Sunshine (OK, Torchlight) On My Shoulders

I really, really like the look of the Tundra Pauldrons:

This is right about dead center for my tastes in medieval-ish fantasy armoring. It's not realistic. (Of course, neither is night elf physiology, and I make no secret of the fact that I do like playing implausibly thin characters. My escapism, let me share my thoughts.) But it conveys—to me, at least—a dramatic appropriateness. Yes, this is the sort of thing that the peoples of cold, undead-haunted lands should make to defend themselves, and it takes a hero with strength and experience to make good use of what she's taken from her fallen enemies' persons and treasure chambers.

Innovative? Nope. Classic and entertaining? Yup.

A Spiderheart Miscellany

I've got posts in progress, including some notes on my first experience with death knight tanking. (Short form: wow, went great; death knight tanking is more fun for me than warrior tanking.) Unfortunately I've also got the Martian death flu again. So for the moment, here's a grab bag of screenshots.

The war of chickens! Akaa has the pet chicken you can earn with some amusing effort in Westfall; Spider's got the mechanical chicken that's a token of thanks from the gnome whose wandering robots one rescues in Tanaris, Feralas, and the Hinterlands. Unfortunately, no showdown of nature versus art seems impending:

I got some pictures of Tivara and the Kalu'aks' mighty turtle ferries a while back, but happened on this angle just the other day, as Spider was returning from a quest on the sea floor in the Dragonblight:

Sean, I have not forgotten the World in WoW series, I've just been sick, busy, or sick and busy so much. But it is coming, because I'd like to write a bit about the overall situation as far as gods and titans goes so as to have a proper context for writing about Dragonblight questing. It involves the dragonflights a lot, and the more one knows of the lore, the more fun they are. In the meantime, here's a fun moment. Quests in Darkshore and the Wetlands have Alliance characters helping out at dwarf-run excavations and gathering up pieces of fossils and relics. Then one puts them together, and a manifestation of the titans shows up to tell everyone to knock it off and get the hell off the titans' lawn:

The above moment came about because I thought it would be fun to build up Spider's reputation with lots of people. So does the one below. WoW players have pretty well all seen this, but for those of you who use me as your surrogate...

Uldaman is another dwarvish dig site, in the Badlands region in the center of the Eastern Kingdoms. As with several other such sites, the Ironforge dwarves exploring it ran into troggs from below and hostile Dark Iron dwarves from above, and the quests for Alliance characters involve a lot of "please help finish this bit of exploration" requests. There's a spot where the adventurers put together a broken staff and use it to open up a magically sealed chamber, and it is a good swipe:

As noted previously, the death knights are undead, just now free-souled rather than bound to the Lich King. So they have a lot of cool abilities. A friend pointed out to me recently that I'm seldom so happy in WoW play than when I can transgress a normal limit on characters' interactions with the world. Take the Path of Frost, which lets characters and their party mates walk, run, and even ride across water. Here's Spider escorting a guildmate of level 20 or so from Menethil Harbor to Southshore, bypassing the higher level critters of the Arathi Highlands:

This is the best shot I've yet gotten of the Acherus Deathcharger, death knights' standard mount. The skin peeling back to reveal glowing bones first appeared on warlocks' dreadsteeds, and I've not yet gotten tired of it:

Dating services! Who knew that one would have to provide dating services? So here's the story. The kalu'ak (the walrus people seen in some previous posts) have an ongoing concern for the health of the ecosystem they live in. Sensible folks. There's a community of sea lions on islands off the Howling Fjord's west coast, with bulls on the south side of a strait and cows to the north, and the community's bull leader dead at the hands of rampaging buccaneers. Now the bulls are muddled and don't know how to get to the cows. There's a daily quest to gather up enough of their favorite fish to lure a bull across the strait. And when it works? Twue wuv!

Kalu'ak elsewhere, in the Dragonblight, are engaged in a pitched struggle with the wolverine-like wolvar. It's an interesting situation. The kalu'ak leader frankly blames the Horde and Alliance for the mess, their expanding settlements pressing the wolvar into crowded conditions that make them more irritable and violence. And the kalu'ak elders think the wolvar are as fundamentally entitled to good lives on the land as themselves. So there's a daily quest to round up wolvar pups so that they won't get slaughtered in the battles—the elders of the kalu'ak realize the risks of going too far in battle and wish to have the wolvar's future in hand before any grand struggle.

Wolvar pups are really, really cute. You can see Spider's shoulder at right for a sense of scale:

And finally, some more heroism. There's an Alliance settlement at Wintergarde, on the eastern side of the Dragonblight. Recently the Scourge started hitting it with a very great deal of force, directed from the floating necropolis of Naxxramas. I'll have more to say and show about that pleasingly epic set of adventures later. This is just a great moment from one of them, using a griffon supplied by the soldiers of Wintergarde Keep to pull out trapped villagers from among the incoming hordes of undead:

Hoping to do more substantial posting this week, as I de-stress on various fronts. Enjoy, in the meantime!

You know how you can tell you weren't just being a drama queen?

When one of the developers apologizes for having nerfed Beast Mastery too far, and promises adjustments between now and the release of the next raid content.

I may still be overreacting in some ways, but it's nice to have the vindication.

For now, not a hunter or a raiding blog

It's a very good thing that I have some characters I like to play and some people I like to play with, because the more I look at the informed folks' experiences with hunters after the 3.0.8 patch, the more it looks like what I was doing with Tivara simply isn't viable anymore.

First, links.

• Big Red Kitty with early data on Survival/Beast Mastery comparison
• Big Red Kitty with follow-up
• Aspect of the Hare on Marksmanship experience
• Amava Knows Aggro on post-patch Beast Mastery experience
• Amava Knows Aggro on early Survival experience

And it goes and goes like that. I'm not bothering with Elitist Jerks links, since I find their forum culture toxic. Out in that portion of the real world which includes people playing and writing in ways I find interesting, there's a genuine consensus: Beast Mastery will no longer allow a raiding hunter to do an impressive amount of damage. Raiding is very much a game of parts, in which each participant needs to do the handful of things they do particular well, and do them reliably, so that the whole is an assemblage of really good parts. For hunters, that's putting out a lot of damage in short order.

{Edit and Update: Pike, of Aspect of the Hare, says in comments: "At this point I have respec'd to Beast Mastery, for me the DPS gain from going to MM was very minimal. Though MM was fun because you had to press a bunch of buttons, but in the end it got too distracting." So that's one voice back in the BM direction. Thank you for commenting, Pike, much appreciated.}

Unfortunately, the options for hunters doing that now all look really unappealing to me.

Marksmanship (and, to a lesser degree, Survival) specs rely more on shot rotation macro. For those of you playing along at home, that's a macro assigned to a key or button that, when pressed or triggered repeatedly, fires off a sequence of shots arranged so that cooldown times and synergistic effects add up to the biggest bang for the buck. Abstracting it out, a shot rotation macro might fire in turn special shot A, special shot B, special shot C, A again now that it's cooled down and ready for use again, B, B again, C now that it's cooled down, and then start the sequence over with A again. Comics fans can think of this as playing Silver Age Green Arrow.

The thing is, I don't like that kind of macro use. There are macros I like and use, to combine two or maybe three actions into one, or to assign the target of a spell based on the circumstances of the fight. (Whenever I play a healer, all my character's healing spells get a stock treatment: cast this heal on the target if it's friendly, on the target's target if the target is hostile, and on my character if I don't actually have a target right now.) The more complex ones feel to me like I'm playing at being a programmer in the days of time sharing and batch jobs rather than playing at being a character in a fantasy world—the degree of detachment from play bugs me. I'm just not tuned in if I'm not getting to make some choices in play, even at the cost of some efficiency. When it takes that much automation to do the job well, the job isn't worth doing, for me.

Survival has a different problem, in that its distinctive combinations of talents call for a fair degree of mobility in the midst of fights. I don't do mobility well. I can't reliably manage a bunch of the mouse-movement-and-shooting combos at all. My reflexes got set in an earlier videogaming day and have only decayed since then, and after a very long futile struggle to assimilate this stuff, I admitted that I was getting nowhere and that I should find my fun playing what I can do in my keyboard-centric sort of way. It's why, for instance, the Combat tree for rogues was such a delight for me: I didn't have to keep trying to stay behind targets all the time. Subtlety is, to my taste, a much cooler rogue tree and full of sneaking nastiness I love, but Combat's what I could actually take to a fight. Well, Survival's trap-dancing high-maneuverability approach is another one of those things I can't make work. I like the idea, and I love to watch a good Survival hunter in play. I just can't do it.

So there I am.

It's always possible I could hassle out something that wouldn't be too uncomfortable for me and not too unproductive for raiding. But...I'm not motivated to play that kind of compromise-hunting game right now. So until I see some reliable signs that hunter approaches that I actively like will work again, Tivara will be in raid retirement.

At the moment, as recent posts have indicated, I'm putting most time into my night elf death knight, Spiderheart. I think I'm going to start up a new alt or two to take advantage of Lunar Festival goodies, and let that do it for now. In a separate post I will comment on features of death knights that are making them remarkably rewarding for me. Spider's coming up on level 72 and my gang's really, really not rushing to endgame since we are confident that opportunities will be there when we get there. Lots of side questing, working on reputations, and stuff like that. When will I next raid? Dunno, to be honest. Sometime in February, I'd guess, but I have no idea, nor any urge to hazard a guess, not when the present moment is working so well with this character.

This concludes the whining portion of today's programming.

In the wake of the patch, scattered thoughts

• Persistent bugs and why I'm bugged. I know enough about large project management to know that there's no simple fungibility of effort and assets, no way to just say, "Bob, stop working on the next arena graphics and go fix the Cower problem." I also know that it's folly to commit to public dates when you're trying to fix something that could be making weird cascading problems, as when the cross-continent boats were making servers crash; I'm quite willing to believe that some bugs persist because they are genuinely hard to fix.

But I still wish there were some public discussion on Blizzard's part, at least acknowledging the existence of the persistent bugs and talking a little about what the fixes will involve. Blizzard needs someone to be the Speaker to Howling Mobs on matters like this, and really could afford to hire that someone.

In the wee hours this morning, I decided that I'm not being altogether irrational about this, for a simple reason: synergy. Abilities, talents, gear, and all the rest are supposed to interact—that's what drives tactical and strategic planning in World of Warcraft. So when one part is persistently out of whack, there's reason to worry about that throwing off anything interacting with it. Bad data's infectious, Dad used to say.

Yeah, I know I keep picking at this. I still don't feel entirely confident I've framed my deepest underlying concerns properly, either in my own mind or out here in text.

• The fun of not losing things. I've touched on this one before, I know: I hate it when I no longer get to use things that have been handy, and the irrelevancy of trapping at the high end is an ongoing disappointment. So far, at least—up to level 68, where she is now—I haven't had to do that with Spiderheart and her death knight abilities. Something new comes into the mix every few levels, most recently the very handy Anti-Magic Shell, but nothing falls out of use. I don't mind retiring an old spell or ability in favor of a more comprehensive one, like paladins going from separate spells to cleanse disease and cure poison to one that does both. But it's a disappointment to just have something no longer matter.

• Teamwork. A paladin and a death knight do not form an unstoppable combo. However, anyone wishing to stop them had better be prepared to work pretty hard at it.

Some Raiding Dissatisfaction

I find that so far, I'm really enjoying the questing and instancing more than the raiding in Lich King. Specifically:

• Naxxramas is very obviously a place made to support a lot more mobs than it now has, and the huge emptiness is oddly disconcerting after a while. I'm not sure what I'd suggest filling up some of the empty space with, but something would be good.

• Onyxia's Lair was and is a one-boss event, with 3-4 "trash" mobs to deal with before her. I liked that and still do. But I don't like quite so many other one-boss raids showing up. I find that it takes me a little while to get fully warmed up and engaged in a raid, so that I'm seldom at my best when it comes to Archavon or Obsidian Sanctum.

• Yesterday I took Spiderheart with friends on achievement-driven runs to Ahn'Qiraj 20 (complete clear), AQ40 (partial), and Blackwing Lair (complete), and it really brought home how far tactics have been stripped out. I certainly don't miss all of the fiddly bits. But I do miss engaging off-tanking, tanking in which AOE attacks are not the obviously best choice pretty much all the time, and like that.

I've read that the developers are intending to add more complexity in the big fights in Ulduar. I hope it works out!

Picture(s) of the Day: A Titan in the Wild

The Dragonblight is home to the great gathering of dagons, the Wyrmrest Temple. And north of the temple is a road that runs into the heart of Northrend. It's patrolled day and night, by this guy. This is what it's like to have mythology at arm's reach.

Neither Tivara or I yet know what curse he's bearing, but I'm sure we'll find out in due season.

Look! Up in the Sky!

On days when I don't have anything else burning up the weblog, I'm gonna at least post a picture of the day. This is one of those...

Here's Tivara in Icecrown, Arthas' home turf. She's drawing in close on Orgrim's Hammer, the Horde base of military operations in the zone:

I loves me this game sometimes.

Some Catching Up: DEHTA

Connectivity failures keep me from playing tonight; I might as well work through some of the picture archive. You'll notice from Tivara's look and gear that this was some weeks back. This stuff really has been piling up.

DEHTA

Back in original WoW, characters at about level 30 could venture into the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale. They would encounter warring tribes of trolls (some with undead minions), pirates, and various other challenges, and also dwarvish big game hunter Hemet Nesingwary. He and his hunting party have the character kill 10 of this and 10 of that, working their way up to the named elite individuals who dominate various animal packs—the tiger Sin'dall, the raptor Tethis, and so on. Most folks I know did them most of the time because it was good experience, and handy rewards for some classes.

Come the Burning Crusade he turned up in Nagrand, leaving his son in charge of the camp back in Azeroth. Same setup, but this time 30 of this and 30 of that, and accompanying jokes among players about how this was going to rival Draenor's shattering for population catastrophe.

Yes, he's in Northrend now. But before travelers like Tivara have a chance to cross his path in the Sholazar Basin, they spend some time in the Borean Tundra, and they run into these folks:

Lathorius is here leading Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals. They have a statue of Nesingwary in the habitat nature intended for him, burning in the Twisted Nether.

Quests for DEHTA are fun and varied. You put down deranged assistant hunters, destroy their traps, and also rescue trapped baby mammoths:

When freed, each one rears up and trumpets some appreciation, which feels remarkably good:

Finally you get to hunt down and dispose of Nesingwary's crazy agents in the Borean Tundra, complete with mammoth riding to trample some of them. There's humor in this, of course, but not a lot of mockery—the victims of the hunt are shown as genuinely suffering, the druids trying to help them seriously focused on doing what good they can and keeping others from doing more harm.

When I first read about these quests, I dread yet another oh-so-clever fannish bashing of anyone so stupid as to actually care about the well-being of animals. I got something a lot better than that, and am happy.

More Loot Boasting

Sorry for the ongoing neglect; it's stomach trouble time here at Chez Mri. But I am getting in some play and I'm getting some goodies.

Tivara now has the Accursed Bow of the Elite, thanks to our first guild victory over Instructor Razuvious in Naxxramas. Yes. This bow's focal point is a demonic skull with glowing eyes and an impaling claw coming out the top of its head. Where did my old hard rock albums get to, anyway *rummage*...

And she made the Nerubian Reinforced Quiver, thanks to getting honored with the Ebon Blade after a bunch of fun quests in Icerown. It's got 28 slots for arrows, which is absolutely wonderful when doing a run of heroic instances or raiding, and it nicely keeps up that "I am being possessed by an album cover of the late '70s" vibe:

And yes, that's Sagarmatha in Naxxramas. He hit level 80 and gets to come join the fun. :)

What Has Tivara Got? (Flying Dept.)

She's got a red drake from the appreciative Wyrmrest Accord, with whom she's now exalted:

I make absolutely no bones about the extent to which this is an occasion for pure glee for me. Flying around on a dragon is such an iconic sort of thing. I never stuck at one character long enough to do the long grind required for the cool mounts in Burning Crusade, and felt bugged by my failure that regard. This is yet another milestone in my march to do this time the things I did not last time.

And it's so cool.

Death Knight, Part 4

And here I am again, tidying up some loose ends of posting.

• Death Knight, Part 3
• Death Knight, Part 2
• Death Knight, Part 1

All right, to recapitulate: the novice death knight is now free of the Lich King's control and part of the new-found undead resistance effort calling itself the Ebon Blade. One last thing remains: to take a letter from Tirion Fordring, the paladin who forced Arthas to flee, introducing the bearer and the Ebon Blade to the leader of one's faction - Thrall for the Horde, Varian Wrynn for the Alliance. I'll get a picture of the Alliance-side version sometime. For now, here's what happens when a newly freed death knight enters Orgrimmar and makes his way to Thrall's throne room:

And now the death knight is at liberty. What comes next? Oh, I'll cover that in due season. :)

Ding!

Level 80 spoken here. :)

Loque'hanak? Yes We Can

Loque'hanak the Spirit Beast is not the rarest tamable beast in the game at the moment, but she is unique in her own way. She's the only member of the spirit beast family in play right now, tamable or otherwise. She's...well, you can see her looks, and she's got the family ability to cast Spirit Strikes. These hit for arcane damage right away, and then the same amount again 10 seconds later. (This is going to take some care, if I take her instancing, to avoid messing up crowd control.)

Special thanks to Sean Riley of Blogatelle for suggesting the name Ørlög, meaning "primal law", and the accompanying quote "To understand Ørlög is to understand the threads of wyrd." That's good for a spirit beast, I'm thinking.

Death Knight, Part 3

• Death Knight, Part 1
• Death Knight, Part 2

Last time, I left off with Cleitus surveying the changed landscape of Havenshire. New commanders enter into the picture now (along with another look at that falling-to-the-Scourge taint in earth and sky)...

...including one familiar to many WoW players, Baron Rivendare, usually seen in his stronghold at the end of the undead wing of Stratholme:

It turns out that I'm regrettably short on screenshots for many of the specific quests that follow. But then they're more interesting to play than might show in pictures, too: they take the death knight against various opponents in the same general context. There's the slaughter of any available defenders and citizens within New Avalon's walls, then the unraveling of some mysteries about what the Scarlet Crusaders are up to. It emerges piece by piece that the leaders and select followers are heading off on an unknown mission. The death knight has to torture information out of Scarlet troops, then get shipping records to clarify what's going on, and finally go in disguise to get documents from the general on the spot, so as to learn that the leaders are following a vision given to General Abbendis to the then-still-mysterious lands of Northrend.

Along the way, the death knight is also pushed to demonstrate their allegiance to the Lich king and the Scourge, including executing prisoners, one of whom has some significance for the death knight. This is the night elf version, which is more poignant than the blood elf one, though the overall thrust is the same:

This is Cleitus in disguise so as to go get the General's documents. It's a good thing that the Scarlets are so zelaous that they will just assume that the glowing eyes and bloody runeforged sword are, er, tokens of holiness or something. The Scarlet Crusade is better at the courage thing than the clue thing.

The Scarlet scheme revealed, Cleitus returns to the Ebon Hold once more to deliver the news and find out what's next. The third wave brings the end to New Avalon. The Light King is now down at ground level to direct the assault:

The weapon of choice for this last wave is the undead wyrm. The death knight gets to rain down fire from above:

In terms of mechanics, the dragon works much like the cannon (and therefore like other vehicles, including trucks ("It flies like a truck." "Fine. What is a truck?")), with the death knight tilting and panning the dragon to aim its fiery breath:

The defenders aren't helpless. They have large ballistas, squads of riflemen, and mages all doing their best. It's quite a challenge.

But the outcome is never really in doubt. The defenders slain, Scourge troops move in for the slaughter, and the Lich King dispatches the death knights on hand to help with an assault on Light's Hope Chapel, a nearby stronghold for both the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn. It's an eclectic force, too, with some of the very largest things I've yet seen in the game:

As Mograine gives the word to begin the assault, many, many, many ghouls pull themselves out of the ground, wave after wave of them:

The ensuing fight is a glorious rumble. At least, it is until the Scourge's forces find themselves unable to advance, thanks to one man:

Cleitus had no idea who this guy was, but I do. He's one of the two main characters in Chris Metzen's short novel Of Blood and Honor. In that story, set after the collapse of the Horde and the closing of the Dark Portal at the end of the Second War, paladin Tirion spares the life of elderly orc Eitrigg, who in turn saves him from the emerging Scarlet Crusade's kill-them-all zeal. Eitrigg is in WoW time the senior advisor to Horde leader Thrall and giver of good counsel at some key moments. Tirion, on the other hand, appears in WoW in a quiet exile in the middle of the Plaguelands, where he sets characters on a remarkable quest chain I'll write up another time. It ends with Tirion paying a large tragic price for having stood by a long time and vowing to re-make the collapsed Order of the Silver Hand.

Now he's here, having brought together members of the Argent Dawn and the Scarlet Crusade into a new organization, the Argent Crusade. And he's got access to the power of something hidden beneath the chapel, strong enough to confront Mograine with a vision of himself as he was as a boy, yearning to fight the undead along with his father. Mograine realizes that he doesn't matter to the Lich King any more than, say, the victims of New Avalon, and gets more than a little annoyed. At this point, enter the Lich King himself to deliver a smackdown on Tirion:

To everyone's surprise, except perhaps Tirion's, it doesn't work. The death knights present now turn on the Lich King, since being disposable trash isn't really what they were after. The Lich King flees without admitting that that's what he's doing, and Tirion speaks once again, telling those who remain that even now there's a chance for them to do their world some good.

But first there'll be some cleanup to do, which I'll cover in the fourth and last part of this.

Death Knight, Part 2

• Death Knight, Part 1

First, a quick supplement to the first post. The gryphon seen more clearly:

Death knights get distinctive mounts. First Cleitus had to steal a horse from the Scarlet Crusade's corral...

...then cross into the shadowlands to defeat one of the dark lords who transform living horses into things that can withstand the undead, demons, and their environments...

...and finally, having impressed the master horseman, could summon his own deathcharger, as seen here against the Ebon Hold:

The first phase of the assault is straightforward. Death knights slaughter defenders of Havenshire, the farms outside New Avalon proper, and Havenshire citizens, and gather up the magical arrows shot by the skeletons seen previously. The interesting thing here is that it's straightforwardly bad deeds—the citizens try to flee, beg for mercy, the whole deal. There is no question but that at this point, Cleitus and his comrades are completely on the wrong side.

"Pulling" is MMO jargon for anything a player has their character do to make one or more enemies c'mon over here for a fight. It can be an arrow or gunshot, or a spell, or a shouted taunt, or any of a number of things. Death knights have a very literal pull in the spell Death Grip:

It yanks the victim through the air to land right in front of the death knight. There may be a day when I grow tired of it, but that day is for sure not this day.

Then comes gathering reinforcements, Scourge style. Cleitus got a poison gas dispenser and directions to a nearby mine. Sometimes the gas just kills a living subject and unleashes a vengeful ghost, but sometimes it makes obedient ghouls, and at the end of successful questing, every death knight has a coterie:

The ghoul master at the Scourge base breaks them down into parts for later use while the death knight gets on with other chores. Specifically, it's time for some mass destruction. This was my introduction to the wonderful world of large weapons in the Lich King era. Cleitus infiltrated a Scarlet Crusade dock...

...seized control of an available cannon, and went to work:

Scarlet soldiers swarm up to make him stop, of course, but the cannon turns out to have an electrical-discharge defense to help repel boarders:

A hundred soldiers gunned down and it's time for Cleitus to leave, with the last blue sky Havenshire will ever see:

These are the trainers waiting for him and his comrades back up in Ebon Hold. Each specializes in one of the three talent trees available to death knights. The lich Amal'thazad, master of cold:

The necromancer Lord Thorval, master of blood:

The blood knight Lady Alistra, mistress of the unholy:

When Cleitus returned to the ground, the old camp lay largely abandoned. Remaining soldiers pointed him to a new forward base, and he saw that Havenshire had been conquered, the front line now at New Avalon itself:

This is the phasing I've written about before. As I played, I shared the changed space with all the other players who'd started characters at about the same time—within a span of a few hours, I gather, and so long as we were doing the same set of quests. Those who finished them up went on to phase 3 just as we'd all left phase 1 and those working on it behind, when our characters carried reports of early victories back up to Ebon Hold.

It's a wonderful addition to the WoW arsenal, and I'm very grateful to the other MMOs who showed it could be done, and done well.

To be continued, of course.