Monday Random Thoughts

I hope the Grumpy Elf won't mind me stealing one of his frequently reused post titles... but it is Monday, and I have a couple of things to talk about that don't really warrant posts of their own.

First off, I was vastly amused when I saw this in chat on the Silvermoon server (where my little Draenei alt lives):

For all the complaining people do about the evilness of random lockboxes, they are apparently popular enough that people feel the need to make their own if a game doesn't provide them. I wonder if someone at Blizzard is watching and taking note of this demand... No, don't answer that; I'm aware that this type of gambling is more likely to break some kind of in-game rule than be adapted as an example to follow.

Speaking of my Draenei alt, I was questing in the Plaguelands with her and thinking about how despite its age and many issues, WoW is still amazingly beautiful and atmospheric in many places. Of course, then I approached the dead town of Caer Darrow and...

HI LOL LOVE IS IN THE AIR! This is just one reason I hate all those seasonal festivals in WoW. There is room for silliness in the game of course, but the way it has become ubiquitous and unescapable, even in places where it really hurts the setting - that annoys me. It makes the world feel ridiculous when it really doesn't have to be.

Speaking of ridiculous things, the amount of self-healing tanks and dps do in this game nowadays has become a joke. I've been thinking about that for a while, but it really struck me the other day when I managed to get stuck and found myself unable to die.

Continuing my little side project of showing my pet tank all the old raids he never saw, we decided to venture into Ulduar. I was a bit rusty on tactics and didn't explain some things very well, so I ended up trapped by a constrictor tentacle on Yogg-Saron and Pet Tank died. Oh well, we'll just wipe up and try again - or so I thought. Only one problem: I couldn't die. My sanity didn't go down any further, Ysera's Gift kept healing me, and I was stunned and unable to do anything. My pet tank eventually left the group to get his corpse kicked out of the instance and I Alt+F4ed out of the game. When I started it back up a few minutes later, guess what? I was still alive and trapped by that bloody tentacle. There were tentacles everywhere and yet they couldn't kill me.

Once I surpassed about a dozen debuffs, my health finally started to dip... just for Hodir to save my life with his flash freeze, and the moment it wore off I was immediately back in a constrictor. I've never missed SWTOR's /stuck command so badly (which allows you to "commit suicide" while in combat). Eventually I managed to achieve death by immediately clicking the flash freeze away the next time it saved me and instantly jumping towards a crusher tentacle so it could whack me dead. Death never felt like such a relief before.

Finally, on a more positive note, I've had some more fun on the Timeless Isle. I found a treasure-hunting quest in a mound of dirt, and when it became obvious that it was directing me towards the one part of the island I hadn't been to yet (across the broken bridge), I finally got off my butt to find out how to get there.

That bridge is a funny thing to the ignorant new player. You watch others run up to it and just fly across, as if by magic! If you're anything like me, you might think: aha, so it's like an Indiana Jones leap of faith thing; I just have to run straight off and... oh, guess not.

I don't expect to get a legendary cloak any time soon, and while there was an option to get across with a vendor-bought glider, I'm too attached to my timeless coins for other purposes, so I was delighted when I found out that there is actually a way to get up there for free: attack a passing albatross until it grabs you, then just hang in for the ride! It's such a silly thing, but in this case I really enjoyed it. It's nice to have an option to get around for players that aren't as advanced, even if it's slower and more of a hassle.

Another thing I found on the Timeless Isle was a quest for a "secret" noodle recipe. It's really old school, requiring you to run back and forth a lot and to complete two dungeons. It amuses me how Blizzard has repeatedly sworn off that kind of design, yet every now and then they still put stuff like that in. Anyway, it was quite fun, until it cumulated in another solo scenario, which required me to... serve noodle dishes to pandas. It's actually pretty fun as a mini-game; it just seemed kind of bizarre to me since I don't recall ever seeing anything this blatantly "gamey" in WoW before, for all the gamification it has suffered over the years. In fact, it reminded me a lot of an old C64 game I used to play, called Tapper, that required you to rush back and forth behind a bar to serve drinks to impatiently approaching customers. Just... weird. The only thing that drives me crazy about it is that the background music is the same little ditty that plays in all the Pandarian inns... and which is my least favourite bit of Warcraft music ever.

Voices of Wrath

Back when I reviewed the Cataclysm cinematic, one of the negative points I mentioned was the fact that I didn't really care for Deathwing's voice. This then made me think about what I thought about WOTLK's voice acting in general, what I thought was good and what was... less good.

The latter doesn't take that long to sum up, as it only consists of two points really. The first one is simply Arthas himself. I didn't have a problem with his voice acting per se, but I swear that the pitch of his voice changed every single time he made an appearance. People joked about how sitting on the Frozen Throne all this time had given the guy a cold, but what it came down to in the end was that the voice of the major villain of the expansion changing all the time hurt immersion and generally gave the impression of Blizzard doing unusually shoddy work with him, as if the sound editor randomly came up with a new mix of settings every time they had to record more voice work for Arthas.

The second thing that I didn't like was that all the NPCs just talked too damn much. I know that certain upcoming MMOs are really priding themselves in the fact that they include a lot of voice work, but personally I don't think that this is a good thing. An MMO is not an audio book, is not a film, is not a single player game... it's not a medium where you should have to spend extended amounts of time just sitting back to listen. If a boss wants my attention they have to be snappy; otherwise I'm just going to tune their yapping out eventually, in order to focus on, you know, actually playing. (Gruul's "Come... and die" is one of my favourite lines to this day, simply for being short and to the point.)

For all the time that I've spent in ICC in the past year, I'd have trouble quoting most of the bosses from there, with the exception of Sindy's terribad "BETRAAAY you" line. I mean, I know that they talk a lot and I have a vague idea of what it's about, but what I really hear in my head is something like "Arthas blah blah Tirion blah blah Bolvar blah blah". Not really memorable to me at least.

That said, when they don't go into endless monologues, a lot of WOTLK's NPCs had some pretty good lines coupled with solid voice acting. My personal favourites from Wrath's five-man instances are:

1. Keristrasza: Finish it! Finish it! Kill me, or I swear by the Dragonqueen you'll never see daylight again!

I have a suspicion that her voice work was done by the same woman that did Sindragosa, only without the annoying screechiness, and she does a pretty good job at conveying emotion with her voice (maybe overacting just a little bit, but that's okay). Whatever you thought of Keristrasza's story in general, her last lines in the Nexus are a heart-wrenching mix of aggressive insanity (threatening to kill the players) and what's left of her original personality (swearing by the Dragonqueen and wanting her torment to end). I like all of her lines really, including the "Preserve? Why?" upon pulling her and her last words asking for the Life-Binder to preserve her after all.

2. Scourgelord Tyrannus: Rimefang! Trap them within the tunnel! Bury them alive!

Scourgelord Tyrannus is actually one of those characters that talk way too much, even if he has a very nice voice, but the above line shows that he can get to the point when he thinks it's urgent. I've been known to randomly call this one out whenever we're fighting Rimefang in ICC.

3. Skarvald the Constructor: Pagh! What sort of necromancer lets death stop him? I knew you were worthless!

I love this line for the simple reason that I've always felt that the Scourge's necromancers have a tendency to look a bit sissy, and Skarvald not only shares these feelings, he expresses them better than I ever could.

4. Ionar: Master... you have guests.

Ionar must be British or something, because that's quite the understatement when talking about people storming your castle and slaughtering everything in sight. Even in death he retains the elemental equivalent of a stiff upper lip, and I can dig that.

5. The Black Knight: No! I must not fail... again...

I always thought that the Black Knight was a bit of a weird character, because on the one hand he's supposed to be this really powerful Scourge lieutenant, but on the other hand he's very obviously a Monty Python joke. How do you reconcile these two images? Well, I thought his last words do a decent job at it, by showing that his constant getting up again is not a sign of overconfidence, but rather the last desperate attempt of someone who knows that he messed up before and can't afford to do so again. The way that last line is delivered is enough to actually make me feel sorry for him a little every time.

The "So bad it's good" award: Devourer of Souls: You dare look upon the host of souls?! I SHALL DEVOUR YOU WHOLE!

If you've ever done Forge of Souls, this needs no explanation. You just want to tell this guy to chill the hell out.

And my five favourite voices from WOTLK raids...

1. Sara/Yogg-Saron: I am the lucid dream. The monster in your nightmares. The fiend of a thousand faces. Cower before my true form. BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH!

This phase-transitioning line is probably the single most amazing piece of voice acting I've ever heard in WoW. Even just playing it back in my head gives me the shivers. The transition from Sara's almost sensual voice to Yogg's fury is just so incredibly well done; it completely blew me away the first time I heard it.

2. Thorim: I remember you... In the mountains...

I never actually got what the fuss was about with this line. I remember our main tank and raid leader repeating it ad nauseam and I just didn't see the appeal, but the longer they went on, the more ingrained it became into my own brain. Then I found out that it had even become an internet meme and... well, now I can't help it anymore either. (Seriously, search YouTube for this phrase and you'll find loads more.)

3. XT-002 Deconstructor: New toys? For me? I promise I won't break them this time!

While having to hear XT's voice over and over again whenever I run past someone with the mini pet has demoted his voice from amusing to annoying for me, I still have to give credit where credit is due: I still remember pulling him for the first time and vent erupting into laughter upon hearing his squeaky voice - and I know we weren't the only guild that had this kind of reaction.

4. Lord Jaraxxus: You face Jaraxxus, eredar lord of the Burning Legion!

I suppose I have a bit of a thing for eredar lords, considering how many times I abused Malchezaar's lines to announce to people at large that they weren't facing our raid alone, but the legions we command! Jaraxxus has a similar kind of thing going on, and like Thorim he's made it to YouTube as well. Hard to get that out of your head again after a while.

5. Anub'Rekhan: I hear little hearts beating. Yesss... beating faster now. Soon the beating will stop.

Being a product recycled from Vanilla, Naxxramas wasn't exactly innovative and new in terms of voice acting, but bloody hell, Anub'Rekhan's voice is still amazing. Especially the line quoted above is just so creepy, delivered in a way that makes it very clear that the big bug won't just eat you, he's also perv enough to enjoy it in a very naughty way. /shudder

The "So bad it's good" award: Sindragosa: Suffer, mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!

There couldn't really have been any other choice for this. There's just something about Sindy's voice that makes it grate so very, very badly, and you'll hate her for that alone - not to mention the many wipes that most of us will have gone through on this fight at some point. However, making a boss hated by the players is not entirely a bad thing, and if nothing else that BETRAAAY is very memorable. Though personally I almost prefer her intro line of: "You are fools to have come to this place! The icy winds of Northrend will consume your souls!" I now find myself wanting to continue any sentence that starts with "You are fools" with this line.

Ugh, I hate The Undying

My guild never cared much about Undying and similar achievements when they were current content, because we've just never been big on raid achievements. Just getting the bosses down has always been the priority.

A few months ago we finally did an Undying run since the option to earn that title is going away soon, which I tanked on my paladin at the time because we were short on tanks. Since then we've occasionally tried to get another run together to get the achievement for those that missed out on it before (like my main), and it's been nothing but a major pain in the arse. Tonight was our third failed attempt in a row.

Whether someone pulls aggro on Patchwerk or stands in a shadow fissure on Kel'thuzad, there's always something, and it's slowly driving me batty. We have three times as much health as we had when we first ran this content, do six times as much damage, and still people can't get the basics right? I'm not someone who tends to get angry easily, but it's hard not to feel a certain seething rage when this kind of thing happens over and over again. After all that person's death just completely wasted an hour's worth of effort.

The Ulduar version where you don't have to get it all right in a single lockout is a lot more forgiving, but it's still infuriating when you only need one more boss in the whole instance (usually near the end) and that ends up being the one where someone messes up, once again by doing something really dumb like standing in Mimiron's shock blast or pulling aggro on Vezax. I actually managed to get my own Champion of Ulduar title last night (after someone had messed it up the week before), but this time it got borked up for someone else who still needed a different boss.

And then, on top of feeling angry, I feel guilty for feeling angry. Because, at the end of the day, I like my guildies, and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. It just feels wrong to get that mad over them dying a single time. It happens to everyone sometimes, right? Too bad that it happens to them when the whole effort of the night hinges on nobody dying... which just makes me hate the whole achievement in the end.

In a way this is kind of weird, because achievements that reward you for playing well and getting it just right have always been among those that I approved of the most. After all I loved the Zul'Aman bear run, and we spent a lot of time messing that one up as well. I suppose the main differences between that and something like The Undying are:

1) Since nobody ever got to do a bear run while outgearing the instance by multiple tiers, it wasn't as utterly humiliating to mess up, and some of the loot from the other three chests was still useful to people even if you didn't get the fourth one.

2) People were generally better at watching their threat. During this expansion even a lot of dpsers that I value a lot seem to have completely unlearned how to watch their aggro, because it simply didn't matter most of the time. I'm hoping they'll get back into the groove come Cataclysm, because having a whole run turn out to be pointless due to someone pulling aggro is just stupid.

3) As tough as it was, the Zul'Aman bear run still allowed for a bit of leeway and compensating. I remember on the run when we got our first bear we actually had two or three deaths, but managed to make up for those precious seconds that we lost while resurrecting people. There weren't really that many insta-gib mechanics either, where a person standing in the wrong place would die instantly. (Maybe Jan'alai's fire bombs...)

People often like to rant about having to carry bad players and I agree that it can severely affect your fun when you have to compensate for someone playing truly terribly, but not being able to compensate at all, completely having to rely on everyone else to not stand in the wrong place and to not pull aggro on the untauntable boss or else your entire evening is ruined... that's even worse in my opinion.

A slightly different view of Ulduar

Between going back to Ulduar for some achievements with my guildies, having this song stuck in my head and finding this article on WoW.com, I couldn't help but think about my own experiences with this raid instance. Many of the commenters on the WoW.com article called it Wrath's best raid, some even the best raid ever. While trying to decide whether I agreed or disagreed with that, I realised that I have quite a love/hate relationship with Ulduar.

To start with explaining the "hate" part, I'm really not that into the whole titan stuff. Everyone's got bits and pieces of lore that they like more than others, and for me the titans are one of those pieces that I don't particularly care about. I blame it on early trauma induced by endless Uldaman runs. To be fair, WOTLK managed to get me a little more interested in the subject than I was before, but still not massively.

Secondly, I experienced Ulduar as extremely dull from a visual point of view. After reading that sentence you're probably feeling a bit incredulous - Ulduar, of all places, looking dull? Let me explain: When I went back to Ulduar last Sunday, seeing it from my new PC for the first time, I was absolutely amazed when I first entered the central chamber and saw all that glass swirling up into the sky. It was beautiful. The problem is that while Ulduar was actually progression content and we were going there three times a week, I was still sitting behind my rickety old PC back in Austria that struggled to give me five frames per second during a twenty-five-man raid even with all the graphic settings turned down. Now, obviously that made every instance less interesting to look at than it could have been, but Ulduar was particularly bad because of its sheer size, which resulted in the limited viewing distance not even showing me the walls a lot of the time, so I was endlessly wandering through clouds of grey fog, which is not the most interesting way of spending a Sunday night. Even Trial of the Crusader was more fun to look at under those conditions, because at least I could make out the NPCs on the stands there.

Behold the glory of Ignis's room! Somewhere behind that wall of fog, presumably.

From a mechanical point of view, Ulduar was also the instance that really introduced the idea that the best way to make a fight hard for the healers was to have lots and lots of unavoidable raid damage. Naxxramas had that on Sapphiron, but that was only one fight. In Ulduar there were Ignis, Deconstructor, Kologarn and many more, with Hodir remaining many a healer's worst nightmare for months, and that's without even getting started on any hard modes. I already wrote a post about why I don't like the "crazy damage everywhere" mechanic, so I can't help being grumpy with Ulduar for starting this trend.

I also didn't really like the whole hard mode/achievement model. I explained my stance on this a bit at the end of this post: Zul'Aman had created very different expectations of what "hard mode" meant to me, and compared to the good old bear run everything that Ulduar had to offer in that regard just felt clumsy in comparison. For the most part "hard mode" didn't so much mean playing better as it meant being "intentionally stupid" and activating avoidable mechanics that would make the fight more difficult by hindering you. Not to mention the whole problem of some early hard modes being easier than the final bosses, which inevitably led to all kinds of arguments about what "progression" should focus on. It just felt like a major pain in the arse to be honest.

That said, I can understand why many people look back on the Ulduar hard modes with a certain fondness, mainly because everything that came afterwards was simply so much worse. Heroic TotC was nothing but an exercise in tedium and frustration. Heroic ICC has been a step up from that but still strikes me as a bit of a mixed bag, as the differences between the two modes, at least mechanics-wise, are still pretty minor on most fights. And heroic gunship is just a joke. If you can't think of a good "hard mode", does there have to be one? Ulduar didn't try to force it on absolutely every boss and that actually worked better - why not favour quality over quantity?

I still think that hard modes are a poor excuse for extra content, but Blizzard clearly considers the concept a success and it looks like it's here to stay. And well, when my choice is between just not raiding anything new at all after finishing all the normal modes and having at least a little bit of variety by trying heroic difficulty, I'll go with the latter. I can still wish for more varied and interesting hard mode fights though, and Ulduar was actually better at that than any of its successors.

Ulduar generally had a pretty interesting variety of fights, with Yogg-Saron still being my favourite WOTLK raid boss. The Lich King's not bad either, but from a healer's point of view that fight is too unforgiving and too scripted. Big speech at the start, big speech at the end, the rest of the time you try to stab Arthas in the kneecaps while also doing some running around and dealing with adds. Yogg was no pushover either, but missing one global cooldown wouldn't immediately wipe the raid, and he gave me a much bigger sense of excitement - dodging clouds and add spawns as we tried to bring down the mysterious Sara, plunging into the brain of the old god as he revealed himself, trying to fight off the deadly tentacles outside until he was finally vulnerable enough to be killed - if you could make it without being overwhelmed by the reinforcements he called in.

Actually, I think Ulduar as a whole felt more like an adventure, more organic than any of the other Wrath raids. All the bosses seemed to be there for a reason, and the whole place just felt "right". Why of course, Freya would live in a lush little paradise where frost lotus grows naturally. And a great inventor like Mimiron wouldn't just be content to sit in a little room, he had to build his own considerably-sized lab connected to the main complex by a train! Also, anyone remember when Sara would occasionally emit ear-splitting cries for help? (I don't know if she still does it.) I remember the first time she did that to us it made the whole raid jump, it was just that sudden and unexpected. But what's a good dungeon without surprises?

All in all I would agree with rating Ulduar as WOTLK's best raid. ICC is pretty good too, but the bosses seem a bit more random to me and as I said the hard modes are quite a mixed bag. I think everyone was just absolutely thrilled by it because the previous raid instance being TotC had really lowered everyone's expectations. (You know something's out of whack when you first enter a new instance and everyone goes "hurrah, there's trash" and means it.)

All in all I still liked Zul'Aman and Karazhan better though.

Looking back at Wrath raiding as a healer

On Monday Larísa made what I thought was a very interesting post ranking the WOTLK raid bosses by difficulty. I immediately thought about how I would rank them myself, since I experienced a lot of them in quite a different way from everyone's favourite pigtailed gnome. From a healer's point of view I couldn't believe that she ranked Festergut as one of the easiest bosses of the expansion for example... However, after thinking about it some more I realised that me making such a list would be a bit long and full of boring repetition, seeing how my likes and dislikes in regards to raid bosses are mostly the same across the board, whether we're talking about Naxxramas or ICC. So I decided that I would rather make a general post about mechanics and fights in this expansion that I thought were fun to heal and ones that weren't.

Making choices: Yes, please.

Let's start with the good stuff, with encounters that I thought were both challenging and fun to heal. One feature that I liked a lot was that of being forced to make intelligent choices while healing: using different spells throughout the fight, timing large heals and cooldowns properly, choosing the right targets. Examples of this kind of thinking were Loatheb in Naxxramas, Ignis and Mimiron in Ulduar to an extent and Lord Jaraxxus in Trial of the Crusader. In ICC Deathbringer Saurfang, Professor Putricide and the Lich King offered some interesting challenges in terms of choosing the right spells for the job.

The only sad thing is that this is something that has to be pointed out as special at all. Unfortunately some of our healing spells have become too smart for our own good in this expansion. Yes, Circle of Healing and Wild Growth, I'm looking at you. Has Chain Heal always been raidwide too? I didn't know much about shamans before WOTLK. Anyway, if multiple people in the raid are taking damage these days it's almost a no-brainer to use one of these spells, just target someone and everyone will get healed (or at least as many people as you can heal at once). It's great to be powerful, but it's also kind of boring. I want to have to pay more attention to who needs healing and when, and switch between different spells more often. Supposedly Cataclysm is going back to that; let's hope that it's true.

Do split the party!

A mechanic that wasn't exactly new in Wrath but that I saw used more often than in BC anyway was that of "splitting the party" - that is to say physically forcing the raid apart into smaller groups that have to tackle tasks independently. Prime examples of this were Gothik the Harvester and the Four Horsemen in Naxxramas, Thorim and Yogg-Saron in Ulduar (and to a lesser extent the Assembly of Iron), the Twin Val'kyr in TotC if you did them "properly" with two tanks, and in a way Valithria Dreamwalker in ICC.

I like this mechanic because it enforces a certain personal responsibility (the healers in the arena can't help you in Thorim's gauntlet, you have to be able to do it yourself) without relying on gimmick abilities that require fast reactions or you'll wipe the raid (coughdefilecough). Splitting the raid in different groups than the traditional tanks, melee, ranged and healers also increases overall group cohesion and encourages you to pay more attention to what part people in other roles than your own are playing. Or in other words, it allows you to work with a small team while still facing off against the boss as a large raid, which is a nice way of allowing everyone's contributions to be acknowledged while preserving the epic feel of bigger numbers.

I'm not just a healbot, you know.

When I'm a healer I want to focus on healing and not on dpsing, but nonetheless the way some fights won't let me do anything but spam healing spells non-stop can get kind of boring at times. Kudos to the few fights that let me use other spells on my bars on occasion by having periods where raid damage is low and I can make myself useful by dispelling debuffs or casting a holy fire or smite during a dps race. Examples of this include Loatheb's aura, Razorscale's ground phase, Deconstructor's heart phase, and Yogg-Saron's phase two where I pretty much always did more dispelling and tentacle-smiting than actual healing.

Environmental awareness: a double-edged sword

As Tobold has been complaining for a long time, WOTLK raids are very focused on generic environment-related tasks like moving out of the fire instead of class-related skills. I'm actually not sure how I feel about that as a healer. On the one hand it's nice to be pulled out of my world of green bars occasionally and be forced to pay attention to what the boss is actually doing, and mastering the art of keeping an eye on everyone's health while also moving to the right place is an achievement to be proud of. On the other hand I feel that some fights in this expansion have been pushing things a bit too far. Sindragosa and the Lich King in particular are quite movement-intensive and extremely unforgiving of even one person standing a few feet too far to the left or whatever. Which is hard enough for your regular old dpser, but as a healer I sometimes feel like I'm about to go cross-eyed, trying to keep an eye on my position at all times while also dishing out heals and monitoring debuffs at all times. Give me a break.

Undecided: vehicle fights

People have talked about vehicle fights until they were blue in the face, but what always perturbed me a little was the way they often defy the usual role distribution. In Malygos's phase three, anyone can switch between dealing damage or healing at the drop of a hat. On Flame Leviathan there are no healers at all - or dedicated tanks for that matter. Switching to a different role can be fun I guess, and FL is probably the most popular weekly raid ever since you can make a raid out of ten people of any spec and class. But on the other hand... I like being a healer, damn it, and I don't appreciate being shoehorned into another role just like that. (Don't view that as a contradiction to what I said before about wanting to do more than cast healing spells by the way. I want to be able to use as many different abilities as possible, but within the boundaries of my chosen role.)

Oh, and speaking of shoehorning, enough of every other boss fight being tuned for a different number of healers. I thought dual-spec was meant to liberate us, not force us to maintain two gear sets because everyone expects us to be able to fulfill another role on a whim. If I sign up to heal a raid then healing is what I want to do.

Spam spam spammedy spam

The one thing that has been typical for WOTLK raids from a healer's point of view more than anything else is how many fights are designed with the idea that healers should be casting spells non-stop. Cataclysm is supposed to move away from that model again by bringing mana regeneration back into play, but we'll see how well that pans out. Either way I'd appreciate simply not casting a spell for a few seconds being a valid option again, because at the moment it simply isn't in raids. With a nearly inexhaustible mana pool, what's the worst that can happen if you keep casting non-stop? You'll do a lot of overhealing, but that's no skin off your back. What's the worst that can happen if you do stop casting because the tank appears to be at full health anyway? His health suddenly plummets so quickly that you don't even have time to think about starting to cast again. Non-stop healing it is then! Meh.

What's this? I'm taking damage?

Somewhat related to this is how Blizzard has started to use "massive indiscriminate raid damage" as a way of making fights harder, as it can only be healed through by spamming non-stop. You won't even have to worry about overheal a lot of the time. And I dislike it.

At first it was just Sapphiron in Naxxramas giving me nightmares. In Ulduar already a lot of fights had the whole raid taking damage, if not always all the time: Ignis's flame jets, Deconstructor's tantrums, Kologarn's shockwave, Steelbreaker's high voltage, Hodir's frozen blows, Mimiron's heat wave. Then we got the Twin Valk'yr in TotC, whose raid damage output made everyone's eyes bulge at first; same again in Anub'arak's phase three. And in ICC we finally got gems such as Festergut, Blood Queen Lana'thel and Sindragosa with their insane damage auras that more or less last throughout the entire fight.

They make things difficult, but not interesting - only frustrating. I remember needing a break from raiding for a week after nearly losing it during some Festergut attempts during which I was one of only two raid healers for a raid of twenty-five. There isn't even enough time to make conscious decisions when targetting a different group with your AoE heal every time. You either get it right every time, instinctively or due to sheer luck, or people will die and you wipe.

And what's worse in a way: It trains everyone else in the raid to not pay attention to their own health bar. When you have just a particularly damage-heavy phase during a fight, you can at least ask people to save their survival cooldowns for that, but if the damage is there all the time... it might as well not be there at all in the eyes of the dps, because there's nothing they can do about it anyway. They pretty much have to completely let go of all responsibility for their own health and trust their healers to take care of it all on their own. Which is kind of flattering in a way I suppose... but it also creates a certain rift between the healers and everyone else. I remember when we first went for the Blood Queen and our raid leader explained all her core abilities, such as the whole vampire thing. Guess what nobody even mentioned? Shroud of sorrow. 'cause you know, scoff, that's just a healer thing, they'll take care of it. When people died over and over again because the healers just couldn't keep up initially, everyone else was just bewildered.

"Taking damage" should never be the default state of a boss fight, because it breeds bad habits and makes healers cry. That is all.

A pleasant surprise

A week ago I made a post about how repeatedly missing out on killing Yogg-Saron and my chances of ever getting to do it diminishing rapidly every day was making me lose my will to raid. I couldn't really make up my mind about whether to stay or go even after getting some encouraging comments in response to my last post, but at least I managed to formulate a plan: In a little less than two weeks I'll go on holiday for a week and thus have an "enforced" break from raiding. I'd sign up for all the raids until then, enjoy my holiday, and then make my final decision after that, based on how my last few raids went and whether I missed raiding at all during my time off.

Somehow just having a plan already made me feel a lot better, less put upon and more in control. I didn't expect the outcome of all this to be positive, but even if the last couple of raids continued to frustrate me, I'd at least know when to stop then. I also sent our raid leader a private message to inform him about my plans... not to make a "go kill Yogg now or I'll quit" type of threat, but simply to keep him up to date. I realise that no raid guild can keep all its members happy all the time, but at the same time you can't expect people to hang around if they are not having fun anymore.

Anyway, tonight was normal Trial of the Crusader farm night. Both of our usual raid leaders were unavailable but two other officers did their best to make the raid happen anyway. I was under the impression that this caused some people to actually play better than usual, being aware of the extra effort the officers put in and trying to do their best to do their own part as well. Either way we cleared the raid quickly and with no issues and followed it up with a twenty-five-man Onyxia kill. "Now what?" came the inevitable question and the acting raid leader decided that we'd go to Ulduar.

Wondering how far we'd get in two hours I made my way to the instance, when my boyfriend suddenly whispered me with "you'll like this" - he had convinced the raid leader to extend our previous raid ID which only had Yogg-Saron left alive. After having to disband and reform the raid to get everyone into the same instance, we were off to Yogg's prison.

I tried not to get excited but couldn't help myself. Maybe he would die tonight? People seemed to be playing well... but no, I mustn't get my hopes up; I had been disappointed too many times! And just sorting out the strategy took so long again, surely by the time we'd actually start the fight everyone would have lost focus again.

On our first attempt we aced phase one, phase two also went pretty well except for a few casualties, but in phase three everything fell apart as usual with Yogg constantly healing up until we were all dead - an all-too-familiar scenario unfortunately. On our second attempt we actually wiped before we even made it to phase three properly as multiple people got mind-controlled or died in other ways during the brain phase.

"This time he'll go down" a rogue friend assured me in a random chat channel. I had my doubts, but as I started to dodge evil clouds again I tried to pull myself together once more. I could actually feel myself losing focus due to the disappointment, but this was the content I wanted to do - if I couldn't focus here, where else? We executed phase one flawlessly again. In phase two there were one or two deaths again but we had combat reses available. Then came phase three. I sprinted towards the door, targetted Yogg to watch his health and started healing and dispelling my little heart out.

And suddenly... everything seemed to come together. The adds were dying so quickly that we never had more than two out at a time, if that. Yogg's health was going down slowly but steadily and we were well ahead of the enrage timer. "Keep it up, guys", the leading officer reassured us cheerfully on TeamSpeak.

And then he was finally dead. Even though it was somewhat belated and with better gear than you should need for this kill, I was happier than I've been about any boss kill since Archimonde. But the best thing was the way in which people reacted: I had felt so alone and abandoned in my quest to kill Yogg, but suddenly everyone made a point of congratulating me specifically on finally achieving my goal.

A Fragment of Vala'nyr dropped, and with both our main fragment collector and his backup not being in the raid the acting raid leader suddenly piped up with: "I think we should give it to Shintar, just so she'll always remember this night." I was quick to assure them that I wouldn't have any problems remembering this night either way, but before I knew it the fragment had landed in my bags. "Put it on your mantlepiece," one of the shamans joked. Nobody wanted the tier eight shoulders either since everyone (including myself) had bought tier nine already, so I got those as well just for show-off value.

More than anything I'm feeling extremely touched. I posted this scribble on my guild's forum afterwards to express myself better than I could right after the raid - I was too giddy really - but I still don't think it quite does the whole thing justice. For all the complaining I sometimes do, I'm really lucky to be in the guild I'm in.

The story of a sad, burnt out raider

It occurred to me the other day that I have now been playing WoW's raiding game for a whole two years. There have been occasional short breaks due to holidays, broken computer parts and the like, but on the whole I've been extremely loyal and dedicated to my raid force, raiding three nights a week and never picking and choosing my raids - when I'm available then I'm available, be it for a thrilling progress night or farming old content until my eyes bleed.

There have been ups and downs during that time, moments when I wanted to quit in a frothing rage because of something that I considered outrageous at the time, but then didn't. There were times when I didn't really enjoy it that much and kind of went through the motions more than anything. But never have I felt as utterly disheartened with raiding as I do now.

It all started with Yogg-Saron. We had been making decent progress through Ulduar until we met him and he turned out to be an utter cockblock. We were stuck on him for weeks and months, wiping and wiping and wiping some more. The fact that this was during the summer didn't help either, as we were often short on signups and couldn't always organise enough raids to clear the rest of the instance before the weekly reset, thus not having any attempts on Yogg at all during some weeks. (This was before the ID extension feature obviously.)

I showed up for every raid and got to enjoy the wiping to its fullest. This wasn't a problem; I had made similar experiences during BC, but in the end we always got the suckers down and victory was all the sweeter for it.

One night in August my PC decided to play silly buggers because of the hot weather and I phoned in to ask to be replaced after having experienced multiple shutdowns mid-fight. That night they finally downed him. I was bummed, but more than anything because it was an exact repeat of what happened during our first kill of Kael'thas last year. Still, I tried to remain positive because I had seen Kael'thas die on the next raid, surely I'd get my chance to down Yogg as well, right? Right?

But suddenly... people didn't care anymore. Trial of the Crusader was out and way more alluring with its new and better loot. We were still doing Ulduar, but barely managed to clear half the instance some nights because the raid leaders would suddenly decide to try hard modes on a whim, just to see what they were like. And Yogg had died, so who cared if we didn't make it to him before the reset? I did of course. I nagged. People rolled their eyes and made fun of me.

Still, I continued to sign up for every raid, convinced that my day would have to come eventually. One night about a month after the first kill I decided to sign off because a friend from England was in town for a day - not exactly something that happens often - and I wanted to spend time with him. Guess what the raid did that night? Yep, they went and killed Yogg-Saron.

I facepalmed but still tried to keep my chin up. After all, it was kind of my own "fault" for choosing my friend over the raid, right? I'd just have to make sure to not miss any raids anymore in the future. So I kept signing. And people kept finding excuses not to do Yogg.

One night we were finally in his prison and had made one unsuccessful attempt on him when someone called out "We've got Wintergrasp! Let's go to VoA!" and the raid leader actually went along with it, abandoning Ulduar and ending the raid after Archavon. That was definitely one of those frothing rage moments.

Since then we've been to his lair one more time, but even though we had half the night to kill him, we just wiped over and over until raid end time. The worst thing was that nobody seemed to be particularly bothered by this. They just don't care anymore. Yogg-Saron is so last month. It's just me with my weird obsession with wanting to see all the bosses dead and longing for closure after dutifully attending Yogg wipe nights for several months.

"Ok," you might say, "we get it, you've got some real issues with not having killed Yogg-Saron and it bothers you. But what about all that time that your raid force spends not trying to kill Yogg? Surely there must be something enjoyable there?"

Well, that's kind of the problem. The only other thing we're doing is Trial of the Crusader. On normal mode that's all fine and dandy (though in all honesty I'm already starting to get a bit bored with it after so many flawless clears, more than my guild ever did of any other raid instance I believe), but it's too easy. It takes about two hours maximum, and that's including summons, bio breaks, explaining boss strategies to the new guy and so on. Then what?

Then we try to do it again on heroic mode. I've expressed my dislike for hard mode raiding before, but I'm not sure I've really managed to convey properly just how much I despise it. It manages to combine the worst bits about progression (endless wiping) and farming (the same old fights over and over) without any of the fun parts. The loyal part of me wants to put up with it for the sake of the guild and because there's no other raid to progress into at the moment anyway. Except I'm still stuck at the point of progression where I want to kill Yogg. So all I ever think about during Coliseum nights is how bored I am and how I'd much rather smite some tentacles. It's sucking the fun out of things harder than a vacuum. I've come to the point where I actually dread most raid nights, wishing I could just hide on an alt. But hey, duty calls...

My friends tell me that I should take a bit of a break and then I'll be able to come back feeling refreshed and enjoying it again. I do think that getting away from it all might help and I might actually miss it again, but there's still the problem of Yogg. If the past is anything to go by, then I just know that the raid will kill him again as soon as I'm away, and going by the utter lack of enthusiasm displayed during our last attempts I'm afraid that it will be the last time as well. And then what? Then my last incentive to keep signing for every raid will be gone and I'll feel majorly let down by having missed out on killing one of the best raid bosses of this expansion. I don't want that. I want to feel like I'm back on the progression curve again and be able to enjoy raiding.

So I cling to signing up like a rabid bulldog clings to its victim, simply because I'm afraid of what will happen if I let go, all the time getting more frazzled and distressed due to not achieving my goals and being frustrated with the content we do. I know it's a game, and in a few years I'll probably look back at this and shake my head at how I could ever get so upset about it, but right now I really don't know what to do but despair.

An tribute to Zul'Aman

Late last night I randomly got invited to a Zul'Aman pug. I decided to go along with my druid since she still had Hex Lord? Hah! in her quest log (I'm notoriously bad at abandoning old quests). We breezed through the place in about twenty minutes and I felt mildly heartbroken. I loved this instance so much back at level seventy; seeing everything getting drowned in aoe and bosses dying before they even had time to execute their signature moves made me sad. I have to admit that when our main tank stupidly rushed ahead, got locked in Halazzi's room with only two dps and died, I felt a strange kind of satisfaction. At least that old lynx's claws were still somewhat sharp.

I remember once reading a throwaway line on another blog that called Zul'Aman the perfect raid, and while I unfortunately can't remember who said that I can't help but agree. I'll admit that I'm biased since I generally love all instances with trolls in them and because I had some of my best raiding moments ever in there, but I think even if I ignored those factors I'd still have to say that it's a damn good raid.

It was pretty short - my "bear group" cleared the whole place in about an hour even before the big 3.0 nerf - but it offered such a nice variety of different and challenging encounters that it always felt worth your time anyway. There was a reasonable amount of trash as well, and every single pull was meaningful and a challenge of its own.

First you had Nalorakk, the priest of the bear god - he was the "gear check boss" since both he and his trash mostly just hit hard. If I think back to how many times we wiped on the last pull leading up to him, back when we first entered the instance... yikes.

Then there was Akil'zon, the eagle or "movement boss". The trash leading up to him only consisted of a gauntlet where mobs would continue to come at you from both back and front, and the challenge was to move forwards as fast as you could without losing control of all the adds. The boss himself was also all about correct positioning and finding the safe spot whenever he cast his electrical storm.

Jan'alai, the dragonhawk, was the "control boss", both in terms of trash and the actual boss encounter. Could you lock down the scouts to prevent them from repeatedly calling for reinforcements? Could you control the flame casters so they wouldn't aoe your raid to death with their hasted fireball volleys? On the boss himself you had to plan carefully when and what to dps, since killing things too quickly could be just as deadly as killing them too slowly. Keeping the mass of dragonhawk hatchlings under control was challenging as well, back in a time where aoe tanking abilities were rare.

Halazzi's trash mostly consisted of packs of lynxes that appeared out of nowhere - who doesn't like surprises? The boss himself wasn't about tons of adds though, more about quick target switching: The off-tank had to be fast with picking up the lynx spirit before it could run off and maul the clothies, and the dps had to be focused on taking down the corrupted lightning totems whenever they were dropped. Ah, the fond memories I have of fail dps who couldn't push a targetting macro unless you shouted at them in a raid warning every single time...

And then you had the final bosses of course, with Hex Lord Malacrass blocking the way to Zul'jin. I remember the first thing I heard about him was that he was "like Moroes" with his four adds and what not. Hah! Of course the adds were significant, but the real challenge was the way Malacrass stole the abilities of random players in your party and used them against you. Nothing like a paladin's consecration eating away at the health of your melee dps or a priest's mind control suddenly affecting your healer. And all this while you were racing against time and massive aoe shadow damage.

Zul'jin himself was kind of a combination of the first four bosses rolled into one and the addition of some new abilities... I think that should say enough really. An epic ending for an epic instance.

Zul'Aman was also - as far as I'm aware anyway - the first raid with a "hard mode". I remember at the time I was looking forward to Blizzard implementing more of them; it's too bad they changed the concept so much since then, because I loved the Zul'Aman timed chests but dislike most of WOTLK's hard mode encounters.

The thing with the Zul'Aman chests was that they were never an either-or decision. It wasn't: Shall we just kill this the normal way or wipe lots in hopes of getting an achievement? You did the "hard mode" while doing the normal mode. It wasn't about weird gimmicks like not killing adds or generally not doing the sensible thing either, you were simply rewarded for playing well, for killing things fast and without wiping.

In addition the chest rewards were staggered and cumulative. It was enough to just know how to kill the bear boss to get the first chest. If you could pull off downing both Nalorakk and Akil'zon without too many wipes two chests were yours. Three was where it started to get tough as you didn't get much extra time from then on, but getting three chests was still a nice consolation prize if you couldn't quite make it to the warbear mount.

Now compare this to something like Freya and her hard mode in Ulduar: There are four different difficulties: normal; one, two and three elders. Higher difficulty requires you to intentionally make things harder for yourself by not killing the elders even though it would be the sensible thing to do. Also, you have to choose which mode to go for as you can only do one at a time. The loot for three of them is identical except for an extra emblem or something (I didn't keep track to be honest); only the hardest difficulty gives extra rewards. In short, it's highly annoying and unrewarding. So... why did anyone think that this would be an improvement over what we had before?

I miss you, Zul'Aman, I really do.