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.
Showing posts with label utgarde keep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label utgarde keep. Show all posts
12/11/2010
29/10/2010
Discussing the raid and dungeon changes announced at Blizzcon
Blizzcon may not have brought us any amazing revelations this year, but the developers did provide us with some solid pieces of insight into what they are planning to do with the old world dungeons come Cataclysm.
Confirmation of more conveniently located graveyards and the addition of dungeon maps was not a surprise but still welcome. I remember desperately pressing the M key so many times during my very first Deadmines run, not understanding why there was no map for this zone, and have pretty much continued to make that same mistake over and over again to this day, even though I should really know better by now.
That said, I'm not sure I'm entirely sold on those so-called "enhanced" dungeon maps they've been advertising. In fact, my very first thought was definitely an "OMG, how much more do they want to dumb things down" knee-jerk reaction. I mean, 3D images of the bosses on the maps? Do they think we'll be unable to recognise them otherwise? Are they trying to appeal to kids that can't read the NPC names yet? Seriously...
I still find this feature rather strange, but I have to admit that the others definitely have some appeal. For example the addition of a list of boss abilities in-game: How many times have you had to explain a boss fight (or heard someone else do it) and it went something like "and then he does this thing, I forget what it's called, let me look it up..."? Might as well save people the tabbing out.
The same thing is true for the detailed loot lists. While I'm apparently in the minority as someone who never ran with any loot information addons because on the whole I rather liked the surprise, I'd lie if I said that I've never looked up a boss's loot on Wowhead for some reason or another.
Still, from an immersion point of view I find having access to all this information slightly strange once again. WoW is a fantasy setting with steampunk elements, not something set in the age of information. Not knowing what exactly lies ahead in the dungeon you're about to enter but doing it anyway is one of the things that makes adventurers stand out as truly brave. If we know our target's exact coordinates and its abilities, aren't we more like hired assassins? Or secret agents? /hums the Mission Impossible theme... actually, that's kind of cool. Maybe we can just look at it as a sort of evolution - as the gnomes and goblins develop more technology we tend to have more information available.
Now, the other major topic was that of how exactly they intend to streamline the old world dungeons to bring them more in line with Outland and Northrend ones. First off, I was really glad to see this quote: "We don't want dungeons to be left behind in the redo, we want them to be up-to-par with everything else", as this was something that I had been kind of worried about.
They said that they want to make currently confusing dungeons less so, with Wailing Caverns being cited as a prime example. I can honestly say that I'm definitely in favour of this, as there's no love lost between me and WC's winding tunnels, even though I've become reasonably good at navigating them by now. I just hope that they don't swing too far the other way and turn something that's supposed to be a natural cavern into a straight and boring tunnel. I do believe that there's a solid middle ground to be found here, where you can make a place appear to be reasonably complex while still avoiding structures that might actually cause players to get lost. I think they did a pretty good job at this in WOTLK already - while most dungeons were still very linear, they didn't suffer from "endless hallway" syndrome nearly as badly as most of Outland.
Then there is the issue of shortening dungeons, in particular by splitting them into wings. Now, in general I approve of this, but I have to say that I found the fact that Utgarde Keep/Pinnacle was quoted as a good example of this rather amusing, because I thought if anything Utgarde is an example of how not to do it. I mean, there you are, questing in Howling Fjord and getting into this whole Vyrkul storyline, you try to kill King Ymiron but Arthas whisks him away to Utgarde Pinnacle, you clear out the lower levels of the keep... and then you go and have to gain ten more levels in other zones, running other dungeons, before you can come back and get on with the story. Sorry, but I don't think that works very well. Different wings of what's supposed to be considered the same dungeon should be close together in level so people can run them right after each other and get the whole story in one go if they choose to do so. That said, places like Scarlet Monastery and Dire Maul already pulled this off very well in the past, so I have faith in Blizzard being able to get this right.
Now, a few more instances that are going to get this treatment were discussed in a bit more detail. Uldaman for example will be split into two parts, with Ironaya ending the first half and what's currently called the back door being the entrance to the second half. Now, this sounds pretty sensible to me. I do have to say though, I really hope that they buff dungeon mobs significantly, otherwise this whole split thing might turn out to be a bit pointless. I mean, I too remember Uldaman as this endless winding maze from my WoW youth, but when I recently ran it at level again, for the first time in ages, we breezed through the whole thing while killing all the bosses in about twenty minutes. If it were to stay like that, splitting a twenty-minute dungeon into two ten-minute ones would just be silly.
Then we have Maraudon, another candidate for a logical split. To be honest I always thought that the whole "two entrances" structure that forced you to backtrack considerably if you wanted to do a full clear was kind of annoying. Two halves sound about right. Currently the dungeon finder splits it into three parts, and from what I hear this separation is rather awkward. Personally I only entered the instance through the dungeon finder for the first time tonight, and just found that the purple section felt extremely short. The rest of the party seemed to agree as we simply continued past Lord Vyletongue (the purple section's only boss) and continued all the way to the princess, just not bothering to go back for the orange section. Again this actually didn't take us all that long, even though we were doing very poor dps (one guy was on /follow the entire time and me and the other remaining damage dealer were about five levels lower than the mobs we were fighting). Again I hope that they will buff the mobs so the instance will still feel like a worthwhile undertaking even when cut in half.
Hearing that they want to cut out Sunken Temple's bottom floor made me a little sad to be honest, but I'll admit that the "elemental section" as we called it was always my least favourite anyway. Still, I'm one of those strange people who always loved Sunken Temple, even back when I kept getting lost in it. I just loved the whole Indiana Jones adventure feel of the place.
The comments on BRD raised more questions than they answered in my opinion. Apparently the developers think that this one is too hard to split into sensible sections, so they added teleporters instead. I don't mind those as an addition (after all, why shouldn't the Dark Iron dwarves go with the times too), but doesn't that leave the instance at the same length at which it is now? Or will nothing prevent groups from zoning in and teleporting straight to the Emperor? If not, what do these teleporters really solve, other than shortening possible corpse runs?
We shall see.
Confirmation of more conveniently located graveyards and the addition of dungeon maps was not a surprise but still welcome. I remember desperately pressing the M key so many times during my very first Deadmines run, not understanding why there was no map for this zone, and have pretty much continued to make that same mistake over and over again to this day, even though I should really know better by now.
That said, I'm not sure I'm entirely sold on those so-called "enhanced" dungeon maps they've been advertising. In fact, my very first thought was definitely an "OMG, how much more do they want to dumb things down" knee-jerk reaction. I mean, 3D images of the bosses on the maps? Do they think we'll be unable to recognise them otherwise? Are they trying to appeal to kids that can't read the NPC names yet? Seriously...
I still find this feature rather strange, but I have to admit that the others definitely have some appeal. For example the addition of a list of boss abilities in-game: How many times have you had to explain a boss fight (or heard someone else do it) and it went something like "and then he does this thing, I forget what it's called, let me look it up..."? Might as well save people the tabbing out.
The same thing is true for the detailed loot lists. While I'm apparently in the minority as someone who never ran with any loot information addons because on the whole I rather liked the surprise, I'd lie if I said that I've never looked up a boss's loot on Wowhead for some reason or another.
Still, from an immersion point of view I find having access to all this information slightly strange once again. WoW is a fantasy setting with steampunk elements, not something set in the age of information. Not knowing what exactly lies ahead in the dungeon you're about to enter but doing it anyway is one of the things that makes adventurers stand out as truly brave. If we know our target's exact coordinates and its abilities, aren't we more like hired assassins? Or secret agents? /hums the Mission Impossible theme... actually, that's kind of cool. Maybe we can just look at it as a sort of evolution - as the gnomes and goblins develop more technology we tend to have more information available.
Now, the other major topic was that of how exactly they intend to streamline the old world dungeons to bring them more in line with Outland and Northrend ones. First off, I was really glad to see this quote: "We don't want dungeons to be left behind in the redo, we want them to be up-to-par with everything else", as this was something that I had been kind of worried about.
They said that they want to make currently confusing dungeons less so, with Wailing Caverns being cited as a prime example. I can honestly say that I'm definitely in favour of this, as there's no love lost between me and WC's winding tunnels, even though I've become reasonably good at navigating them by now. I just hope that they don't swing too far the other way and turn something that's supposed to be a natural cavern into a straight and boring tunnel. I do believe that there's a solid middle ground to be found here, where you can make a place appear to be reasonably complex while still avoiding structures that might actually cause players to get lost. I think they did a pretty good job at this in WOTLK already - while most dungeons were still very linear, they didn't suffer from "endless hallway" syndrome nearly as badly as most of Outland.
Then there is the issue of shortening dungeons, in particular by splitting them into wings. Now, in general I approve of this, but I have to say that I found the fact that Utgarde Keep/Pinnacle was quoted as a good example of this rather amusing, because I thought if anything Utgarde is an example of how not to do it. I mean, there you are, questing in Howling Fjord and getting into this whole Vyrkul storyline, you try to kill King Ymiron but Arthas whisks him away to Utgarde Pinnacle, you clear out the lower levels of the keep... and then you go and have to gain ten more levels in other zones, running other dungeons, before you can come back and get on with the story. Sorry, but I don't think that works very well. Different wings of what's supposed to be considered the same dungeon should be close together in level so people can run them right after each other and get the whole story in one go if they choose to do so. That said, places like Scarlet Monastery and Dire Maul already pulled this off very well in the past, so I have faith in Blizzard being able to get this right.
Now, a few more instances that are going to get this treatment were discussed in a bit more detail. Uldaman for example will be split into two parts, with Ironaya ending the first half and what's currently called the back door being the entrance to the second half. Now, this sounds pretty sensible to me. I do have to say though, I really hope that they buff dungeon mobs significantly, otherwise this whole split thing might turn out to be a bit pointless. I mean, I too remember Uldaman as this endless winding maze from my WoW youth, but when I recently ran it at level again, for the first time in ages, we breezed through the whole thing while killing all the bosses in about twenty minutes. If it were to stay like that, splitting a twenty-minute dungeon into two ten-minute ones would just be silly.
Then we have Maraudon, another candidate for a logical split. To be honest I always thought that the whole "two entrances" structure that forced you to backtrack considerably if you wanted to do a full clear was kind of annoying. Two halves sound about right. Currently the dungeon finder splits it into three parts, and from what I hear this separation is rather awkward. Personally I only entered the instance through the dungeon finder for the first time tonight, and just found that the purple section felt extremely short. The rest of the party seemed to agree as we simply continued past Lord Vyletongue (the purple section's only boss) and continued all the way to the princess, just not bothering to go back for the orange section. Again this actually didn't take us all that long, even though we were doing very poor dps (one guy was on /follow the entire time and me and the other remaining damage dealer were about five levels lower than the mobs we were fighting). Again I hope that they will buff the mobs so the instance will still feel like a worthwhile undertaking even when cut in half.
Hearing that they want to cut out Sunken Temple's bottom floor made me a little sad to be honest, but I'll admit that the "elemental section" as we called it was always my least favourite anyway. Still, I'm one of those strange people who always loved Sunken Temple, even back when I kept getting lost in it. I just loved the whole Indiana Jones adventure feel of the place.
The comments on BRD raised more questions than they answered in my opinion. Apparently the developers think that this one is too hard to split into sensible sections, so they added teleporters instead. I don't mind those as an addition (after all, why shouldn't the Dark Iron dwarves go with the times too), but doesn't that leave the instance at the same length at which it is now? Or will nothing prevent groups from zoning in and teleporting straight to the Emperor? If not, what do these teleporters really solve, other than shortening possible corpse runs?
We shall see.
27/09/2010
Sunday night pug musings
Last night I took my death knight out to pug a few instances, to balance the large amount of solo-play that I've been doing lately. Since I gave her a tank spec I've found grouping with her much more enjoyable - I just think that melee dps is kind of annoying and boring. In fact, I've generally started to warm up to her a little.
I've complained in the past that I didn't like death knights because they felt too much like pre-made characters to me and getting all those abilities right from the start just confused me. However, after (very, very, slowly, over the course of nearly two years) gaining sixteen levels since her creation, my death knight is finally starting to feel a bit more like she's truly "mine", and I also couldn't help learning at least a little bit about the class's abilities after two years of playing with other death knights - I suppose you could call that mental osmosis. So things aren't quite as bad now.
But to get to the pugs. They were actually all pretty pleasant, and I don't think we had a single death, but that's not to say that nothing interesting happened. I started the night by queuing for a couple of specific Outland instances, since the dungeon finder won't let me do random normal modes anymore at my current level.
I expected a bit of a queue even as a tank, since healers tend to be the bigger problem in that level bracket, but I actually got a group very quickly. My first run took me to the Arcatraz. I don't know what it is about that instance, but I swear every time I run it these days it elicits cries of joy from at least one member of the group. People love the bickering demons, laugh at Millhouse Manastorm and gasp at Harbinger Skyriss. In this case our priest was particularly fond of them all. It's really weird in a way, because I remember that instance not being one of the most popular ones back in BC, especially on heroic mode, since it had a lot of absolutely murderous trash pulls, and Zereketh the Unbound was without a doubt one of the worst heroic bosses of that expansion (even if he could be skipped). It's funny how our perceptions of what's fun can change.
I also noticed that our healer had to drink a lot, which is perfectly fine and I was happy to wait of course, but I realised for the first time that this is another one of the things that I miss about crowd control - it gives the non-casters something to do while the mana users drink. I mean, I stood there in front of the next trash pull, trying to be patient but admittedly being a bit bored, and found myself thinking that I never had that problem back in BC because back then, while the healer was drinking, the tank and dps were marking up the next pull and discussing strategy. I do think this is why nerfing mana regen and requiring more crowd control have to go hand in hand in Cataclysm - because just forcing the healer to drink after every pull while everyone else taps their feet and waits to be able to do more AoE wouldn't really cut it I dare say.
Anyway, my next run took me to the Old Hillsbrad Foothills. I had run that one before, but went again because I had forgot to complete the Nice Hat quest. Two other people in the group had it too and everyone was perfectly happy to take a quick detour to get it done. I miss that kind of co-operation in many runs these days.
I was also really hoping that I could get people to continue to the Black Morass right afterwards but had no such luck. I've said in the past that Escape from Durnholde is hard to get a group for these days because it requires you to do a boring attunement quest that nobody tells you about, in a zone that's way out of the way when you're in the right level range, but after careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that Durnholde isn't so bad. Black Morass is much worse, for the simple reason that it requires you to do all the things you have to do to unlock Old Hillsbrad, and you have to complete the Escape from Durnholde quest, and you then have to be at least level sixty-eight to enter BM, by which point most people are already off to Northrend.
My last Outland instance for the night turned out to be the Mechanar. Again we had a pretty smooth run, though one thing pissed me off: When the other death knight in the group, level sixty-seven and dps, looted the crystal from Gatewatcher Iron-Hand, I told him to hold on to it because we'd need it later. Then, after we killed Capacitus, that same death knight suddenly announced that he would leave because he felt that he was too low-level for the instance and couldn't hit anything, and anyway, we should get a replacement quickly. I thought this was a slightly strange, but not entirely unreasonable complaint, but quickly typed out "wait" in chat because I wanted that crystal first. Too late, he had taken off already, taking our key to the loot chest with him. Grrr! Damn you, cross-server pugs and the way you allow people to just vanish into the nether!
After these three runs I decided to finish the night by giving Utgarde Keep a go. Even though I was level seventy-one by then, and keep in mind that I'm the kind of death knight who actually bothers to collect defense gear before starting to tank, my health went up and down like a yo-yo throughout the entire run. In the previous instances I had sometimes chastised myself mentally for not using my survival cooldowns enough, but in that UK run I was spamming them like there was no tomorrow. Being so squishy was just scary. It's really ironic how the normal Northrend instances are so much tougher at level now than the average heroic run of the same place. I have to give massive kudos to our priest healer, who never let anyone die even when the going got tough and who pulled through even though our dps was rather low.
That was the other interesting thing about that run - why was our dps so low? Right after we entered, I noticed that our "dps" paladin was sporting a sword and board combo. I inspected him and sure enough, he was protection spec and not changing. I asked him why he was dpsing if he was geared and specced to be a tank and he said that he just hadn't felt like tanking when he signed up. Now okay, I get that a tank might not always feel like tanking, but maybe he should make sure to also gather some dps gear then? The really daft thing was that it turned out that he was actually dual-specced prot/holy. Why in the world would you queue as the one role out of three for which you have neither gear or spec?!
I do have to admit that this annoyed me and I kind of wanted to get rid of him, but at the same time I felt that I should at least give him a chance. And to be fair, he did behave himself - he didn't use righteous fury or tried to pull aggro off me, he just attemped to do damage. Unfortunately he was still very much dead weight, as he only did about two hundred dps, which was about a third of what I was doing while tanking very amateurishly. On Prince Keleseth we must have gone through about ten frost tombs, that's how slowly he died. I couldn't hold it against the healer that he bickered at the paladin to pick it up, but the latter assured us very earnestly that he was trying. We did complete the instance despite of the paladin's rubbish performance, but I felt bad about the healer basically having to make up for the other guy's fail pretty much the entire time. Going into group content with strangers while intentionally gimping yourself is just wrong.
I've complained in the past that I didn't like death knights because they felt too much like pre-made characters to me and getting all those abilities right from the start just confused me. However, after (very, very, slowly, over the course of nearly two years) gaining sixteen levels since her creation, my death knight is finally starting to feel a bit more like she's truly "mine", and I also couldn't help learning at least a little bit about the class's abilities after two years of playing with other death knights - I suppose you could call that mental osmosis. So things aren't quite as bad now.
But to get to the pugs. They were actually all pretty pleasant, and I don't think we had a single death, but that's not to say that nothing interesting happened. I started the night by queuing for a couple of specific Outland instances, since the dungeon finder won't let me do random normal modes anymore at my current level.
I expected a bit of a queue even as a tank, since healers tend to be the bigger problem in that level bracket, but I actually got a group very quickly. My first run took me to the Arcatraz. I don't know what it is about that instance, but I swear every time I run it these days it elicits cries of joy from at least one member of the group. People love the bickering demons, laugh at Millhouse Manastorm and gasp at Harbinger Skyriss. In this case our priest was particularly fond of them all. It's really weird in a way, because I remember that instance not being one of the most popular ones back in BC, especially on heroic mode, since it had a lot of absolutely murderous trash pulls, and Zereketh the Unbound was without a doubt one of the worst heroic bosses of that expansion (even if he could be skipped). It's funny how our perceptions of what's fun can change.
I also noticed that our healer had to drink a lot, which is perfectly fine and I was happy to wait of course, but I realised for the first time that this is another one of the things that I miss about crowd control - it gives the non-casters something to do while the mana users drink. I mean, I stood there in front of the next trash pull, trying to be patient but admittedly being a bit bored, and found myself thinking that I never had that problem back in BC because back then, while the healer was drinking, the tank and dps were marking up the next pull and discussing strategy. I do think this is why nerfing mana regen and requiring more crowd control have to go hand in hand in Cataclysm - because just forcing the healer to drink after every pull while everyone else taps their feet and waits to be able to do more AoE wouldn't really cut it I dare say.
Anyway, my next run took me to the Old Hillsbrad Foothills. I had run that one before, but went again because I had forgot to complete the Nice Hat quest. Two other people in the group had it too and everyone was perfectly happy to take a quick detour to get it done. I miss that kind of co-operation in many runs these days.
I was also really hoping that I could get people to continue to the Black Morass right afterwards but had no such luck. I've said in the past that Escape from Durnholde is hard to get a group for these days because it requires you to do a boring attunement quest that nobody tells you about, in a zone that's way out of the way when you're in the right level range, but after careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that Durnholde isn't so bad. Black Morass is much worse, for the simple reason that it requires you to do all the things you have to do to unlock Old Hillsbrad, and you have to complete the Escape from Durnholde quest, and you then have to be at least level sixty-eight to enter BM, by which point most people are already off to Northrend.
My last Outland instance for the night turned out to be the Mechanar. Again we had a pretty smooth run, though one thing pissed me off: When the other death knight in the group, level sixty-seven and dps, looted the crystal from Gatewatcher Iron-Hand, I told him to hold on to it because we'd need it later. Then, after we killed Capacitus, that same death knight suddenly announced that he would leave because he felt that he was too low-level for the instance and couldn't hit anything, and anyway, we should get a replacement quickly. I thought this was a slightly strange, but not entirely unreasonable complaint, but quickly typed out "wait" in chat because I wanted that crystal first. Too late, he had taken off already, taking our key to the loot chest with him. Grrr! Damn you, cross-server pugs and the way you allow people to just vanish into the nether!
After these three runs I decided to finish the night by giving Utgarde Keep a go. Even though I was level seventy-one by then, and keep in mind that I'm the kind of death knight who actually bothers to collect defense gear before starting to tank, my health went up and down like a yo-yo throughout the entire run. In the previous instances I had sometimes chastised myself mentally for not using my survival cooldowns enough, but in that UK run I was spamming them like there was no tomorrow. Being so squishy was just scary. It's really ironic how the normal Northrend instances are so much tougher at level now than the average heroic run of the same place. I have to give massive kudos to our priest healer, who never let anyone die even when the going got tough and who pulled through even though our dps was rather low.
That was the other interesting thing about that run - why was our dps so low? Right after we entered, I noticed that our "dps" paladin was sporting a sword and board combo. I inspected him and sure enough, he was protection spec and not changing. I asked him why he was dpsing if he was geared and specced to be a tank and he said that he just hadn't felt like tanking when he signed up. Now okay, I get that a tank might not always feel like tanking, but maybe he should make sure to also gather some dps gear then? The really daft thing was that it turned out that he was actually dual-specced prot/holy. Why in the world would you queue as the one role out of three for which you have neither gear or spec?!
I do have to admit that this annoyed me and I kind of wanted to get rid of him, but at the same time I felt that I should at least give him a chance. And to be fair, he did behave himself - he didn't use righteous fury or tried to pull aggro off me, he just attemped to do damage. Unfortunately he was still very much dead weight, as he only did about two hundred dps, which was about a third of what I was doing while tanking very amateurishly. On Prince Keleseth we must have gone through about ten frost tombs, that's how slowly he died. I couldn't hold it against the healer that he bickered at the paladin to pick it up, but the latter assured us very earnestly that he was trying. We did complete the instance despite of the paladin's rubbish performance, but I felt bad about the healer basically having to make up for the other guy's fail pretty much the entire time. Going into group content with strangers while intentionally gimping yourself is just wrong.
21/05/2010
Strangely enough, being squishy is fun!
I got my seventh character to eighty the other day, a draenei mage. After briefly testing the waters in a couple of normal mode runs I decided that my 2-2.5k average dps in a mix of greens and levelling blues should be enough to not draw anyone's ire in heroics, even more so as the average skill level seemed to be pretty low across the board in that battlegroup (that is to say, I saw people in full tier nine doing about as much damage as me and nobody complained).
So I jumped into a couple of heroic runs... and hilarity ensued! Why, you ask? Well, mages can be all kinds of awesome if the person behind the character knows what they are doing, like that guy who made all the "funny mage tricks" videos, or Euripides. However, if the player is not that good at being a mage (like me), the class really lives up to its reputation of being a glass cannon.
The scene: Halls of Lightning. Having struggled with healing the Loken fight often enough, I knew that I didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the lightning nova with my piddly 14k fully buffed health, but I didn't quite trust myself to run out properly anymore either, so I thought I'd be clever - put on mage armour for some nature resistance, ice block through the first nova, throw up a mana shield before the second, and again for the third (yes, our overall dps was so low that we got *gasp* three novas) but I died on the third one anyway. Boo.
The scene: Utgarde Keep. We start the second fight, I run close to avoid getting charged (but not close enough as it turns out), have just enough time to shoot about three arcane blasts at Dalronn the Controller when Skarvald charges me for 11k damage and then instantly melees me for another 7k. Mage go splat! I whinged about that one a bit because I'm still not sure what happened. The charge is one thing, but I don't know why he started to melee me afterwards when I hadn't even touched him.
The scene: Gundrak. I knew that it was a run in progress when I accepted the popup, but what I didn't expect was to land right in front of Gal'darah, with the tank being the only person still alive. "Uh, not the best moment to join in," I commented and the rest of the party chuckled in agreement. I tried to go invisible but got slashed by his whirlwind before I could get out of range, so it broke and I died with everyone else.
On our next attempt I blew all my cooldowns right at the start and did great dps... then I got impaled. I didn't get any heals from our visibly struggling healer (who said that it was her first heroic) but figured that I should be able to survive the dot anyway... except that the moment I got thrown off, the boss decided to add a 30k damage crushing blow to my face. Yay for getting aggro while incapacitated! They still managed to kill him without me though.
Now, all this might sound more bitter than amused, but I actually had a ton of fun, (though I'm not even sure why). I guess I like the whole glass cannon concept and that it works both ways. I can't help giggling out of sheer surprise when something unexpectedly one-shots me. Not to mention that being so extremely squishy actually forces you to pay attention and play sensibly again because you simply can't survive being sloppy (pulling aggro, standing in the AoE). Or maybe it's just that seeing my mage dead on the floor cracks me up every time, seeing how female draenei have this rather silly death pose which makes them look like they just tripped and fell flat on their faces.
D'oh, fell over my own hooves again!
So I jumped into a couple of heroic runs... and hilarity ensued! Why, you ask? Well, mages can be all kinds of awesome if the person behind the character knows what they are doing, like that guy who made all the "funny mage tricks" videos, or Euripides. However, if the player is not that good at being a mage (like me), the class really lives up to its reputation of being a glass cannon.
The scene: Halls of Lightning. Having struggled with healing the Loken fight often enough, I knew that I didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the lightning nova with my piddly 14k fully buffed health, but I didn't quite trust myself to run out properly anymore either, so I thought I'd be clever - put on mage armour for some nature resistance, ice block through the first nova, throw up a mana shield before the second, and again for the third (yes, our overall dps was so low that we got *gasp* three novas) but I died on the third one anyway. Boo.
The scene: Utgarde Keep. We start the second fight, I run close to avoid getting charged (but not close enough as it turns out), have just enough time to shoot about three arcane blasts at Dalronn the Controller when Skarvald charges me for 11k damage and then instantly melees me for another 7k. Mage go splat! I whinged about that one a bit because I'm still not sure what happened. The charge is one thing, but I don't know why he started to melee me afterwards when I hadn't even touched him.
The scene: Gundrak. I knew that it was a run in progress when I accepted the popup, but what I didn't expect was to land right in front of Gal'darah, with the tank being the only person still alive. "Uh, not the best moment to join in," I commented and the rest of the party chuckled in agreement. I tried to go invisible but got slashed by his whirlwind before I could get out of range, so it broke and I died with everyone else.
On our next attempt I blew all my cooldowns right at the start and did great dps... then I got impaled. I didn't get any heals from our visibly struggling healer (who said that it was her first heroic) but figured that I should be able to survive the dot anyway... except that the moment I got thrown off, the boss decided to add a 30k damage crushing blow to my face. Yay for getting aggro while incapacitated! They still managed to kill him without me though.
Now, all this might sound more bitter than amused, but I actually had a ton of fun, (though I'm not even sure why). I guess I like the whole glass cannon concept and that it works both ways. I can't help giggling out of sheer surprise when something unexpectedly one-shots me. Not to mention that being so extremely squishy actually forces you to pay attention and play sensibly again because you simply can't survive being sloppy (pulling aggro, standing in the AoE). Or maybe it's just that seeing my mage dead on the floor cracks me up every time, seeing how female draenei have this rather silly death pose which makes them look like they just tripped and fell flat on their faces.
D'oh, fell over my own hooves again!I was almost disappointed when I made it through my last instance for the night, heroic Old Kingdom, without even dying once. Though I have yet to figure out the best way to deal with the evil clones on the last boss as a mage - when I used my mirror images I could kill them easily, but without them I just spent the whole time flailing about and being unable to kill anything, only staying alive due to repeatedly spellstealing the tree's lifeblooms.
14/12/2009
A tale of two non-heroic pugs
So we've all been talking a lot about how the dungeon finder allows people to chain heroics by the dozen, but how well does it work for low-level dungeons? In the first few days after the patch my shaman alt got a little neglected since I was focusing on getting some new shinies for my eighties instead, but when I logged onto her again yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to see that she was already eligible to run a random normal dungeon for two emblems of triumph - and that at level 72! For some reason I had assumed that the random normal dungeon feature would be like the old daily quest for normal dungeons: only for characters that are level 78 and up. But no! At this rate my shaman will hit eighty and be able to buy some tier nine the moment she dings.
Anyway, the first time I queued myself up as a healer I was baffled when I got a group pop-up literally instantly. I got dumped into an Azjol-Nerub run that was tanked by a level eighty death knight who, frankly, didn't give a shit about whether he had a healer or not. When I discovered to my horror that I was still in my enhancement spec and said as much, he just said that it didn't matter. Sadly he was right and I healed through the first couple of trash packs just fine anyway, until I managed to snag a couple of seconds out of combat to change specs.
On the trash pack before Anub'arak both of the mobs decided to cast their debuff on me at once, I exploded big time as I tried to heal myself and died. As I ankhed and sat down to drink up, the tank decided to rush the boss, thereby locking me out of the fight. Well done. I got killed as the adds came in and so did the slightly confused retri pally, but really, we were clearly dead weight anyway. The 80 death knight just pwned Anub and his adds without even breaking a sweat, grabbed the loot and disappeared while the pally and I ran back to our corpses. I wasn't too annoyed because I had still got credit for the kill and had received my first two emblems, but well, as far as fun pugs go, that one was an utter failure.
Today I decided to try again. This time I had a wait of a couple of minutes, during which I went off to do the Shattrath fishing daily, until a pop-up invited me to join an Utgarde Keep run already in progress.
As it turned out the group was about halfway to the second boss but I didn't really mind as Utgarde Keep has a bit much trash for WOTLK standards anyway. The question was just what had happened to their previous healer, but I decided not to ask. When I reached the rest of the party I was initially a little worried upon discovering that the druid tank had only slightly more health than me, even when in bear form, but as it turned out that wasn't a major problem. I think it's important to keep things in perspective: when you're used to running heroics with tanks who have 50k health, seeing a tank with only 11k will initially make you uneasy, but back in BC that would have been enough to start running Karazhan - and since Utgarde Keep is a level seventy instance, that's pretty much exactly what it's tuned for.
Other members in the group included a retri pally who loved to pull aggro and spam damage metres, a shadow priest and... I can't actually recall what the third dps was, how lame is that? Anyway, this run actually turned out to be a blast and reminded me of what I miss while just "farming" instances at eighty: the sense of adventure. I mean, I knew the instance and I think most of the others did as well, but it was obvious that a lot of them were new to their current role and having fun figuring out how it works. As it was I couldn't even begrudge the retri pally his aggro pulling and damage metre spam, because he was clearly excited about being able to do damage omg! There's something cute about that.
Our tank, Mr Bear, was the cutest of all however. He was clearly new to this whole tanking lark and took a lot of damage, but he tried. He messed up a few pulls and lost aggro on mobs more than once, but damn it, he tried. He kindly asked the dps to not start too early, taunted things occasionally, and after the last boss he said "maybe I'll be a tank one day". Awww! I told him that he'd been doing fine and that he should just keep practising. You can't encourage enthusiastic and humble newbie players nearly enough.
As for myself, I also had a blast healing. Since the tank was pretty squishy, just putting an earth shield and riptide on him didn't really cut it, so I often had to cast lesser and normal healing waves as well, chain heal if the pally stood on a bomb too and so on. Now that I've made it all the way down the resto tree I'm actually having a lot of fun trying to optimise my use of tidal waves. It's kind of like a priest's serendipity (in fact I believe that the priest talent was modelled after the shaman one), only more complex. It encourages you to use a sort of rotation on occasion without making it so repetitive that you could macro the whole thing.
Also, I came to the conclusion that shamans are the perfect healers for newbie tanks. I mean, when my priest or druid gets aggro I always have to spam heals on myself big time and still risk dying very quickly. Whenever my shaman got aggro on the other hand, I kind of pictured her standing there with her shield over her head, just waiting patiently and hoping that the tank would notice the problem within the next decade. Paladins are sturdy like that too, but since they have no HoTs and little AoE healing, getting interrupted by an add on themselves is quite annoying. A shaman can just cast a chain heal or let earth shield and riptide keep the tank alive in the meantime, taking that beating with unsurpassed stoicism. Go shamans!
I'll have to try getting into a low-level instance on one of my littlest alts soon just to see how well that works.
Anyway, the first time I queued myself up as a healer I was baffled when I got a group pop-up literally instantly. I got dumped into an Azjol-Nerub run that was tanked by a level eighty death knight who, frankly, didn't give a shit about whether he had a healer or not. When I discovered to my horror that I was still in my enhancement spec and said as much, he just said that it didn't matter. Sadly he was right and I healed through the first couple of trash packs just fine anyway, until I managed to snag a couple of seconds out of combat to change specs.
On the trash pack before Anub'arak both of the mobs decided to cast their debuff on me at once, I exploded big time as I tried to heal myself and died. As I ankhed and sat down to drink up, the tank decided to rush the boss, thereby locking me out of the fight. Well done. I got killed as the adds came in and so did the slightly confused retri pally, but really, we were clearly dead weight anyway. The 80 death knight just pwned Anub and his adds without even breaking a sweat, grabbed the loot and disappeared while the pally and I ran back to our corpses. I wasn't too annoyed because I had still got credit for the kill and had received my first two emblems, but well, as far as fun pugs go, that one was an utter failure.
Today I decided to try again. This time I had a wait of a couple of minutes, during which I went off to do the Shattrath fishing daily, until a pop-up invited me to join an Utgarde Keep run already in progress.
As it turned out the group was about halfway to the second boss but I didn't really mind as Utgarde Keep has a bit much trash for WOTLK standards anyway. The question was just what had happened to their previous healer, but I decided not to ask. When I reached the rest of the party I was initially a little worried upon discovering that the druid tank had only slightly more health than me, even when in bear form, but as it turned out that wasn't a major problem. I think it's important to keep things in perspective: when you're used to running heroics with tanks who have 50k health, seeing a tank with only 11k will initially make you uneasy, but back in BC that would have been enough to start running Karazhan - and since Utgarde Keep is a level seventy instance, that's pretty much exactly what it's tuned for.
Other members in the group included a retri pally who loved to pull aggro and spam damage metres, a shadow priest and... I can't actually recall what the third dps was, how lame is that? Anyway, this run actually turned out to be a blast and reminded me of what I miss while just "farming" instances at eighty: the sense of adventure. I mean, I knew the instance and I think most of the others did as well, but it was obvious that a lot of them were new to their current role and having fun figuring out how it works. As it was I couldn't even begrudge the retri pally his aggro pulling and damage metre spam, because he was clearly excited about being able to do damage omg! There's something cute about that.
Our tank, Mr Bear, was the cutest of all however. He was clearly new to this whole tanking lark and took a lot of damage, but he tried. He messed up a few pulls and lost aggro on mobs more than once, but damn it, he tried. He kindly asked the dps to not start too early, taunted things occasionally, and after the last boss he said "maybe I'll be a tank one day". Awww! I told him that he'd been doing fine and that he should just keep practising. You can't encourage enthusiastic and humble newbie players nearly enough.
As for myself, I also had a blast healing. Since the tank was pretty squishy, just putting an earth shield and riptide on him didn't really cut it, so I often had to cast lesser and normal healing waves as well, chain heal if the pally stood on a bomb too and so on. Now that I've made it all the way down the resto tree I'm actually having a lot of fun trying to optimise my use of tidal waves. It's kind of like a priest's serendipity (in fact I believe that the priest talent was modelled after the shaman one), only more complex. It encourages you to use a sort of rotation on occasion without making it so repetitive that you could macro the whole thing.
Also, I came to the conclusion that shamans are the perfect healers for newbie tanks. I mean, when my priest or druid gets aggro I always have to spam heals on myself big time and still risk dying very quickly. Whenever my shaman got aggro on the other hand, I kind of pictured her standing there with her shield over her head, just waiting patiently and hoping that the tank would notice the problem within the next decade. Paladins are sturdy like that too, but since they have no HoTs and little AoE healing, getting interrupted by an add on themselves is quite annoying. A shaman can just cast a chain heal or let earth shield and riptide keep the tank alive in the meantime, taking that beating with unsurpassed stoicism. Go shamans!
I'll have to try getting into a low-level instance on one of my littlest alts soon just to see how well that works.
08/12/2009
It sucks to be melee
The other day I got a chance to participate in an Utgarde Keep run with my shaman - as melee dps, which was rather surprising considering that she can heal too and healers generally seem to be in higher demand than damage dealers.
As it happens, I was pretty terribad. I ended up at the bottom of the dps metres at the end of the run, caused a wipe by butt-pulling Prince Keleseth while we were still fighting the group of trash mobs in front of him, and consistently failed to drop my totems, which the other shaman in the group rightfully admonished me about.
Now, all of those issues are things that I'm sure could be improved with time and some practice, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to; the run also served as a stark reminder of the fact that I don't enjoy the role of being melee dps. (That's in group situations, mind you - while soloing I don't really care how I kill things, and melee classes generally seem to have the advantage of being less squishy, but in groups... ugh.)
After thinking about it a little, I think my main issue is one of control. When I play a healer or ranged dps, I stand at the back and have an excellent overview of everything that's going on, making it easy to pick out my targets and decide on which abilities to use. When I'm tanking, I'm lacking that, and it can be quite hard to take note of everything that's happening while you're surrounded by a bunch of mobs and half a dozen aoe spells are going off at the same time, but at least I'm in charge: I get to decide when the chaos begins, I determine the kill order, and even if I'm not entirely sure what's happening all the time, as long as I can keep the mobs focused on me, it's all good.
As melee dps, I just feel hopelessly confused and dependent on others all the time. I'm supposed to be at the front, but not at the very front, because I have to let the tank go first. Once he's pulled I have to make sure to quickly close the distance between myself and the mobs, but as soon as I, the tank or the mob itself takes a single step in a random direction I'll get "your target is out of range" messages and have to reposition myself. At the same time I'm of course supposed to keep things like kill order, threat, my dps rotation and nasty melee-range effects like whirlwinds in mind - and that while I'm right in the middle of a big aoe fest and can't make out a damn thing that's happening.
So, remind me: people prefer this over other roles... why exactly?
As it happens, I was pretty terribad. I ended up at the bottom of the dps metres at the end of the run, caused a wipe by butt-pulling Prince Keleseth while we were still fighting the group of trash mobs in front of him, and consistently failed to drop my totems, which the other shaman in the group rightfully admonished me about.
Now, all of those issues are things that I'm sure could be improved with time and some practice, but to be honest I'm not sure I want to; the run also served as a stark reminder of the fact that I don't enjoy the role of being melee dps. (That's in group situations, mind you - while soloing I don't really care how I kill things, and melee classes generally seem to have the advantage of being less squishy, but in groups... ugh.)
After thinking about it a little, I think my main issue is one of control. When I play a healer or ranged dps, I stand at the back and have an excellent overview of everything that's going on, making it easy to pick out my targets and decide on which abilities to use. When I'm tanking, I'm lacking that, and it can be quite hard to take note of everything that's happening while you're surrounded by a bunch of mobs and half a dozen aoe spells are going off at the same time, but at least I'm in charge: I get to decide when the chaos begins, I determine the kill order, and even if I'm not entirely sure what's happening all the time, as long as I can keep the mobs focused on me, it's all good.
As melee dps, I just feel hopelessly confused and dependent on others all the time. I'm supposed to be at the front, but not at the very front, because I have to let the tank go first. Once he's pulled I have to make sure to quickly close the distance between myself and the mobs, but as soon as I, the tank or the mob itself takes a single step in a random direction I'll get "your target is out of range" messages and have to reposition myself. At the same time I'm of course supposed to keep things like kill order, threat, my dps rotation and nasty melee-range effects like whirlwinds in mind - and that while I'm right in the middle of a big aoe fest and can't make out a damn thing that's happening.
So, remind me: people prefer this over other roles... why exactly?
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