breaks.

WOW Endgame series: Vanilla, Burning Crusade, Lich King, Cataclysm, and Pandaria.
or read about Mists of Pandaria leveling.
Latest hot post: Reaper of Souls Analysis!
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By: agavin
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Tagged as: Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Races and factions of Warcraft, Warcraft, Warlords, Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft

Hearthstone Beta Review

Jan06

I’m no stranger to Trading Card strategy games, having played Magic: The Gathering way back in 1993 (and fairly heavily through 1995 or 96). In recent years, lacking an enthusiastic series of human opponents, I periodically tried my hand at their latest computer incarnations. Most recently, this was IOS Magic 2013. This game was okay, but the designers felt too beholden to the specifics of the card game and not confident enough to invest in changes that would streamline the digital experience. Also, I’ve long felt that nearly all MTG expansion packs have strayed from their classic D&D flavored roots into that sort of bizarre out-there-and-too-cool-for-school style of western fantasy (all that dimensional and plane waker stuff).

To prove my old school cred, I dug up 20 year old box of magic cards, including beta dual manas, and a 1996 calendar!

Which brings us to Blizzard’s entry into this underdeveloped genre: Hearthstone. Basically, the Irvine powerhouse has taken the MTG formula, reskinned it with Warcraft characters, and streamlined it for online play. And while this may sound merely evolutionary — and it is — in typical Blizzard fashion, when they do something, they do it well.

Hearthstone is great fun and the gameplay itself extremely well balanced (considering its beta state) and fast and furious for a card game.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdXl3QtutQI]

For those of you not familiar with this sort of game, it represents a “duel” between two fantasy characters. Each player constructs (or uses an off the shelf) deck of cards out of the pool of cards they own. Hearthstone’s decks are 30 cards, no more than two of any one type. You draw from this (shuffled) deck representing spells, abilities, and creatures to play them against your opponent as best you can. Generally cards require certain resources (mana) be spent to play, limiting the combinations you can cast in a given turn.

The biggest Hearthstone gameplay innovation (and I haven’t played enough Trading Card Duel games to know if it’s even a real innovation) is assigning decks a distinct class. In MTG, your deck design balances the flavor of mana versus the cost needs of various cards. I.e. it’s possible to “dual class” (or even triple class), but the odds of ending up with mismatched land and spell/creature cards becomes greater. In Hearthstone, you select one of the original nine Warcraft classes (Warrior, Rogue, Warlock, Mage, Druid, Shaman, Paladin, Priest, and Hunter — Deathknight and Monk being left for a future patch). Your deck must be constructed from cards specific to that class or the Neutral cards. This is quite clever as by giving each class unique mechanics found only in their specific cards, particular gameplay styles are created. Each class also has a unique 2 mana hero ability which can be used once per turn without consuming a card. This serves to both differential them and prevent the “nothing to do because I don’t have a usable card” problem. In Hearthstone, mana capacity notches up one turn at a time (unless affected by special cards). I.e. first turn you have one mana available, next turn two, and so on. This helps measure out the phase and progression of the game, being like a less frustrating version of playing your MTG lands.

A typical game board

The original World of Warcraft classes transition to this new medium impressively. For flavor, the art is very similar, cards are almost invariably named after WOW spells and creatures, and many are even accompanied by sound effects or voice snippets lifted right out of the MMO (Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!) . To a longtime WOW player like myself (9 years!), this is all pretty effective. I’ve played most WOW classes (all but Hunter and Shaman) and I’ve done enough PVP and raided exhaustively. For me,all the class abilities have a certain iconic quality. Add the fact that Blizzard based the mechanics of the individual classes around similar WOW abilities to color me impressed. For example, mage specific cards include: Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missles, Fireball, Polymorph, Cone of Cold, Flamestrike, Frost Nova, Frostbolt, Ice Lance, Mirror Image, Blizzard, Pyroblast, Mana Wyrm, Water Elemental, and Ice Block — all of which are fairly faithful to their WOW roots. And they world as a cohesive play feel and strategy that makes the transition into the card duel.

Being fully computerized, and not relying on mechanics that work with physical cards, Hearthstone is able to support more complex AOE and card modification. Spells can strike all or groups of cards for certain, random, or variable damage — and work in combination with modifiers like shield, stealth (can’t be attacked), taunt (must attack first), or enrage (extra abilities for damaged minions). Some of these mechanics, while possible on paper, would be tedious and slow to manage (annoying counters anyone?). The game doesn’t exactly push the hardware limits of a modern PC/Mac, but it features the typical slick Blizzard interface. Actions are fast, with satisfying sounds and effects. Plus they queue up nicely in a way that allows for rapid play out of multiple moves. This is in sharp contrast to a game like Magic 2013 which drags out each move with awkward and slow animations. Hearthstone lets you just go bang bang bang in a far more satisfying manner.

$1.50 to $2.00 for just 5 virtual cards!

I suspect Blizzard is also (as usual) going to make a lot of money with Hearthstone. Not only is it fun, and technically free to play, but seamlessly integrated with Battlenet and your attached credit card. Basically, to add anything but the basic cards to your pool of available cards, you have to either be very good, very patient, or spend some money on packs of cards. These cost $1.50-$2 for a pack of 5! And there is no guarantee you’ll get cards you want. Although you can disenchant extra or undesired cards for dust and use them to craft any specific card. Getting substantial dust pretty much only comes from buying packs, so this mostly allows the player who spends $50+ a way to fill in for bad luck (thank God!). Certainly for $50-100 one could get the cards for any ONE deck one wanted (the cost is mostly in getting lucky or enough dust for the 1-3 legendaries many serious decks want).

Warlock class specific cards. You face Jaraxxus, Eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

There are a variety of modes and tricks to keep you coming back. Classes level up (giving you extra cards and bonuses). There are daily quests (you can have up to 3) that earn extra gold (which can be spent on cards or the Arena) and there is practice, normal, and ranked play modes. Possibly most interesting is the creative Arena mode. You have to pay (with dollars or gold) to enter, then you semi-randomly build a new deck, and play until you lose three times. The more wins in this time, the bigger the reward in gold, dust, and cards. The Arena seems currently, even for a sucky player, to be a slightly better value gold/dollars to cards, as it costs $1.50 and you seem to earn at least one pack. However, it does take an hour or two (you don’t have to play all at once). I’ve only done it twice, as I find playing with it’s fairly random decks a little frustrating compared to my carefully crafted normal mode ones.

Finally, you can always play with your Battle net friends, which will be cool once we get out of closed beta and more of mine try out the game. All in all, now that my main in WOW is ilevel 558 and I’d basically have to run Heroic raids for upgrades (almost), and given the fact that Hearthstone can be played in 5-10 minute chunks, I’m having a blast with it. If I feel motivated, I might even write up my experiences with the three late game strategies I’ve been working: Warlock, Mage Ice Control, and Pally Utility Control (sadly, as I’m a Lock in WOW, my Mage deck is doing much better).

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By: agavin
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Tagged as: beta, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, card game, Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, Video Games, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

WOW Endgames – Mists of Pandaria

Jan11

The xpac box

Having discussed all the previous wow endgames, we come at last to Mists of Pandaria.

Leveling

I wrote a previous detailed post on leveling 85-90. I won’t repeat myself and go into the talent changes again. Overall, while I like the new rotations and abilities for Warlock Destruction (the only spec I’m really playing), and feel they are the best yet, I do miss a bit of the crafting that went into old school talent selection. I have little incentive nowadays to investigate changing my spec or talents.

But I must admit I adore Kil’Jaeden’s Cunning, which allows casting while moving. This is a game changer for warlocks. Even with a cast and movement speed penalty, it means not having to cancel that big cast in order to get out of the fire!

Of Justice and Valor

MOP, great as it is, is a highly evolutionary expansion. The Justice and Valor system was born from BC badge system, iterated on during LK, and finally codified under Cata. It passes nearly unaltered to MOP. We have four major point systems, two each for PVE and PVP. Since I don’t PVP at all anymore, I’ll only talk about Justice (the lessor) and Valor (the greater) points.

But first, I need to discuss item level. As discussed in my Cata post, with reforging and the like, WOW gearing is more and more about ilevel. Better is generally better and there is an elaborate spread based on gear source and difficulty level.

458: Justice rewards, superior blue quality
463: Heroic dungeon gear, superior blue quality
476: Mogu’shan Vaults LFR and crafted PvE gear bought from reputations, epic purple quality
483: Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Springs LFR
489: Vaults normal mode gear and valor point gear bought from reputations
496: Galleon and Sha loot table, Heart and Terrace normal mode gear, crafted gear from raid-drop patterns, and valor rewards for the patch 5.1 reputation vendor
502: Vaults heroic mode gear
509: Heart and Terrace heroic mode gear

Justice points are more useless than ever. You earn them exclusively by killing dungeon bosses, notably heroic dungeon bosses. They earn fairly slowly. They buy ilevel 458 blues. But wait, heroic dungeons drop ilevel 463 blues. By the time you have enough points to buy something, you probably have a replacement that is slightly better from drops. Justice points are therefore useful only to fill in the occasional piece that you are unlucky on. I bought two items fairly quickly after hitting level 90 and wore them for a few days, perhaps a week, before replacing them. Theoretically you can also spend Justice points on heirloom items for your alts. I’ve sworn off this deadly addiction and so wouldn’t know.

Valor points are very different. You can earn them doing just about anything: Heroics dungeons, Challenge dungeons, Scenarios, daily quests, LFR, regular and heroic raids. Valor points cap at 1000 points a week. There is a strong incentive to reach your cap, but it takes awhile, probably at least 10-15 hours a week of play. If you don’t cap, you aren’t gearing as fast as you could. They buy you ilevel 489 epics, which is the same level dropped by the first half of the first tier of normal raids. After patch 5.1 Valor buys ilevel 496 and upgrades. For active raiders with a guild, these are supplementary, filling in on missing drops and allowing faster gearing. For players (like me) who only use LFR (more on that later), Valor gear is always better than raid gear, and represents the best and most important items. The only better gear open to us is world boss gear, and that’s very limited in selection.

Because of the cap, and its importance, grinding Valor feels like a bit of a chore, or at least certainly an obligation. This is a difficult balance for the designers to achieve. Set the cap too high, and there would be no limit to how much time you could sink into it, set it too low, and you feel that post cap, you are “wasting your time.” For me personally, it’s just about right.

In Vanilla and BC you spent a lot of time playing for no reward, and these point systems address that issue to a significant degree. This time around, the Valor system seems better than ever, rewarding all sorts of play. The Justice points seem like a fail and basically irrelevant.

Shrine of Two Moons: profession hub and standing in for a new city

Going Professional

The professions got their usual cleanups and tweaks. Many remain boring. Herbalism is the same as it ever was. Alchemy is even simpler than ever, as you now learn new recipes not from the trainer, but from making previous ones. This shouldn’t be confused with the more elitist Burning Crusade discovery system. By the time I hit level 90 and max skill level I’d learned everything. The better/cheaper “alchemist only” potion is nice. The Alchemist trinket is decent, but after patch 5.1 badly needs an upgrade to epic. I level enchanting on an alt and that seems to have lost the interesting daily mechanic from LK and been tied back to reputations. That’s annoying on an alt as I don’t want to level those reps there. These recipes should be BOA.

Archeology got a hell of a lot easier. During Cata I gave up on it because it was intensely boring and slow. Now I leveled it in 2-3 hours. But there isn’t anything good to make. No epics, no cool pets or mounts, just some mediocre blue weapons.

Fishing is easy to level now as it’s tied to the Angler’s reputation. It’s got a few cool things, although not as cool as the old BC Mr. Pinchy days.

Cooking is the real standout. Wow. This got a lot of love. It’s tied in with the whole farming game (see below), the awesome Tillers rep (see below) and even in of itself is chock full of goodies. There are now six different sub schools to level, and it takes considerable time and effort, but the whole combined cooking/farming/Tillers thing is great fun. I’m even training up my apprentice. They need to do all the professions up with this kind of complexity.

Angler’s Warf

Mote in your Eye

A new system this time around is the “harmony” system. Monsters randomly and occasionally drop these little “motes of harmony” which combine into “spirits of harmony.” These currency items can be used to buy just about any top trade skill item, or even some of the other trade skill currencies like for cooking and archeology.

This sort of combines and improves two general systems/trends from previous xpacs. One is the “limited top profession item.” For alchemy this was the Lotus. For enchanting the epic enchanting mat. Motes normalize and make less frustrating the collection of these resources.

They are also an evolution of the older crafting essences that came in various flavors. Motes are a marked improvement. Spirits of Harmony are generally quite useful, and you accumulate them at a slow but reasonable pace. I’ve never been a heavy crafter and the old piles of 10-12 types of currencies for each xpac still clog up my bank alt.

Scenario Fail

A new addition to MOP is the scenario. This is a mini dungeon, for three players, not requiring a tank or healer. There are about 10 of them and you enter through LFG with virtually no queue (because of no tank/healer crunch). They reward some Valor and are designed to include hefty doses of lore.

Being even easier than dungeons (which were pretty easy), I found them ridiculously boring. They yield Valor, and are approximately the same Valor/time invested as dungeons, yet duller. In dungeons I enjoy boss fights and hate trash. Most of the scenarios feel like short outdoor dungeons with a 100% trash ratio. I hate trash. The rewards themselves are just some random and useless blues. Perhaps they might have been upgrades for about a day after hitting 90, but that’s about it. I haven’t even run all the scenarios. There is one in the Temple of the White Tiger, highly reminiscent of Lich King’s Trial of the Crusader, that is alright, as it’s just a series of bosses.

Shado Pan Monastery

Shades of the Lich King

The dungeons in MOP have all been carefully tuned. They’re all pretty short and fun and none of them stand out as annoying or particularly more difficult than the others. Difficulty tuning is back where it was at launch in Lich King. There is no need to run a level 90 normal level dungeon. Maybe if you’re an ignoramus at gearing, you might have to pop into one or two. Basically you drop into heroic and steamroll. They take 20-30 minutes. CC is completely gone again. It’s like every dungeon is Heroic Utgarde Keep or Azjol-Nerub. My least favorite these days are Shado-Pan Monastery and Siege of Niuzao Temple, but only because they take slightly longer than the others. They aren’t harder and they are cool enough. This time around there is nothing like Halls of Lightening or Occulus to throw anyone a loop. It’s worth noting that in my entire (extensive) MOP playing experience I never ONCE had a dungeon group fall apart. Every single one has completed. Wipes of any sort are rare, and I doubt I’ve ever wiped more than 2-3 times. This is unprecedented, as in Vanilla, BC, and Cata groups that self destructed were more the rule than the exception. Even in LK it happened, particularly in Occulus or some of the Icecrown instances.

Gear is solid at 463 and things are well itemized. However, it only took me a week before I had every piece of dungeon gear I needed, after that, they’re just an easy way to earn valor (80 points a day).

Blizzard added a cool new Challenge mode in which you can run instances for speed with normalized gear. I’ve never tried it. The mode requires that you run with friends, and I don’t have a big enough group of in game friends or a guild.

Stormstout Brewery

The big Grind

While reputations have always been part of the WOW endgame, with MOP Blizzard put a lot of extra effort into them. In the BC-LK era reputations usually awarded a couple of small things each. Generally a free epic, maybe a cosmetic item like a pet, crafting recipes, and often enchants for certain slots like head and shoulder. While small, these enchants were considered mandatory by most raiders. So Blizzard removed them, but at the same time tied the Justice and Valor gear into the system. Rep gear isn’t free anymore, pretty much all Justice and Valor gear is divided randomly among four (five with patch 5.1) reputations. Initially, honored was needed for Justice gear and Revered for Valor. Blizzard argued that this wasn’t mandatory, and it probably wasn’t, strictly speaking, for serious raiders, as they have access to equal or better gear in raid. However, in practice, for those of us without guilds the Valor gear is the best available. Even serious raiders tend to optimize for getting the most stuff as quickly as possible. This meant bringing at least the four major reps to revered. Two of them, the August Celestials and the Shado-Pan are mysteriously tied to the Golden Lotus, and so you can’t even start their grinds until reaching revered with Lotus.

In LK and Cata you could combine tabards with dungeon grinding to speed leveling of the reputations. In MOP, the new tabards no longer give rep, although you can still finish out reps from the old xpacs in the new dungeons. This means doing the dailies for each rep. And dailies there are in spades. On the plus side, these give valor points and the special new currency that increases loot drops (more on that later). On the minus side, there are a LOT of dailies.

I’ve reached exalted in every MOP rep, including the fifth important one introduced with patch 5.1. At the beginning, and particularly about two weeks after 90, this meant A LOT of dailies. I’ll discuss all the reps below because Blizzard deliberately built a different style grind into each of them in order to experiment, but at the peak, it is very easy to have 2-3 HOURS of dailies in your queue PER DAY. On one level, this is a lot of end game content, as you could do it slower, on the other, for a few weeks it felt like a Herculean chore.

Golden Lotus

Because this rep gates two others, it’s very important. And the GL has a lot of good Valor items itself. Here Blizzard went with a “more is more” theory of dailies. There are three hubs, each with four quests that are completed sequentially per day and a final boss quest. This means 13 dailies (plus some connector quests). Not all of these are available at the start, as the hubs open up as you advance. The individual quests are well enough designed for the most part, but for a new 90 can actually be pretty hard. At the beginning, competition for mobs was fierce and frustrating. This chain alone could take 45 minutes a day and often felt very tedious.

There were also a couple different cool ways of earning bonus rep. Periodically you find keys which can be used to open secret chests (available only on select end dailies) that give you extra rep bonuses. GL mobs also (extremely) rarely drop a crystal that once you have 10, allows capturing an (extremely) rare mount. By exalted I had 2/10.

The Golden Lotus has lots of secret chambers

Klaxxi

The second major rep open at the start is pretty cool. There are about 9 quests available per day in about four areas within a zone. You can select various Klaxxi (bug dude) champions to help you too. The quests are pretty cool, but some of the areas were better than others and the set could run a little long. There were a bunch of cool intermediate non-daily progressions on the quest-line. Much better than GL, but 5-6 quests would have been better than 9.

There is a collection mechanic here too. Killing mobs in the zone earn you crystals that you can turn in for rep. This is a great idea, but the drop rate on them was so low as to make little difference.

Return of the Klaxxi Paragons

Shado-Pan

SP also has champions to help you and rotates roughly 6 quests between three locations. In between, you have non-daily champions to fight. This would have been an excellent rep except that one of the locations, “stra-vess” (sic) was very annoying and represented the only place in the entire daily grind across all reps where I died on a frequent basis. The mob density was just out of control.

August Celestials

This rep chain opens late and runs slow. Every day there are about 4 quests available in one of four spots in wildly different zones. You find the location at your home base and fly there. The quests are pretty quick and easy, but the grind goes on for longer than the other reps. One of the four zones (the Niuzao Temple) is far more annoying than the other three. One of the quests in the White Tiger temple complex (the one where you cross the bridges avoiding the wind) was incredibly frustrating and best skipped.

Dominance Offensive / Operation Shieldwall

This new rep, added with patch 5.1, gates the 496 ilevel rep gear and is very important. It’s also a very well designed daily grind. Blizzard learned from the earlier four in short order. There is an alternating mixture of non-daily quest groups of 3-4 quests and a group of 5 dailies that rotates between 4 hubs. There is even a cool daily mini-boss. The dailies are pretty quick and enjoyable (except the cave one was annoying because the caves are so dark it’s hard to see the tunnels) and the mix in of non-dailies felt great. It doesn’t have the tedious chore-like quality that GL, Klaxxi, and Shado-Pan often did.

Loremasters

This is a fun rep that is outside of normal progression. Bringing it to exalted wins you a cool flying magic disc mount and a few aides to the archeology profession. But it’s also the easiest rep, taking only an hour or two flying around Pandaria to level.

Order of the Cloud Serpent

You level this rep for one reason (besides the Valor points): to earn the right to fly on cloud dragons. It’s a fast and easy rep that thats takes 2-3 weeks and combines some profession tie-in quests and a rotating pool of fairly simple fight and gather dailies. Every once in a while it is possible to engage in cloud dragon racing. This was really cool. The problem is, there seems to be no way to know if they are available (which is about once a week) without flying over to the far away zone and checking. So once I hit exalted, I didn’t bother, because I didn’t want to haul out there for nothing.

Everyone wants to ride one of these!

Anglers

This rep is tied to fishing. It provides 3 quick and easy fishing quests every day. They’re pretty easy, but not very exciting, and the quest hub has no flight point (serious annoyance). Once I maxed out fishing it was irritating to head down there and grind it out, even though it didn’t take long. I gave up for awhile at revered, then eventually finished it out.

There is also a separate reputation with master angler Nat Pagle. This earns you two different items and requires that you fish around the world for about 45 minutes every day for several months to fish up some EXTREMELY rare fish. This is the only grind in MOP I didn’t bother with, because it’s for the very extreme and the rewards aren’t compelling. It should at least have had a cool pet.

Tillers

The Tillers faction, which dove tails in with cooking and the new farming mechanic, is hands down the best designed grind in the game. This all has several components. The profession itself has been split into 6 different grinds (the ways of cooking). They are all very similar, but for number collecting obsessives, it’s very addictive to level each. Then the master Tiller reputation is a nicely balanced 5-6 daily per day mix that rotates between 3-4 hubs. Some of these quests are very easy and some are related to farming. Some of the quests aren’t really attached to the hubs but are randomly selected floaters around the zone. Many are very creative (if a little annoying) like the weed war, pest control, and chase the chicken quests. One of the daily quests earns you a cooking token. These are actually quite valuable as they speed your leveling of the cooking profession and production of useful feasts.

Progressing through the main reputation opens up periodic cool quests that “level” the farm by adding more plots. You can also buy quests at one of the vendors at different reps to add convenience features to the farm like sprinklers, pesticide, and the master plow. The rep and token vendors have all sorts of fun and useful items. If you get enough tokens you can buy an apprentice that has a new daily him/herself that you can level. This opens up other stuff. As you level, your farm gains small cosmetic “improvements” relating to the quests (mostly farm animals).

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, there are eight or so quest givers who all have their OWN reputations. You level these up by completing their quests (randomly in the daily sets) and/or making particular foods for them and/or finding these oddball farming drops and/or finding the same drops in dirt piles around Pandaria. Reaching max reputation with a particular Tiller opens up a small person specific quest chain.

All in all it feels very fresh and varied, far more so than any of the other rep grinds, and being intertwined as it is with farming and cooking encourages you to engage in those other skills just to see what might be coming. Bravo!

Big Bags of Loot

MOP reintroduces world bosses, two of them to start. One of these, the Sha of Anger, is a replacement for the LK/Cata PVP loot boss. Sha is easy to kill with 30+ people (it can even be done with 25). He drops a random mix of PVP and the PVE ilevel 496 hands and pants. The first time you kill him, he gives a token for an ilevel 476 boot. He can be looted once a week and his respawn timer is 10 minutes. For LFR people like myself, this makes him very valuable as the set pieces are half a tier better in score than the 483 stuff from LFR. With the short timer, the only difficulty with this boss is finding a group. If one needs him, you usually have to do that on Tuesday, often early Tuesday. After that, too many people have killed him and you’re unlikely to find a raid.

The other world boss is Galleon. He drops a mix of various 496 loot and is fairly easy to kill. The problem with him is that his respawn timer is several days. I’ve killed him twice, and both times it happened after a server reset. At this point, when he’s up, both Alliance and Horde are usually gathered to try to kill him and it becomes a strange battle in which one can wipe the other side, but that results in flagging and a near infinite back and forth between the factions. We were able to kill him once when a Horde group outside the raid generously took it upon themselves to keep wiping the Alliance side.

He must die every week – until you have your gloves and pants

Way of the Raid

MOP has more raiding options than ever, and as this is an area that keeps evolving, it’s worth mentioning. There are now five types: LFR (25), Normal (10), Normal (25), Heroic (10), and Heroic (25). LFR has it’s own per boss lockout, but the other four share the same lockout. I.e. if you kill the boss on Heroic (10) you can’t loot it again on Normal (25) in the same week. The lockout is all per boss, and only affects loot (but that’s what matters, doesn’t it?). The two normal modes share gear, so do the two heroic modes. I only run LFR these days, but presumably 25s are pretty rare, as they are harder to form and offer little advantage at this point. This is kinda a shame, but I can understand Blizzard not wanting to add even MORE loot levels.

LFR has a new loot system which is quite controversial. In the traditional model, still used in normal/heroic raids, the boss drops his loot, and the party divides it up. In the new LFR system, each player has his own individual random role, which appears to be about 1 in 10, to see if he gets loot or gold. If he gets loot than he is handed a random item from the loot table that fits the spec he is currently using. There is no consideration made as to what items you have. You can get an item that you already have even if something else in the loot table would be more useful. There is no trading. On the plus side, there is no drama. Each player’s loot situation is totally separate. On the minus side, you get a lot of “gold” and it’s annoying. Other players also get items they can’t use (already have), but you could, which feels frustrating. Overall, it’s probably better as drama in LFR is a bad thing.

To complicate this, doing daily quests earns a kind of currency that you can spend once a week to earn 3 coins in a different currency (up to 10 max in your inventory) that can be spent to buy extra rolls at a bosses loot table. In practice, you use these on the three bosses each week that have stuff you need the most. This is kinda nice as it increases your chance of getting the things you want. It is possible to partially abuse this system by killing a boss a second (or third, or fourth) time and using the coin, even if you are not eligible anymore for the regular drop. I don’t do this, too tedious.

Terrace of Endless Springs: the last raid of the 1st tier

Raid Finder Rules

I didn’t play Cata during the final months with its Raid Finder, so for me, LFR was new to MOP. This is the ultimate conclusion (for now) of Blizzard’s trend toward “let everyone see the content.” The raids are broken into 3 boss chunks with minimal trash (still sometimes too much, as in Heart of Anger). There is a gear level requirement, but the tuning is very easy, aimed at allowing the bosses to be killed with no active coordination and 0-2 wipes. The first week a particular dungeon opens, when most of the people are completely unfamiliar with the mechanics, there are wipes. After that, it’s a total steamroll. Mechanics that wipe raids have been “tuned down” so they don’t. There isn’t really much skill, although I personally, as a Warlock, amuse myself by focusing on maxing my DPS.

For me, LFR is a facsimile of real raiding. It’s missing the challenge and camaraderie, but it does feels kinda like raiding and yields pretty good loot. It also can be done on your own schedule in 30-45 minute chunks, which is huge. Raiding with a guild is scheduled, like 6-10pm Tues-Thurs, and involves drama and stress. LFR is queue up, steamroll, maybe collect loot.

Everyone is a Legend

What makes up a legendary has really changed in MOP, and probably for the better. I don’t know if they plan to still have the old kind of legendary weapons, but there is a new quest chain that anyone who raids can get which is more equivalent to the old Mount Hyjal or Ice Crown rep chains that allows you to slowly, but fairly straightforwardly, earn into legendary gems that can be placed into the sockets of special weapons dropping from Terrace of the Endless Spring. These are a pretty big boost, +500 in a primary stat, and the chain continues allowing you to keep upgrading slowly across the course of the xpac. This is a real nice touch and very compelling, although it’s a different thing than the traditional legendaries.

This guy is actually a Black dragon!

No need to PVP

As a PVE player, there seems to be no need to PVP in any way shape or form. With the Sha of Anger having taken over for the PVP bosses and no new world PVP zone, that’s gone. This is fine by me.

Return to the Old Raids

One of the new things I’ve been doing a lot of is actually old stuff. The drastic scale up of every stat has made it possible for level 90 toons, particularly us OP Warlocks, to solo nearly everything in the first three expansions. Vanilla raids are trivial (for Locks) and Blizzard has made some effort to change a few of the mechanics that were impossible to solo (Viscidius, Razorgore, who is still a pain). Plus, you can now go into old raids without a raid group and they added cool minipets to the Vanilla raids. I’ve been running MC, BWL, Naxx, and AQ40 every week and have all but two of the pets. I’ve also nearly completed my Felheart, Nemesis, and T2.5 sets (I had a lot of them from the Vanilla days, but the RNG is fickle). This is all good fun.

And last week, I even earned Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker! Too bad it can’t be used to xmorph. My Lock does dress old school, usually in Felheart or Nemesis. Even some of the really difficult titles can be soloed. I soloed Sarth 3 drakes 10 man and 3 manned the 25 man (I had the titles from before but I wanted the mounts). I soloed Ulduar 10 to get Starcaller and even facerolled some BC heroics to finish out two reps I hadn’t quite knocked out originally.

I finally killed Cthun (by myself)

Farmville Wow

The Tillers have brought limited Farmville to WOW. Once you level up your farm you can grow up to 16 crops a day. It’s possible to make feasts pretty much for free this way, or easily earn extra cooking tokens. There are some optional plants that will earn you crafting materials or even teleports. It’s a pretty simple mini-game, and takes about 5 minutes a day, but it’s fairly fun.

Better than Farmville

Pet Battles

I have yet to invest anytime in the pet battles, which is surprising given that I’m a pet collector. I’ve heard they are really fun and Pokemon like. They certainly have vastly expanded the mini-pet inventory.

Back to the Fun

MOP has brought a notable effort to really add a lot of fun and vanity items and quests. This stuff has been in short supply since Vanilla but there is a lot of it now. So many one of a kind vanity items that they fill up the bank. There are neat weird quests and achievements based on lore and whatnot too. We could still use more actual USEFUL items that have weird powers, like in Vanilla, but this is a good start.

Scaberus is in his old school finery

Patch 5.1

The only patch so far is 5.1 and it’s a very evolutionary patch, including no new raid or instance. It did beef up the southernmost zone and add a faction, more dailies, and a rep vendor. The faction is one of the better ones. To help raiders spend their valor points a new upgrade system has been added that allows Justice points to upgrade blue items and Valor points to upgrade epics. This is a pretty useful point sink. It seems Blizzard intends that the epics from the patch 5.2 raid will not be upgradable until patch 5.3, which seems a decent idea to slow inflation. The item upgrade in general, while useful, continues the long trend toward anonymous gear based on ilevel.

Another very useful addition is that MOP reps have gained a hastily implemented feature for doubling the speed at which you earn revered to exalted, and passing on the advantage to alts when a main has hit revered. This must be very welcome for alts, but I wish they’d given me a feat of strength for leveling all my reps to exalted BEFORE the patch shipped.

Home of the Horde on Pandaria

Conclusion

In conclusion, MOP really draws together all of the elements present in Cata but rebalances them into a much much more effective (and therefore fun whole). There is a LOT to spend your time on at level 90 and pretty much all of it is either very fun, for vanity purposes (pets, mounts, xmorph etc), or contributes directly to your character via Valor. All elements of the game are more accessible than ever. I have a level 25 guild that I share with another real life friend, but it’s essentially a ghost guild and no one else is ever online. Yet I’m able through LFR and Valor to advance my character steadily.

Frankly, it keeps me playing and while without real raiding some of the extreme highs of the game are gone, it’s rarely frustrating and generally very fun. Pretty impressive after 8 years!

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
or the video game post depot
or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Mists of Pandaria, Races and factions of Warcraft, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

WOW Endgames – Cataclysm

Nov28

The Cataclysm Collector’s Edition contents

For the record, like many others, I stopped playing during the last six months of Lich King (who needed to run ICC more than 20-30 times?) and came back for Cataclysm. I discovered what is now my least favorite era of WOW.

Getting There

I didn’t even like leveling in Cataclysm. The zones were boring. I hated Vashj’ir for it’s annoying 3D travel and vast size. The others were just uninspired. Only Uldum was decent.

The Big Distraction

I suspect that the designers blew their wad on the giant world revamp. Every zone in Azeroth got an update, some quite dramatic, and all of the quests were redone. But I never saw any of this — except flying overhead. With four toons from 60-80, I wasn’t about to go level a new one. I didn’t even try out the new starting zones (Goblin and Worgen, although I heard they were good). If Worgen had been Horde (like they should), I might have tried them.

The old world got a facelift, or hatchet job…

Talent’s Last Stand

The talent trees got another huge overhaul, but this time instead of adding 5 new talent points, Blizzard took away 30! Level 85 characters had 41 talents, which wasn’t so bad except it reduced the emotional reward given at each level. Still, I understand how the prospect of 76 points could be overwhelming from a design and user standpoint. More substantially, Blizzard introduced a more formal choice of specialization. Instead of merely investing points in various trees, you had to pick your preferred tree. Along with this came certain mutually exclusive abilities and resources.

On the plus side, this allowed the designers the freedom to work on the specs in more isolation without having to place signature spec abilities deep into the trees. By Pandaria, it allowed even greater differentiation of specs. On the minus, this change continued a trend toward homogenization. There was a feeling under the old system, even if illusionary, that you could create an interesting hybrid between two specs. No more.

The new, post diet, Warlock talent trees

Reforging to Sameness

A number of gearing innovations were introduced with Cataclysm. In the BC and LK eras, the number of affixes (different stats and attributes possible on gear) had expanded considerably. The game has a lot of gear specs: plate tanks, plate dps, plate healing, mail spell dps, mail melee, mail ranged, mail healing, leather healing, leather spell dps, leather melee, leather tanking, cloth healing and cloth dps. In the old days, the designers ignored some, like bear tanks, but with making every spec viable came the need to provide them gear.

With Cataclysm, the designers tried to reduce this gear proliferation and consolidate stats. For example, the new “mastery” stat, basically good for every spec, but does something different for each. It might improve healing for a Holy Priest and damage for a Shadow Priest.

To make more gear useful to more players Blizzard introduced the reforging vendor. This allowed players to exchange one secondary stat on an item for another secondary stat. For example, if you had an item with crit and mastery, but want more haste, you could take half the mastery off and turn it into haste. This was reversible and modifiable.

This allowed almost any gear that fit your basic spec to be adjusted to fit your overall itemization. The downside was that it made gear increasingly by the numbers. Individual items used to matter more. You sought out the Azuresong Mageblade or the Core Hound Tooth. After Cataclysm, if the item had a higher ilevel (item level) and fit your spec at all, it was likely better. This meant that you stopped caring so much about the individualitem and its stats and more about its ilevel.

The reforging vendor allows you to play with the stats on your gear

The End of the Silhouette

Vanilla, BC, and LK WOW never allowed the modification of gear appearance. Other games had dyes and methods of cosmetic alteration, but in WOW, the gear actually looked good, and because each class had unique tier gear, it was usually possible at a glance to tell how good (or at least dedicated) a player was. In fact, when I first started playing I was really impressed by the way your character slowly improved visually. At first, you dressed in rags, and slowly but surely you got cooler looking (with a few setbacks). I, like most players, chose function over form, and sometimes had a patchwork appearance.

Cataclysmchanged all that by introducing Transmogrification. The transmorg vendor, would for a fee, make any piece of gear look like any other of the same type that you owned (i.e. you couldn’t make a bow look like a sword). Suddenly, your best gear was disconnected from your best-looking gear. The cool part of this was that old gear, which often looked very cool or nostalgic, was useful again as a template for appearance. It also allowed characters to construct unified thematic sets without compromising function. Negatively, the specific new gear you got became even less memorable. It was just ilevel and stats.

You can now make any gear look like pretty much any other gear

Normal Mode is Back

Cataclysm about faced the dungeon difficulty trend from LK. Normal mode level 85 dungeons had some challenge, and Heroics had a new key: gear level. You couldn’t enter them (via the Dungeon Finder) without having a certain gear level. This meant you actually had to run the normal ones. Which was good.

They weren’t really that hard and they had some decent gear. Plus, each faction had a tabard you could wear to gather reputation. Two of these dungeons were favorite Vanilladungeons that got a refresh and new level 85 modes: Shadow Fang Keep and Dead Mines.

Uldum featured this cool outside dungeon (shades of ZF and ZG) called The Lost City of the Tol’vir

The Return of CC

Heroic difficulty was another matter. While Cataclysm Heroic’s weren’t as brutal as BC Heroics, they were actually kinda difficult. They often required a bit of crowd control (CC) and knowledge of boss strategies. Again, not anywhere near that from the BC and Vanilla era, but a lot harder than in LK.

In guild runs, this was no probably and actually quite fun. But the problem was that most people didn’t run dungeons in guild groups, they used the Dungeon Finder. Heroics with the Dungeon Finder became torture. They were just a bit too hard for most random groups. They required you know the fight. Many good players reacted to this by dropping group as soon as anything went wrong. This happened prior to the Dungeon Finder, but social factors kept it more in check. Now, one wipe and your best player or two fled, leaving you to replace them by random chance.

At the time, I thought my problem was that after facerolling dungeons in LK, it was hard to go back to a challenge, but I think it had as much to do with the interaction of the Dungeon Finder. Pugs with no invested social connection are not well geared to face and learn to overcome challenges.

Justice/Valor Points

The badge system reached more or less final form: which wasn’t badges at all, but points. Instead of a constantly expanding collection of currencies, Blizzard converted the badges into two types of points (presumably the badge->point thing was for better granularity) and instituted several policies. With the release of new tiers, any remaining currency in the better currency (Valor) was converted into the lesser (Justice). Old Valor Gear was then made available for Justice Points. New gear went into the Valor Vendor. You earned Justice via dungeons (easy) and Valor by dailies and raiding (harder). Both currencies gained a weekly cap to discourage hardcore players from grinding out too much at once.

Blizzard experimented with different methods of Valor awards for non-raiders: first Heroic completed of the day, then up to 7 Heroics per week. The later was designed to remove the “need” to run one Heroic every day, but somehow turned out to discourage running as many of them.

This latest evolution worked well. Valor gear was very good, and could be purchased approximately one item every two weeks (if you maxed out your weekly cap). There was too little Justice Gear. For single spec classes (like my Warlock) the currency was useless after about two weeks — until a new tier landed a bunch of formerly top gear in the Justice Vendor. For non-raiders, Valor points were too hard to cap.

The elite can slay Deathwing, which is pretty cool

Guild Loyalty

Another successful new system was the expansion of the guild system. With Cataclysm, guilds as an entity gained reputation, levels, achievements, perks and more. Doing “work” (quests, dungeons, profession work, etc) started earning you reputation with your guild and the guild itself experience. The guild could then level up, earning members various guild perks. Certain achievements could open up guild rewards. The perks and rewards were actually pretty sweet although not usually related to performance per-se. Things like: faster running while dead, shorter hearth teleport timer, 10% more reputation, and a mass resurrection spell.

Overall, the system felt rewarding. You definitely wanted to be in a guild, and one that was pretty high level at that. The speed of leveling was reasonable and worked even for my tiny and fairly inactive guild.

The guild reward window: lots of cool stuff

Reputation Redux

Cataclysm‘s end game reputation grinds kept me occupied for a few weeks. There were some decent epic items and a few cool mounts. Most reputations had some dailies to help them along, or there were always dungeon runs. But they didn’t last forever, after about a month, I pretty much maxed them all out.

PVP + Dailies, oh my

Blizzard tried world PVP for a fourth time with Tol Barad. It was a lot like Wintergrasp, including the same kind of loot piñata boss. I felt obligated to run the boss once a week, but couldn’t have cared less about the PVP.

It also had a PVE rep and hub with a whole bunch of dailies. This was a pretty extensive 2-3 week grind-a-thon but awarded a couple of worthwhile things at exalted. Then it was done.

The Tol Barad outside world PVP zone. Pretty much just good for its loot filled tasty creme boss.

Archeology Fail

Instead of adding yet another crafting profession, like BC and LK, Cataclysm added a fourth optional profession all players could train: archeology. This turned out to be a rather boring, albeit, time consuming distraction. Making you travel is a time-proven form of cheap WOW gameplay (lots of holidays feature “tour the world” activities). Theoretically, Archeology could earn you cool items, but at launch it did so in a maddeningly tedious fashion.

Archaeology gets you all too familiar with this little gizmo.

Raiding as Usual

My guild fell apart at the end of LK and my new one consisted of mostly casual players, so I didn’t raid much at all during Cataclysm. I suffered from near burnout and never mustered the energy to try pugging anything or finding a raiding guild.

About a month after the expansion shipped I ran out of any way to progress my character without raiding. So I stopped playing.

Trolls again?

A few months in, Blizzard added two new 5 man dungeons with better gear. But I’d seen them both before: the troll raids Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman, just repurposed as 5 man dungeons. I tried a couple of times to run them, but they suffered from the same problem (as the Heroics) of pug wipes.

I stopped playing one more time.

The return of the trolls: Zul’Gurub!

Molten Front

Blizzard tried again with the Molten Front, a new raid (I didn’t try it) and a daily quest hub and reputation. I ground out rep for a week or two and grew bored.

I stopped again, and didn’t return until Pandaria.

Burn your eyes out on the bland looking Molten Front

Gone for Good?

Without a raiding guild, the majority of endgame progression was unavailable. Sure, I could have continued mindlessly running the same dungeons to gather valor points, but what was the point of getting new better gear if I wasn’t facing any new encounters? I just didn’t feel motivated. This time around, I didn’t bother with alts, the boring 80-85 zones put me off.

Late in the expansion, Blizzard introduced the Raid Finder, an attempt to do for raids what the Dungeon Finder did for dungeons. I never tried it out, but it’s possible, probable even that had this been around at Cataclysm launch, I would have played longer and had more to do.

But as it was, Cataclysm suffered from a diffuse focus spread throughout the world, frustrating Heroic pugs, over homogenization, and a general lack of newness. Had I played too long? Or was it the content itself?

I assumed it was me… until Mists of Pandaria…

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
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Deathwing lunches on a tasty tower

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Cataclysm, Video Games, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

World of Warcraft 8th Anniversary

Nov20

Blizzard released this cool 8 year anniversary video, which is sort of a walk down memory lane. Given that I’ve been writing up my giant endgame comparison post series, I thought it apropos.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jqBkUqOMacA]

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
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or win Crash & Jak giveaways!

By: agavin
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WOW Endgames – Burning Crusade

Nov07

The original cover

…continued from my coverage of the WOW Vanilla endgame.

In January of 2007, Blizzard launched The Burning Crusade, the first of four expansions to World of Warcraft and completely overhauled the endgame. In the race from level 60 to 70, any advantage gained by level 60 raiders was quickly swamped out.

Vanilla introduced the core World of Warcraft gameplay: questing, dungeons, pvp, and raids, but The Burning Crusade (BC) began a long process of inventing and refining new mechanics that doled out rewards for these activities. Most innovations were introduced during the BC and Lich King periods, and the newest two expansions (Cataclysm and Pandaria) have mostly tuned those mechanics. BC represented a lot of innovation, beginning one way (closer to Vanilla) and ending another.

It’s all about the numbers

BC saw radical changes with regard to party size. Ignoring UBRS, Vanilla finished up with a 5, 20, 40 scheme. This meant that dungeons were 5 man, smaller raids 20 man, and big raids 40. BC dropped the odd “big dungeons” (like UBRS) and moved to 5, 10, 25. Dungeons didn’t change, but the small raids moved to 10 man and the big raids to 25. Unlike today, each raid was designed for one size. At launch, there a single “intro raid”: Karazhan and four “big” raids. Two were 1-2 boss raids (Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon) and two were bigger progression instances (Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep). 40 man groups persisted vestigially for ad hoc and battleground PVP.

The intent of the shrinking group was to make it easier for guilds to get a raid together. With 10 man, this was successful. 10 man raids had enough people for two tank mechanics and specialized roles, but were easy to recruit and coordinate. I’m not sure the 40 to 25 shift was as productive. 25 man raids were only moderately easier to organize than 40 and certainly felt less epic. On the other hand, Vanilla 40 mans allowed single players to screw up and slip through the cracks. In BC 25 mans, everyone counted.

Questing

BC shipped with 7 big new zones, a new capital city, two new races, and a ton of quests. By the time I hit level 70, I still had two full zones left. However, like Vanilla, the motivation to finish wasn’t extremely high. You got gold and a few decent blues, but it was a lot of work, and there were numerous annoying 5 man quests. The main reason to finish was to open up the complex network of key chains required to raid (more on this later).

Questing in general was a lot better organized. The basic principle of smaller quest hubs located near their objectives was established. There were few long postal quests like in Vanilla. Dungeon quests remained interwoven with long zone based quest chains. This usually meant, like Vanilla, that during leveling you had not opened up the proper chains for many dungeons. Often these lengthy chains that wound in and out of the many dungeons had to be completed at 70.

The gateway between Outland and Azeroth

Split Reputation

Reputation in BC moved from the sidelines to front and center. Each dungeon group had one (or two) associated new reps and each rep gained a more meaningful vendor. The rewards, pathetic in Vanilla, became merely okay, and in the case of a few later reps actually good. Several of the reps gated the acquisition of vital items and buffs. The specifics varied by class and spec, but generally it was necessary to run most reputations to revered, particularly since entry into the new heroic difficulty dungeons also required revered reputation with each dungeon’s specific rep (more on that later). Reputation was earned in two ways: by running dungeons specific to the reputation or by grinding annoying drops.

In BC, reaching honored was generally trivial, revered a modest effort, and exalted painful but perhaps 10 times easier than the excruciating final march found in Vanilla. The original design found in Vanilla and early BC was that not only did the amount of rep needed for each rank double, but the ways you could earn it diminished. Midway in BC Blizzard reversed the latter and opened up increasing earning potential at higher levels. A tremendous improvement.

Important to all classes were two new city reputations (Scryer and Aldor). Blizzard experimented with providing the player with a choice between two similar reps. Both gated important buffs and resistance gear. Any serious raider needed to reach exalted and that required killing thousands of specific mobs to collect rep drops (or you could buy them on the auction house). Since this was the last time the designers tried this “choice of rep”, I can assume it was a failure. It added color, but ultimately was a lot of developer work for what didn’t amount to much variety.

Normal Dungeons

Dungeons remained a major source of loot and were necessary to armor yourself in dungeon blues for entry raiding. Blizzard shortened up the dungeons — slightly. Nothing in BC was as big and as long as the gigantic Blackrock dungeons. Still, some of them were still quite long, like Shadow Labs. Normal dungeons were difficult in questing gear and some dungeons like Shattered Halls, Shadow Labs, and Black Morass had high wipe rates. They required careful crowd control and care. There was more need for players to understand the boss mechanics than in Vanilla. A few dungeons proved unpopular and were infrequently run.

But they were, for the most part, challenging and fun.

Keymasters wanted

When BC shipped, instance attunement was famously complex. Every raid, heroic dungeon, and the more difficult normal dungeons all had separate and involved key requirements that wound their way through previous content. Some of this content was quite difficult and unpopular and basically made it so that only players in well organized guilds could easily complete the chains. In these guilds, players were willing to run otherwise pointless dungeons and raids merely to help others finish their keys. Without this, gathering a pickup group for difficult content could be extremely frustrating.

Later in BC, the designers removed the key requirements. Most people seemed to feel this was an entirely good thing and Blizzard never again gated instances with much in the way of achievement based requirements (although the current ilevel gating could be considered a dumbed down form of key). However, I miss the key quests. True, the ones in BC were often too long and too difficult, particularly the Naruu and A’dal chains, but they gave you long term goals and filtered out less capable players.

I my opinion, the Karazhan (intro raid) key chain was perfect. It required running several normal dungeons but could easily be accomplished in a day or two. The Naruu chain, where you had to defeat Mag (an unpopular 25 man boss) and several brutal heroic dungeons was another matter entirely.

Vanilla and BC key requirements

Kara is King

It was never clear if Blizzard intended players geared from normal dungeons to move straight to heroic dungeons or the intro 10 man raid, Karazhan. In practice, Kara was much more appealing. It offered vastly better rewards and was much less frustrating.

Karazhan is also my favorite instance in all WOW — and I reached exalted with the Violet Eye (Kara’s rep) on three characters.

Kara was a big place. It had 12 bosses (some optional) and a post corn roast buttload of trash. It was also incredibly cool with a fantastic score and ghostly gothic atmosphere. The bosses each had distinct and memorable mechanics. The complex encounter design that had been born in Vanilla‘s Naxx was repurposed in a more approachable manner. There were actually even more than 12 bosses because the opera event was really 3, one chosen at random each week, same in the Servant’s Quarters (even if it’s rewards were so lame that no one ran it).

For loot, Kara contained something for everyone. Its gear was a step up from the dungeon blues and better than the early heroic and badge epics (see below). It held the tokens for the tier gloves and helm and dropped matched gear for every slot and every spec in the game. At two epics per boss, it dropped upwards of 20 items per run for 10 players. A lot of loot. By late autumn of 2007 Kara was a juicy plumb of a loot piñata for new 70s.

But in the beginning, it was too hard, and the loot a little too weak. Early groups moving into Kara soon after launch experienced a serious shock. Kara wasn’t exactly a gear check. You could do it in blues, but beyond the first boss, it required that you understand the mechanics. For raiders forced in the hellfires of Blackwing Lair, AQ40, and Naxx, it was a cakewalk. For normal players, used to tank and spank, it was a serious challenge. Over several months, Blizzard nerfed the bosses, trimmed back the exhausting trash, buffed the loot, and players learned the encounters.

The 10 man “entry raid” concept was so successful that mid expansion Blizzard added a second one, the troll themed Zul’Aman.

The wizard Medivh’s spooky abode

Tier Tokens

BC introduced the concept of the tier token (actually AQ40 and Naxx had experimented in this direction, but that was only for the 1%). In Vanilla, bosses dropped a particular tier item, like Ony and the Tier 2 helm, and they dropped them for a specific class. This barely worked with 40 players, but in 10 man raids it would have been a total failure. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a bunch of druid helms when there isn’t even a druid in the party!

So we got the token, which could be exchanged for a specific piece of gear, say the Tier 4 helm. Usually three classes shared a token, so say priests, warlocks, and paladins. This meant it was likely someone could use it. The token could be converted to any spec’s gear, say holy, prot, or ret for paladins.

Heroics and badges

Far less successful, were the heroics. The idea itself was brilliant. Since leveling dungeons don’t get a lot of mileage, provide two tunings of each BC dungeon: normal and heroic. The heroic was intended to be level 70 exclusive and quite difficult. In practice, the heroics were VERY hard, required revered reputation, and provided sub-par rewards. However, it’s worth noting that their badge system was to evolve into one of the cornerstones of WOW endgame progression.

Heroics dropped mostly blue gear. Only the final boss would drop an epic, and there were very few of these, covering only a fraction of the gear slots and specs. The epics were also lame, barely (and sometimes not) better than the blues. The bosses also dropped “badges” that could be redeemed for epic gear. Again, brilliant idea, poor tuning. Heroic runs earned 3-6 badges. Gear cost 40-80. The gear was the same lame ilevel as the end boss heroic gear, and there weren’t very many items.

Heroics were also very hard. Some, like Shadow Labs or Shattered Halls were REALLY long or really hard. They were hard to recruit for and even harder to run. In the early days, before the badge gear was expanded, they weren’t worth it.

PVP was the new black

I’m a PVE player. I never cared that much about PVP itself. But during the first year of BC the easiest way to gear your PVE character was to PVP. Before the removal of the Tier 6 key requirements, you could get post Kara gear only from the 25 man Tier 5 raids. These were pretty hard and even in a raiding guild it was several weeks between items. The summer 2007 PVP set was competitive with T5 and the fall one better. Half of it could be bought for honor, the other half for arena points.

And honor came from battlegrounds. So you played them. And played them. And played them some more. This was easy, predictable, and boring. I used to PVP on the laptop while watching TV. You wanted to grind for 5-10 hours a week. Basically, I consider this a design failure. It got me into battlegrounds, and for a while I cared, but eventually I’d just run AV endlessly, barely paying attention.

Even losers win

During the 2007 seasons, arena was the secret sauce and 3 vs 3 the sweet spot. A casual 3 vs 3 team could spend an hour a week, lose half its matches, and still earn enough arena points to buy amazing gear every other week. This was the best time investment to gear ratio in the entire game by an order of magnitude. Eventually, Blizzard caught on and required fairly high ratings to buy the best pieces. Still, it paid to arena to get the others. With Lich King, they changed the gear balance to make PVP gear fairly useless in PVE, but for a while, it was a solid progression option.

New Daily Hubs

During the course of the expansion, Blizzard introduced a number of ideas to add endgame content and mitigate the varied time investment of the player base. As I discussed in my Vanilla article, difficulty and time investment were used as the gateway to many rewards. It turned out, you could do the same thing for quests that you did for raid gear: limit them by real time as opposed to time investment.

And so the daily was born: A quest that you can do once per day. Dailies allow grinds to be limited by real time instead of time invested. If you can only earn reputation by completing 5 daily quests worth a total of 1000 points, you can only earn 1000 a day. One of the first uses of the daily concept was the “daily dungeon.” Here, one random dungeon was chosen each day. Running it rewarded extra badges. This actually solved two problems. Besides gating badge earning, it concentrated player energy on that specific instance for the day and made it easier to find a group.

The spring of 2007 brought a trio of reputation based daily quest hubs. These player time sink centers allowed you to pick up 5-8 quests per day and turn them in for reputation. Things were calibrated so that a 1-2 hour a day investment for 2-3 weeks would bring you to exalted in any one of the hubs. Blizzard didn’t trust the new mechanic and these first hubs were mostly cosmetic. I did the Netherwing chain where you earned a cool flying dragon. The grind was significant but fair. You could do it but it was enough work that you felt you achieved something. The evolving mix of quests was also pretty cool (the bootarang quest is one of WOW’s greatest).

Like the badges, this idea was initially underutilized but destined to become a cornerstone.

Unlocking the Gates

During early BC, my guild endlessly ran Kara and Gruul. Entry into the T5 raids required that the entire guild earn the “Champion of the Naruu” title by killing Magtheridon and running a bunch of heroics. No one liked Mag and our guild was too disorganized to get everyone through the heroics. This effectively kept us artificially “stuck” in T4 gear and unable to progress into T5.

Eventually, Blizzard just dropped the key requirement to Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep (and later to Black Temple and Hyjal). This was a drastic solution, although effective enough. However, in my opinion, the real mistake was the nature and difficulty of the keys, not their existence. Key quests added flavor and excitement to the endgame, but they needed to be doable without a great deal of punishing runs. Merely requiring 10 of 25 in the raid to have killed Gruul for entry into SSC/TK would have been fine.

A similar problem existed with the T6 raids (Black Temple and Hyjal). Their key quest was truly epic. Besides some heroics, you had to collect something from both Vashj and Kael. These bosses, the final ones in both SSC and TK, were serious raid checks. Both encounters were multi-staged and required that everyone in the raid know and execute on their role. While cool encounters, it was very rare that guilds wanted to take down these bosses after getting into T5, as the burden of training new people on them was too high.

Still, earning “Hand of A’dal” (killing both Vashj & Kael), was one of the proudest moments of my WOW career.

I used to tank Ilidan on my warlock

ZA and Vanity Wins

In Vanilla, Blizzard introduced plenty of additional content as the endgame progressed, however very little of this helped the more casual player progress their gear level and make any additional progress in the difficult raids. These remained the providence of exclusive raiding guilds. In BC this changed.

First, they introduced ZA, a new 10 man “easier” raid along the Kara model. This offered gear somewhere between the T4 and T5 level. It was easier than T5 and only required 10 people so it helped players and guilds gear to make better progression in T5 and T6. Also, ZA introduced a number of interesting new concepts designed at rewarding better players. The faster you ran it, the more loot dropped. But more importantly, if you ran it really fast, you got a single “Amani War Bear” mount for someone in the group. This became a major status symbol, particularly as Blizzard removed the ability to win the mount when Lich King shipped.

In my opinion, some of the features of ZA paved the way for both the achievements and raiding heroic modes that were to become the hallmark of endgame experimentation in Lich King.

Daily hub and more epic 5 mans

With the final major content push of BC, Blizzard introduced not only a new major raid (Sunwell, the last crazy hard normal raid in WOW history) but a whole island of content. There was a great new 5 man dungeon at both a higher level of difficulty, better design, and with better epic loot. Plus there was a new reputation centered around a quest hub of daily quests. This took the daily concept begun with the more casual hubs and brought it to the next level. The dungeon tied into the same rep and keyed from it, plus the rep vendor actually offered valuable epic upgrades both as normal gear and as profession recipes.

The model of the Isle of Quel’Danas was to set the mould for what was to come. Plus, unlike in Vanilla, this patch offered less hard core raiders a shot at “easier” gear equivalent to T5 and T6. One of the effects of this was to enable progression of guilds (like mine) that didn’t really have the skill to handle Black Temple and Hyjal in pure T5 gear. This ties into one of the most important trends discussed below.

The Isle of Quel’danas

Currency to provide progression (expanding tokens to all raids)

The initial badge system sucked. As I said before, the badges were only earned in annoying heroics and the rewards bit. With the launch of Qel’Danas, this all changed.

Suddenly, you could get badges not just in heroics, and bonuses for daily heroics, but every raid boss dropped a pair, including the ones in ZA and Kara. The already popular Kara became a total badge fest at 23 a week! Even the hardest core raiders pounded it out making it easier for the rest of us. Why? Because the new badge vendor on the Isle sold T6 quality gear. Sure, some at steep prices like 250 badges, but the gear was fantastic. This meant that if you raided, and ran a Kara/ZA, and some heroics, like a daily or the ever popular Heroic Mechanar (because it was the easiest and shortest heroic), you could bank 50-70 badges a week.

New best in slot items every two weeks or so. One way or another, the badge system (now the point system) has been a major part of WOW ever since. I’ll discuss later how it evolved over the course of Lich King, where it was to see a lot of experimentation, but Blizzard had hit on something. The badge system meant that running instances where you needed no loot, or were unlucky and got no loot, wasn’t a total waste of time. When you accumulated enough badges, you could buy something you really did need. Regulating the rate of badge acquisition would be a major design challenge, but the concept was brilliant. Vanilla and early BC were filled with a lot of play sessions that left you feeling cheated, hours invested and nothing gained. Badges changed (or at least mitigated) that.

You are not prepared!

It’s worth noting that the final raid, Sunwell Plateau, retained the traditional Vanilla/BC elitist only model. Some regard this as the best raid Blizzard ever produced, but few saw it. Our guild only downed the first two bosses, and we considered ourselves pretty elite to be killing anything in there. It was hard, really f**cking brutally hard, and nothing about the new gearing systems changed that. Meeting the final boss of the expansion, Kil’Jaeden, was something only the most dedicated and skilled could be expected to do.

It took us 6 weeks to vanquish Archimonde

Heading toward normalization

BC began and extended a trend which was to continue through Lich King and Cataclysm: Normalization.

In Vanilla, a lot of differences existed between classes and faction. The Alliance had Paladins and the Horde Shamans. BC took this away and gave both factions the same classes. Because of both PVE balance and largely because of arena, Blizzard worked very hard to normalize the classes and specs. There was a significant effort to make every spec viable. In Vanilla, raiding Druids and Shamans healed. Tanks were all Warriors. BC saw the rise of the Pally and Bear tank. Not only that, it became part of the design to make even healing specs viable in arena and for solo (i.e. daily) play.

In Vanilla/early BC, healing gear was healing only and healing specs couldn’t dps worth a damn. Healers were forced to spec back and forth in order to grind materials or run dailies. Blizzard made a number of incremental moves to change this, first making “plus healing” provide partial damage and then merging “plus spell” and “plus healing” into one stat. The amount of gear was reduced, with a lot of healing and dps gear merged. There was some effort to provide specialized bear tanking gear and other rare specs.

Another aspect of normalization was a decreased emphasis on quests and content that could only be experienced by a few. Blizzard built less and less specific class quests in BC and onward. Still, BC had a few great ones like the Druid flying form quest chain.

Hybrid Vigor

Making most specs viable changed the relative value of the hybrid. In the Vanilla design, hybrids (druids, shamans, paladins) were supposed to be more versatile but a little worse than the dedicated classes. As each spec was brought into parity, the “option” of being healer/dps or healer/tank/dps became more and more valuable. My main has always been a Warlock and we dedicated damage classes became less popular and less likely to be picked for raid.

Conclusion

In many ways, BC was my favorite endgame. It had some problems, particularly at the beginning. The difficult key quests and high degree of raid difficult meant that it “seemed” like there was too little raid content for mediocre guilds like mine (because T5 and beyond wasn’t accessible). The tuning on new systems like heroics and badges wasn’t right at the beginning.

Still, there was a lot to do, and the game felt more epic than ever. Compared to Vanilla, there was vastly more accessible content for the non-raider and the softcore raider alike. Things were generally much more balanced and mature than in Vanilla, if not quite as varied. There was a lot less wasted development effort (some of Vanilla‘s vast dungeons were barely ever played). It was possible for different levels of raiders (and even non-raiders) to make significant progress across the course of the expansion. PVP got some skill based development (at top arena levels) and only remained “mostly” (as opposed to entirely) a grind.

Burning Crusade introduced, new and untuned, many of the systems that were to lead to the modern endgame. Lich King would more or less finish the job.

This saga continues as we head to the frozen north…

My novels: The Darkening Dream and Untimed
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Mists of Pandaria Leveling

Oct15

First a bit of background on me and WOW (World of Warcraft):

I bought the game at launch but didn’t start playing until 2005. Once I did, I was instantly addicted — truly I’ve never been so addicted to a game in my life — and I’ve played at all stages of the game’s evolution. In Vanilla, my main (Undead Warlock) raided everything except for Naxx. Even my Night Elf Rogue wore Bloodfang. In Burning Crusade, my Warlock tanked Illidan and cleared all but the last bosses of Sunwell. My Paladin and Druid healed and tanked Karazan. In Wrath of the Lich King, I raided through to and including Icecrown with both my Warlock and Holy Paladin. But at the end of LK my guild fell apart and I didn’t have the willpower to apply to another, so with Cataclysm I merely leveled my Warlock, geared him for raiding, then gave up.

After almost two years hiatus, I swore I wouldn’t bother with Mists of Pandaria. Of course, this didn’t stop me from buying the collector’s edition. I have all the others except for Vanilla. I didn’t even log in for a few days.

Talent Trees et al

When I finally zoned in, I was daunted by the effort needed to revamp my interface before I could play. All the spells had changed. I had to pick new talents from the completely redesigned (non) talent trees. I had to update all my addons, glyph, and layout my action bars nearly from scratch. I’ve long preferred Destruction on my Warlock, with a minor in Demonology, only having briefly played Affliction during LK.

I found the new Destruction spells make for a much tidier toolbar. A lot of abilities are gone or moved to other specs and so all the main combat spells actually fit on convenient keys for the first time since vanilla. I’ll eventually have to see if this is true on my Paladin. Historically, the Pally’s obscene collection of roles and buffs has meant the default action bars don’t even have enough slots for all the abilities.

Anyway, the new Destruction rotation didn’t take long to learn — although it’s really weird not to have Lifetap and Corruption which were such longtime Warlock staples. The new Destro Lock is more Mage-like than ever with only a single DOT. But the burst is pretty awesome and thanks to a bunch of defensive cooldowns and heals, survivability is excellent. I didn’t choose either Howl of Terror or Shadowfury so my only problem is if I get mobbed by 5+ tough enemies.

I’m not sure how I feel about this new talent system. Broken as they were, I liked the talent trees back in the old days of Vanilla and BC. But the compressed Cata trees felt a bit lame. And most importantly, what seems to be missing now-a-days is the feeling of upgrading while leveling. Between 85 and 89 nothing happened. No talents. No new abilities of note (one minor passive change to Backdraft). All rather anticlimactic. I liked slowly depositing points into those trees and eventually gaining new abilities.

Zones

Pandaria looks gorgeous. From the trailers, I was initially skeptical of the whole Kung-fu Panda thing, but it actually works. The Asian look, and the shear dramatic verticality of many zones can be breathtaking. They are easily the best looking yet. I liked the look of BC and LK, but Cata never did it for me. Most of those zones were flat, and far too dislocated.

Jade Forest is a great place to begin and it’s really lovely. Valley of the Four Winds is tongue in cheek, but reminds me (in a good way) of Nagrand which was my favorite BC zone. Kun-Lai Summit is another favorite. This has a high Tibetan feel that is really cool. Being on foot/mount is great, as the scale when you crest some of these mountains wouldn’t work if one was flying. Krasarang Wilds and Townlong Steppes are a little less exciting, but certainly fine. I haven’t played the Dread Wastes yet.

The music is top notch.

Leveling

I played Jade Forest, Valley of the Four Winds, Krasarang Wilds, and Kun-Lai Summit in that order, completing 100% of the quests in each before moving on (I’ve had Loremaster since two weeks after LK shipped, so this is no surprise). I turned 90 just as I finished up Kun-Lai. I’ve always wondered why Blizzard paces the XP so that you usually have two zones left over when you hit max level. In LK it was three! The Pandarian zones are the biggest yet. Jade Forest and Kun-Lai are almost heroically big. Too big perhaps, as I was starting to feel a little weary moving into the final sub zones of Kun-Lai.

The whole process took me less than a week and I wasn’t playing that hard.

Overall difficulty was very easy. Similar to Cata, but much easier than BC and Vanilla. In those old days you used to die while leveling. Sometimes a lot. I probably died 2-3 times from 85-90.

This was the best leveling experience in a long time, but I can’t help but think it would have been even better with 10 levels, and with the pacing spread out so you hit 90 right at the end of Dread Wastes and with more spell and talent rewards per level.

Quests

The quests seem hugely improved. There are still plenty of kill and gather quests, but they are doled out in a really efficient way. You almost always get about five quests at a time all concentrating on a single area. They usually mix collection and kill quests. You head back and pick up a new crop. There is no sense that you might miss some. It’s extremely easy to do them all and feel that you got 100% of the quests. This is in marked contrast to the haphazard nature of old vanilla quests. There is a total absence of postal (long distance delivery) quests and long back and forth quest chains. They also seem to have toned down those giant story chains that took a lot of time in Cata. I’m talking about the Bronzebeard one and that weird vision quest thing in the tedious and way-too-big Vashj’ir. I don’t miss these. Replacing it are some fun chains like the odd but funny monkey/sniper adventure and the highly amusing kung-fu training. It’s all pretty light hearted but enjoyable.

Gear

For perhaps the first time ever, the quest rewards were actually useful. I pretty rapidly replaced my blues and purples with green (and the occasional blue) quest rewards. The huge thing is that the rewards are ALL for your class! In the old days, particularly as a DPS only caster, 90% of the rewards couldn’t even be equipped, or were useless healing gear. Plus the rapid step up of base stats (dare we say runaway inflation – my level 90 Lock has 400,000 HP, at 60, in raid gear, I had 6k) means that in MOP, a level 87 green is probably better than your level 85 raid gear, at least for leveling.

Interestingly, there are almost NO socketed items until the endgame. Blizzard doesn’t seem to want you to have to deal with it. There is no need for enchants. The game is easy anyway, and the same scaling means that old cheaper enchants are a waste of time and new endgame MOP enchants too expensive to bother with on leveling gear. You grab and go.

Bag space, at least for a hoarder like me, is still a problem. I need to move some more crap into void storage. The asian look of some of the armor is cool, although I’ve been stuck at 90 with a dumbass looking green hat and need to transmorg it.

Tradeskills

My Warlock is, and always has, been Herbology/Alchemy. I’m going to write up a separate post later on the level 90 endgame where I will discuss the bigger changes in the skills, and confine myself here to the experience while leveling. It’s clear that Blizzard is currently thinking that you should concentrate on crafting skills at 90.

Gathering nodes are, however, available in almost obscene quantity. This is in stark contrast to LK where there was barely an herb to be found. I hit 600 with Herbology about half way thru. At first I thought there was a crazy overabundance of Green Tea Leaf, but then I realized this holds for every Pandarian herb except for Golden Lotus. It’s nice that you get XP from the nodes as this rewards you for the 30 seconds spent chasing them down.

Alchemy right now is also very straightforward and doesn’t even require ANY return visits to the trainer or grinding of reputations. This is perhaps boring, but more on this in the next post.

Cooking and Fishing are clearly intended to level at the end as they are both tied to level 90 daily quests. First Aid is, as usual, trivial, and I find Archeology too tedious and am stuck at about 250.

Dungeons

There are only four leveling dungeons: Stormstout Brewery, Temple of the Jade Serpent and at level 87: Mogu’shan Palace and Shado-Pan Monastery. These are all really great leveling dungeons. The quest givers are inside and there are exactly two quests for each. They take about 15-20 minutes and are easy but fun. They feel different enough. They don’t require any sort of crowd control or marking. You just pull a pack and whack away at it and then pull another. Even adds won’t wipe you.

The XP and gear rewards are very good. The gear for sure is better than from quests. The overall balance and length of these instances is very consistent. All four are fun and there is no frustration factor.

If I had a major criticism I think that all the MOP dungeons should have been leveling dungeons and the heroics reserved for 90. I hopped right into heroics without ever playing the level 90 normals (and had no problem) so these are wasted. The designers would have been better off making the Palace and Monastery available at level 86 and the two bug dungeons available at 88 in normal mode.

Overall, the instances serve as nice breaks from the tedium of questing. Now-a-days, with the dungeon finder, you can just queue and keep questing, hop into one, and then back out to questing. It’s all very efficient. You don’t even have to walk in once like in Cata. At some level, I miss the cool interweaving of the world and dungeon quests that Vanilla and BC had, but in practice, back when I leveled vanilla, the time it took to gather a group and run the ludicrously large dungeons was not adequately compensated by the rewards. It was much faster to quest on past them.

I’m also of two minds about the dumbing down. It began with Lich King, saw a frustrating reversion in Cata, and is back in full force. I guess for leveling dungeons, where one is in a hurry, this is a good thing.

Extras

Despite the fact that I collect vanity pets (I had over 175 even before this expansion), I haven’t dealt with the whole battle pet mini-game yet. It doesn’t turn up XP or gear, so I figured I’d save it for when I run out of normal stuff to do.

I keep meaning to play a Pandarian (Monk) through the turtle zone, but I haven’t yet.

Conclusion

While there is nothing radically new about MOP, it feels a hell of a lot better than Cata. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. It was fun to level again and Blizzard has cleaned up a lot of stuff that after four expansions had become a little messy. This “new” game is still very much World of Warcraft. They have not reinvented the wheel, but they continual the usual iterative improvements. I suspect that Cataclysm suffered from the redoing of the old zones, which was a lot of content that continuing players like myself never saw.

Anyway, the real meat of the matter is in the end game, and I’ll discuss that in a second post.

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By: agavin
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Diablo 3 – The Infernal Barbarian

Jul06

A few hours after hitting level 60 I mowed through Hell Mode Act IV and one-shot Diablo. That’s when the real hell began.

Act I

Inferno Mode is hard, and particularly difficult for a Barbarian. As a short-range melee class, you have to take the hits, and the hits are big. Real big. The first thing I noticed about Inferno was that even the trivial zombies took a few hits to kill, and they actually do some damage. The elites are out of this world crazy. With normal Hell mode gear, the second you step into an area of effect zone (molten, plagued, desecrator, or the like), you die.

This sent me back to the Auction house for a few upgrades. I found a strong DPS 2 hander in the real money AH for $3 and this helped (1080 base DPS, 200 strength, socket). I picked up some more armor and changed my passives to be more defensive. I ended up (in several waves) spending a lot of gold to get level 60 pieces on most slots. This enabled me to slog through Act I scene by scene, but the going was tough and expensive, even before Blizzard’s repair cost hike. The elites trained me to play better and more defensively. You can’t step in their shit. You can’t get hit by their telegraphed physical attacks. If health gets low you have to run until your cooldowns recover. You have to be careful about pulling too much trash at the same time, or God forbid, two elite packs (99.9% fatal). If you can’t kill The Butcher fast enough, the whole floor starts to burn (enrage timer). I went into him with five stacks and couldn’t kill him in 30 minutes. When they wore off I switched to a more offensive build and managed to kill him with no stacks, just to get it done.

A more defensive build

Cleave (with Broad Sweep) – I still wanted an AOE main as there are far to many enemies to single target down

Seismic Slam (Stagger for Crowd Control) – This is a controversial skill. It’s a terrible fury dump on bosses, but I like it against crowds and elites because you can AOE, and more importantly, stun and knock back big groups of enemies. This keeps a little damage at bay while dishing out some punishment.

Ground Stomp (with Wrenching Smash) – This turns out to be a pretty awesome skill. Against trash it’s a great way to gather in a group for Cleave or Revenge and against champions it allows you to keep them stunned — briefly.

Revenge (with Provocation) – a combo fury-free heal/aoe. The increased chance to proc seems the best when you need it to survive.

Furious Charge (with Dreadnought) – A short cooldown escape/closer with a heal and stun. This extra heal (besides your health potion) can really keep you alive.

Wrath of the Berserker (with Insanity) – This big burst damage is pretty much a requirement to burst down tough elite packs and bosses.

Passives: Superstition, Tough as Nails, and Nerves of Steel – I ended up going all defensive for now. Later, I was able to switch out Superstition (which seemed the worst of the trio) for Ruthless.

Follower: Templar, specced fully for healing. Really, as a Barbarian, anything that heals you is good. If you can stay alive, you will prevail. The Templar also has a nice WOW Warrior style charge and stun.

Back on the Farm

Before some of the recent patches and hotfixes Act I dropped shit gear. Packs dropped mostly blues, even with 5 stacks, and bosses dropped two crap yellows. The repair costs were so high versus the rewards (not to mention the high AH prices) that you lose money to play.

This forced me to find farming spots. If you set the quest to “search for the stranger, the cursed hold” and teleport to the “old ruins” there is about 75% of the time a cellar straight to the west through the gates. The elite there is very easy and drops a lot of gold. He’s easy enough that you can kill him in a complete set of gold find gear, plus he’s real close to a checkpoint so you can repeat it quickly. This is incredibly boring but earns (for me) about 200,000 gold an hour.

I think it’s a serious flaw that the game basically requires you to farm gold in order to either progress or even play at the edge of your skills. Act I does not itself drop good enough gear to allow you to pass it easily, at least not during the first 4-6 weeks of release. The totally random nature of the gear means that you almost NEVER find a genuine upgrade yourself in Inferno. You need to sell what you find and buy stuff on the AH. But it’s EXPENSIVE. Either I’m missing some easy gold earning technique or the player base can an incredible tolerance for tedium. It takes A LOT of farming to improve your gear in Inferno, and Act I is the easy sauce.

Also, I have terrible luck selling on the AH. I keep 10 items listed on both gold and $ AH at all times, but they rarely sell. I’ve tried pricing them cheap, I’ve tried pricing expensive, but there is such an incredible supply (despite high prices), and the visibility is so low, that very little seems to sell. There are no aides to pricing and it’s very tedious to search for comparable prices. There should be a “show me stuff that is like this item” search.

Act II

If I thought Act I was hard, Act II was a total wake up call. There is a very steep cliff which is not present in any of the previous difficulty modes. And unlike those earlier modes, in Inferno, there is no option to just grind for a bit and level past it. You have to improve your skills, spec, and gear. At first, using gear that made Act I Halls of Agony easy enough, even Act II trash pulls of more than 2-3 mobs killed me. And forget about elites. Those annoying wasps with their mini-wasp “bullets” could easily be fatal. In Act II, as a Barbarian, you need at least 200-400 resist in every category in order to survive the area of effects.

One of the first things I did was switch from 2-hander to 1-hander and shield. Getting a shield with a reasonable block rating (17%+) helps a lot, but your DPS craters compared to 2-hander or dual-wielding. I had to farm, farm, and farm some more in order to repurchase more gear slots with a big chunk of “all resist.” This stat is essential to Inferno melee and is priced accordingly. Any gear with it, and decent other stats, is very expensive. I re-gemmed for all vitality. I got some more health on hit. Other classes can focus on DPS, but the Barbarian needs to use at least half his stat allocation for resists, armor, and healing. It sucks.

As I slowly got my resists up around 400 I was able to push through the Act. Still, even before the repair hike, progress cost me money. Some elites took a couple deaths to finish off and this cost a lot of gold. I was, however, able to move forward, defeating 80-90% of elite packs. Bosses were no problem, and single elites, but occasional pulls involving two packs or nasty affix combinations like molten and fiery chains or molten, invulnerable minions, and waller would require skipping or resetting the game. Belial was hard. After the patch where he has a enrage timer he required a more DPS/healing oriented spec (including Frenzy) and a two-hander to defeat.

Act III

The third act put me up against yet another wall. Defeating the first elite pack took me into the yellow and cost 45,000 gold. Hardly an economical solution. I put on my two hander, changed my passives to DPS, and went back to farm Act I. With my Act II gear (all purchased, at most I’m wearing one piece that actually dropped for me) I can now crush Act I Inferno. I only die when I get exceedingly sloppy (like taking on three elite packs) and can DPS the Butcher down in about 1.5 minutes.

Farming Act I earns perhaps 150,000 gold an hour direct and a huge number of rares, particularly after the most recent patch where they drop from both elite packs and bosses in good numbers. The increased drop rates of ilevel 62 and 63 stuff mean that some of it is even decent. Still, the random number generator churns out enormous amounts of crap that is barely useable by any class. Vendor fodder. I have improved my gear to about 22,000 DPS with a 2-hander, 7k armor, and 400-450 resists. Then back to Act III and see how that goes.

I can kill some elites, but I still die too often. It would cost me 200,000 gold an hour to progress. Hmmm.

Stacking it all up

I have mixed feelings about the valor stack mechanic. It’s essentially pretty good except for the fact that it requires at least an hour or two of play time. The fact that the game will disconnect you after about 20-30 minutes of pause means that you can’t really leave it. That DC will kill your stacks and reroll the world. This isn’t a big deal before 60, but loosing those stacks sucks. It can also be frustrating with the harder end-of-act bosses that really need a different spec than the rest of the Act. By the time you arrive at them, you usually have 5 stacks, and killing them without any is useless. I don’t like being forced to kill trash with a single target DPS spec just so I can save my stacks for the boss.

The Gear/AH Problem

The relationship between gear, progress, and the Auction House seems fairly broken. In order to progress in Inferno you need extremely specific gear that is very expensive. During the first couple of weeks the acts themselves were not dropping this in sufficient quantity. The RNG generates a lot of crap. I try to have no more than one “second rate affix” on any piece too, ideally zero. A second rater for a Barb is something like Int, or Dexterity. I try to have no “third rate” like gold pickup range or something specific to other classes. This kind of gear drops once in a blue moon.

With the new drop rates, and my ability to farm Act I and Act II it should be possible to get a lot of good gear, but I despair of actually finding much I might want myself. Which leaves the AH. It just seems very difficult to sell anything, and what I want to buy is frightfully expensive. Prices are random and all over the place. The AH needs a lot of improvement for finding items. It needs more than three filters and ways to sort your finds better. It needs tools for pricing your loot and probably a higher limit on the number of sales and a shorter sale time.

It just seems broken to have progress come only from an external mechanism (or willingness to pay significant real dollars or farm insane gold stacks). Blizzard has made improvements (and a few backward steps like the repair cost hike). The increase drop rates are good and the reduction of crafting costs. Still, merging gems is frightfully expensive. Blacksmithing requires a lot of materials considering how random the results are.

Coming from WOW, which also had a very steep cliff in vanilla at level 60, this one seems even odder. That was gated by your ability to raid (and to a lesser extent by a similar willingness to grind), but this one seems “pay to play” or “grind to play.” Neither seems super appealing.

Check out my review of Barbarian 1-60 leveling.

Or my Beta preview of all the classes.

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Area of effect, Barbarian, Barbarian Build, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo, Diablo 3, Diablo III, inferno, inferno mode

Diablo 3 – Barbarian 1-60

Jun08

I used the Diablo 3 Beta as a chance to explore each class, but my first 48 hours with the real game were thwarted by the login boss. Blizzard clearly had a few problems out of the box, but by Wednesday or Thursday things were mostly stabilized.

I rolled a Barbarian as my main. Thematically, I’m more a Witch Doctor type, but I didn’t love the indirect style of gameplay so I debated Barbarian or Wizard. Both were fun to play, but ultimately I went with the Barbarian because he seemed tougher (theoretically less dying) and his “jump right into the middle and kill” style was very satisfying. Over the next three weeks I played through Normal, Nightmare, and Hell, and have just started on Inferno.

Normal Mode

The game is pretty easy on Normal Mode, probably easier than Diablo II (it’s hard to remember). Personally I think the difficulty here is about right, there’s really no reason to be punitive given the game is intended to be played multiple times. A couple mechanical changes make for less downtime than previous games: You don’t have to corpse run. All you lose when you die is a bit of time and the cost of repair. Champions save the health you left them with, so zerging is possible. In normal I barely died, perhaps only 5-6 times.

Each play through took about a week of fairly casual play, with the increasing difficulty being matched by increasing familiarity. The end of Act I and Act II seemed the hardest. Bosses seemed pretty easy. Act IV very easy.

Game Size

The game is long and very linear. It feels about the right length. Acts I and II go on and on. Even on the second and third play throughs I kept saying to myself “oh yeah, this again” as I had forgotten all the varied sub areas. The random generation does mix it up fairly well. I, myself, usually explore every level completely, milking every last chest, monster, and elite out of it. This makes the game considerably easier than if you force ahead at the fastest rate. The way I did it, the leveling was perfectly paced, I reached level 60 just as I hit the last boss of Act III on Hell Mode.

Plot

The plot as told in D3 is a bizarre mix of voice over quest text and three kinds of FMV. There is a brown ink on parchment style, in game boss talk, and the fully rendered advanced CGI style. I found only this last compelling. The full-rendered character models, notably Leah, are pretty awesome. So are the angels. The boss speeches are pretty laughable, almost Scooby Doo style. “Muuuhahhaha. Now I have become the prime evil!!!!”

The quest structure is pretty good, if entirely 100% linear. You can skip everything for repeat listening (or not). I also enjoyed the comments of the companion followers. They are well acted and occasionally amusing. Still, they do get a bit repetitive.

None of this detracts much from the game as it’s more about the combat and the overall mood than it is about the specifics of character and plot. Nevertheless, as a writer I suggest that Blizzard could use to… ahem… hire one. This is no Uncharted with regard to story.

Barbarian Build 1

It takes until about Act II of Normal Mode to really get enough of your skills for a full sense of the class. Once you do, the Barbarian is a real badass. Wading into a giant group of trash is very satisfying. Blood and bodies fly everywhere. I tuned my first build for maximum AOE damage output. Given the difficulty level of Normal this was fine even for champions and most bosses. Occasionally, I had to swap a skill for bosses.

Cleave (usually with Rupture) – This is a no brainer, it’s the AOE fury builder

Either Rend (usually with Ravage for extra range) or Seismic Slam (with Stagger) – More AOE. Rend is a little more practical, particularly against elites and bosses, but SS is so much more fun. It’s particularly exciting with huge groups of mobs.

Leap (with Iron Impact then Call of Arreat) – Great for opening a fight, or getting a brief stun, or escaping

Revenge (with Vengeance is Mine or Best Served Cold) – a combo fury-free heal/aoe

Battle Rage (with Marauder’s Rage) – a pure damage buff

Call of the Ancients (with the Council Rises) – If you get overwhelmed, this will sop up some monster attention and burn them down

Passives: Ruthless, Weapons Master, and Berserker Rage or Brawler – all of these are straight DPS increases

Follower: Enchantress, speced for buffs and DPS

For bosses I would sometimes swap Cleave out for Frenzy (Sidearm) for more single target DPS and COTA for Wrath of the Berserker (Insanity) to burn bosses down.

This basic build served me fine through all of Normal and Nightmare.

Nightmare

The second difficulty level doesn’t really feel any harder than the first. It’s more fun too because you have a much more complete set of abilities. In general, in both Normal and Nightmare, I would kill bosses in one try, maybe two. I barely noticed champion packs and would usually only die if I caught an Elite or Champion at the same time as a huge pull of trash mobs.

Hell

In Hell Mode, after the Skeleton King, things start to change. Suddenly, champion packs of three start to become a problem. Single elites and their minions can also be tough, but generally I found these much easier than champion trios with certain abilities. In Diablo, champion packs (usually 3) and elites roll from certain sets of abilities. Generally, they will have three or four. For melee classes like the Barbarian some of the worst are: Molten, Plagued, Fire Chains, Waller, and Frozen. If one of these movement impairing or area of effect skills is combined with something like Horde, Extra Health, Illusionist, or Shared Health it can be a real problem. Lethally a movement impairing effect, an AOE damage, and a health/numerical increase. The strategy here is to pick off the minions and then focus down one of the three champions, all the while keeping out of the deadly stuff. In Hell Mode, even a well equipped melee can die in seconds if trapped inside the bad zones.

By the post Skeleton King section of Act I, the “real bosses” (uniques) are no longer the problem. It’s these champion groups.

Build 2: Dealing with Hell’s Champions

For a while, in late Act I and early Act II Hell Mode, I was dying too often. Clearly I needed more survivability.

Cleave (with Broad Sweep) – I still wanted an AOE main as there are far to many enemies to single target down

Hammer of the Ancients (Smash for max damage) – This turned out to be a more useful way to spend fury. It allows for slamming down champion and elite health in a more focused manner

Revenge (with Best Served Cold) – a combo fury-free heal/aoe. The increased Crit helps you really smash and destroy

War Cry (with Invigorate) – exchanging the damage buff for this increased armor really helped survivability, and even better it has a self heal.

Furious Charge (with Dreadnought) – A short cooldown escape/closer with a heal and stun. This extra heal (besides your health potion) can really keep you alive.

Passives: Ruthless, Weapons Master, and Nerves of Steel – Replacing the last DPS buff with increased armor and gemming and gearing for more Vitality, Lifesteal, and Health per second really helped keep me alive.

For bosses, I would usually change out Cleave for Frenzy (Sidearm) and Ground Stomp for Wrath of The Berserker (Insanity). But at level 60, the need to keep up the Valor stacks (which reset when you spec) made me stick with the usual build. It wasn’t a problem, just without WOTB bosses took a bit longer.

This build worked wonders for my Hell Mode champion problem. With the first build, I would die again and again on certain champion abilities. Once I learned to play this build, use everything on cooldown, and keep moving, I rarely died more than once or twice on even a tough group.

Gear

One of the weird things about gear in D3 is that while rare drops come in a fairly steady stream and blues are a dime-a-dozen, it’s very unusual to find an upgrade in the game. The gear available on the auction house was almost always better and cheaper than finding or making it in game. I suspect this is because of the random factor. As a Barbarian (or any class) you only really want certain stats. Any Intelligence or Dexterity (or a host of other stats) on gear is near useless. The odds of perfect Barbarian gear dropping is low. But with millions of players the AH is choked with it. Same goes with the crafting. At first in Normal Mode I leveled the Blacksmith. But it gets very expensive by Nightmare and for the cost of just one skill level you can buy one or two better things on the AH. This trend, frustratingly, seems even more true in Inferno. You have to play inferno to earn gold to buy better gear on the AH, not to actually win better gear (unless you are very lucky). I don’t think this will be good for Inferno. The relationship between play and reward is too disconnected.

Inferno

I’ve only had a day or two to play Inferno and have only done so in the easiest section of the game, but it’s clearly a lot harder. Even normal trash hits for a wallop. I came across a champion pack with Fire Chains, which along with Molten, are my least favorite. They crushed me. You have to get in close as a Barbarian to do any damage and they just cross those chains over you — near instant death. If this persists I will experiment to changing all my passives to survival and stacking my gear with more resists. Still, I think it will be hard.

My guide/discussion to Barbarian Inferno play is in a separate post.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer system is great for hooking up with your battlenet friends. I did a bunch of that. I found cooperative a little slower, but perhaps more fun, than solo play. You often have to wait for the other person to do something, or go back to town and sell, etc. In solo, things go at your own pace. I played a couple of times with mismatched levels. This works but isn’t very fun. It was either hard to stay alive (if I was too low) or way too easy (if I stepped down). I suspect that once a bunch of my friends reach Inferno it will be easier. I was often concerned with not messing up my solo game or having to repeat. If you exit the game to join another and you aren’t at a checkpoint you’ll have to backtrack a little to wherever it lets you reset the quest to.

I also think to progress in Inferno will nearly require group play. We’ll see.

Overall

The game rocks. As I mentioned in my beta preview, it isn’t the most graphically advanced game. The camera is incredibly conservative and never changes POV. But the game is impeccably smooth and the responsiveness of the skills and varied monster deaths are awesome. The overall feel is exciting and it’s extremely gratifying to destroy demons en mass. Stuff destroys all over the place too, which is awesome. Class balance is also very good with a wide number of cool and useful abilities and play styles. Most games are really lame in this department and it doesn’t really seem to matter which skills you use and how you combine them. Not so here, there are all sorts of interesting synergies and the builds feel distinct.

Makes me wonder if I should level a Wizard!

Continue reading about my Inferno Mode experience here.

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Area of effect, Barbarian, Barbarian Build, Berserker, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo, Diablo 3, Diablo III, diabloIII, Hell Mode, Normal Mode, Roleplaying, Witch Doctor

What is Diablo 3?

May12

Only three days to go until D3-day, and in case you don’t know what that means, this little video from Blizzard does a nice job summarizing the game:

See you in Sanctuary!

My detailed impressions of the closed beta can be found here.

And my review of the Barbarian 1-60 experience here.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard North, Diablo 3, Diablo III, Fantasy, role playing game, RPG

Diablo III: Wrath

May08

Blizzard has released Wrath, an animated short by directory Peter Chung (Aeon Flux) depicting an ancient battle between the angels of Sanctuary and Diablo. Pretty cool.

Strangely though, I am reminded a bit of Ralph Bakshi’s bizarre The Lord of the Rings.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Animated cartoon, Animation, Arts, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo, Diablo 3, Diablo III, Peter Chung, Ralph Bakshi, Wrath

Diablo 3 – Commercial

Apr29

The geek watch countdown!

And a second ad:

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo, Diablo 3, Diablo III, Fantasy, RPG

Diablo 3 – Beta Preview

Apr19

[ NOTE: this is my beta preview. I also have a release post on playing the Barbarian 1-60 and a separate one on the Barbarian in Inferno Mode. ]

Finally, the Diablo 3 beta invite showed up in my mailbox. Unfortunately, by the time I got it downloaded and installed I was headed to Vegas for the weekend (which wasn’t so bad, really). But as soon as I returned, I fired it up, rolled a toon, and cranked through the 1.5-2 hours it took to defeat the Skeleton King and “finish” the beta. Then I rolled another class. Then another and another until I’d played them all.

General Impressions

Not surprisingly, for a Blizzard game, and one that is only a month from launch, the game looks “finished” and is seemingly bug free. I didn’t have any problems. I didn’t try any multiplayer but I’m looking forward to it in the release.

Graphics wise, D3 is kinda dark, which wasn’t a problem playing at night, but during the sunny hours it was hard to see a lot of detail. I play on a Mac Pro with an Apple 30″ monitor. At full 2500×1600 resolution the game ran fine (I have a ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB). There was occasional slight slowdown as new textures paged in (I think that’s what it was because it wasn’t during big fights but moving into new areas).

The art is fantastic and everything is modeled in detailed 3D, yet the classic three-quarters pulled back viewpoint limits the options for dynamic camerawork or even the simple ability to show enemies at any real scale. Overall, this substantially reduces the visual drama in favor of more approachable gameplay.

But in that regard, Blizzard does it’s usual slick job of babying you into the game. This is in complete contrast to a hardcore RPG like Dark Souls, which does no coddling. Here, you start each class with just one skill, gaining them incrementally as you level. The early quests are easy and straightforward. By the time you get into the depths of the cathedral and to level six or so, the real flavor of the class starts to emerge.

The overall gameplay is, as one of my friends said, like the Diablo II you remember, not as it actually was. If you boot up the aforementioned classic you’ll find a 2D game that runs in 800×600 (and that only with the expansion pack installed!). Sure the gameplay is slick, but the late 90s graphics are very dated. The new Diablo brings the same basic experience but updated to perhaps 2007 level technology. And really, it’s that great gameplay that matters.

The Barbarian

I’m normally drawn toward dark wizards, and so in D2 I mostly played a Necromancer. In D3, that niche is filled by the Witchdoctor, but neither the pet based nature or the class style really appealed. I decided to try out the Barbarian. Big and plate wearing, this is a very straightforward class. The few skill choices available in the first nine or so levels basically seemed to oscillate between heavy hitting on a single target and non-quite-so heavy hitting on multiple targets. I haven’t studied the skill system in detail but it seems to have been simplified, moving away from the elaborate talent trees. Each skill can be powered up or tweaked with runes, and there are several completely distinct skill slots (primary, secondary, defensive, etc) that you can swap in and out skills that belong exclusively in their particular category. For the Barbarian, the primary is a fury generating basic attack and the secondary a harder hitting fury sink.

Progression with the Barbarian was a piece of cake. In the limited scope of the beta I barely even had to chug a health potion, perhaps once. I didn’t die at all. Even the Skeleton King was pretty easy. The attacks definitely got more satisfying as they leveled up, but some felt lackluster like the bleed-causing whirlwind. Maybe it gets cooler later. Maybe they aren’t done with it.

Still, all and all a very fun class to play.

For my discussion of leveling 1-60 in the final version, see here.

Taking on the Skeleton King

The Wizard

Next I tried out the wizard. This is the ranged magical damage dealer. Overall, this class is much squishier than the Barbarian and I died in one spot (right on returning to the Cathedral where there are three big sub-bosses). You have to watch your health and make sure to kite, mostly using the freeze ray or the frost nova to slow down the badies. I liked the feel of the freeze ray, it’s pretty fun. If you tune the skills toward the electrical discharges and the spark-like exploding fireball the wizard can do some serious AOE damage. On one middling outside area I collected a rather large collection of undead and then obliterated them in a big firefight (earning a 60 enemies killed at once achievement). I think there is more pure DPS output here than with the melee classes — in exchange for being fragile.

You have to pay more attention to your resources than the Barbarian. The defensive skill (on the 1 key) is crucial. With the Barbarian it was a sweetener, here, it’s key to getting out of the middle of a big cluster of foes (or blasting them down quick if you are using Crystal Armor). Although harder, it was a fun class to play and I’ll be torn what to try first in the release version.

Monk

Third up I tried the Monk. Squishier than the Barbarian for sure, but fairly similar in that you get right in the thick of thinks and wallop. At the earlier levels the different skills didn’t seem as differentiated. Theoretically the Barbarian would be slower and the Monk more nimble, but the Barb is plenty fast, so I’m not sure I yet see a compelling advantage. The teleport TO an enemy rune is kinda cool though.

At about level 7 or 8 things power up a bit and the excitement level rises. The spinning circle of fire and triple punch are real nice. Overall this was an easy class too. I didn’t die and pretty much never needed a health pot.

Witch Doctor

A few days after finishing the monk I felt it was my duty as a Necromancer player and diehard WOW Warlock to try the Witch Doctor. It was immediately obvious that this was a seriously squishy class, even more so than the Wizard. It’s harder to kite with too. A lot of the early skills are pets of one sort or another and you have to toss them out there and run. This is true of the spiders and bats. I really didn’t like trading the snaring hands for the bats and quickly went back to it. The spiders were okay though. Like the other classes, by the time I got to level 8 or so he was getting fairly powerful. The dogs were fun. The runed version of the grasping hands was a really solid snare and the machine gun blow gun too. Fun to play, but despite the cool theme, I think the Wizard was more straightforward as a ranged caster.

Demon Hunter

This is the last class I played and thematically the least interesting. The Hunter in WOW never held any interest whatsoever for me and it’s the only class I’ve never rolled. But the D3 Demon Hunter turned out to be pretty fun. Its long range and rapid fire is satisfying and I put an epic? (yellow) bow I got from another tune to good use right from the beginning. The problem with this class, like the Witch Doctor and Wizard, is that it’s very squishy. But even more than those other two it becomes problematic when you get mobbed by mobs. The Demon Hunter can go down fast. Now, even given that, I only died on the Skeleton King, but it was the only class where the boss gave me some trouble. Once I learned to kite and stun him and run back and forth for the health balls it was okay, but still harder and slower than the other classes. Up until that point I often felt I was really kicking ass with the DH, but the problem seemed to stem from the classes’ lack of AOE. I ended up having to use the “trap” as my slowing and AOE device, laying them down (up to five) in advance. I didn’t like the invisible skill very much. The Wizard, while also a ranged squishy, has much better AOE (at least at these early levels).

Gear

I enjoy the gearing up minigame in Diablo, always have. My only complaint is the still present need to manage your inventory. It’s not as bad as in D2 where one spent a ridiculous amount of time combing the trash from your inventory and leaving it on the dungeon floor, but you still have to do this. The more readily available town portal(s) makes flipping back to sell your crap much easier.

I also don’t exactly get what gear you really want for each class. Classes can use a large percentage of the items, which I guess is a good thing, but it’s hard to know if a 15.5 dagger is better for a Wizard than a 12.0 wand.

Multiplayer

I spent about an hour playing the last two dungeons and the Skeleton King with a pickup group of one other person. This does not represent any exhaustive survey of D3’s four player coop mode. Overall, it was fun, and slightly easier. It was also slower as one often had to wait on the other person. That player clearly hadn’t run through the whole beta four times already and didn’t know exactly where to go like I did :-). I’m assuming multiplayer is the most fun with a good or pre-made four man group. I was playing my monk (repeating the dungeons and she was level 9-11) and they were playing a Demon Hunter about two levels lower. There is no increased loot or particular advantage to playing multiplayer, either. There should be. It’s also not very competitive anymore because everyone has their own loot and there is no PVP (that’s in a separate non PVE mode like the WOW arenas).

Random

The consistent naming and art elements in Blizzard style are an amusing note. While Diablo is darker and more gothic than WOW there are quite a number of common enemy archetypes. The grotesques (abominations in WOW) are one example. These are a distinctly Blizzard baddie. Many of the spell names (and even the class archetypes) are overlapping. The Demon Hunter fires arrows and drops traps and bombs like the Hunter. The Wizard is like a WOW Mage, even down to having a Frost Nova with nearly identical effect. There was even a skeletal sub-boss with the same name as a Scholo boss.

I can’t wait for May 15. In the meantime, watch the Wrath animated short.

Or read my discussion of the Barbarian class, levels 1-60 here.

Find more video game posts here.

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Barbarian, Battle.net, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzard North, dark souls, Diablo, Diablo 3, Diablo III, diabloIII, Games, Mac Pro, Monk, roll playing game, RPG, Skeleton King, Video Games, Wizard, World of Warcraft

Diablo 3 Opening Cinematic

Dec11

Today is a double nerdgasm day. Not only did Naughty Dog announce it’s new game, The Last of Us. But–

the Diablo 3 opening cinematic was released. The game itself should be coming in Q1 2012. Ah, so many games, so little time. I haven’t even had the moment(s) to pop in Skyrim. Been too busy packaging The Darkening Dream and editing Untimed.

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Blizzard Entertainment, Darkening Dream, Diablo 3, Diablo III, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Games, Naughty Dog, Untimed, Video game

Expansion of the WOW Factor

Oct26

I was once a very hardcore WOW (World of Warcraft) player. And although I burned out and haven’t been playing this year (after reaching 85 with my main, I just lost interest), but I still follow the news. Blizzard just released a trailer for the upcoming fourth expansion, the Mists of Pandaria. Below is a series of cinematics, from the original 2004 release to this newest (sometime 2012). It’s an interesting exercise in progression.

Above is the classic WOW launch cinematic.

Burning Crusade, where the demon infested Illidan Stormrage is confronted.

Then, above, the corrupted Lich King and his army of Scourge, in Wrath of the Lich King.

Then the gigantic Deathwing shatters the world in Cataclysm.

And finally, above, the arrival of… talking pandas. Hmmm. Seems a little like an April Fools joke. But not.

Now Blizzard also just released the cinematic for the upcoming Diablo 3.

That’s more like it! Even if the demon lecture is slightly cheesy. Also note how awesome the rendered girl looks, particularly the lighting and skin textures.

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