Spiderheart got her first ever look at Northrend this morning. She's seen city-sized demons in combat, peered over the edges of a shattered world, died, been a plaything of the Lich King, regained her freedom, rejoined the society of the living as a perpetual outsider, become an exalted ally of half the members of the Alliance, and gone forth in search of her former master. As Treat Williams put it so well in Deep Rising...
"Now what?"
• 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.
This may be helpful to someone of any class, not hunters.
I've been doing the rep grind a lot this week with Spiderheart as I wait for Akaa to close the last few levels so that we can hit Northrend together, and because Akaa (as noted in a previous post) is way ahead of Spider there and gosh darn it I want funky mounts too. Now, I'd known in a vague sort of way that Wowhead will let you look at data collections, but never checked its rep listings.
Wow.
Take the one for Exodar reputation, which I've been on most lately. It shows all the quests that give Exodar reputation, which I wanted. But it also shows all the quests that give overall Alliance reputation, since that's added to all the groups within the overall category. With these reminders in hand, I could and did spend a few hours in Alterac Valley battlegrounds and save myself 30-odd stacks of runecloth turned in to the cloth quartermaster in the Exodar.
Gotta like that. I'll certainly be making more use of this in the future.
Each playable race in WoW has its own mount: elephant-like elekks for the draenei, tigers for night elves, horses for humans, mechanical ostrich-like things called mechanostriders for the gnomes; massive rhino-like kodo for the tauren, raptors for trolls, living running birds called hawkstriders for blood elves, worgs for orcs, skeletal undead mounts for the undead Forsaken. It's always been the case that some mounts are available to others but not all, with constraints based on size. Lots of races can use tigers and horses, but only dwarves can join gnomes on mechanostriders.
Until today, that is.
In patch 3.0.8, the racial limits on mounts were removed. Now, it's still not super-easy to get another race's mount, because your character has to have a very high reputation with them. Not everyone wants to take the time to do the quests and gathering this requires. My friend who plays Tivara's questing partner Nyo, on the other hand, likes that sort of thing a lot, and uses it to break up the routine of leveling up. Her draenei paladin Akaa is indeed exalted with all five Alliance races, giving her the Ambassador title, and letting her be the first non-gnome I saw on a mechanostrider:
One of the things I most like about playing on Earthen Ring's Alliance side is that it has the best-developed network of cross-guild contacts for pickup events I've seen anywhere in WoW. Yesterday I took advantage of it to join in some spur-of-the-moment visits to old raid instances. Here are pictures from Ahn'Qiraj.
Knowing that I have non-WoW-playing readers, here's the scene...
Kalimdor is the western continent on Azeroth, and not nearly so extensively settled as the Eastern Kingdoms. There's more room for stuff to be lurking hither and yon. At the south end of the Barrens there's a couple hives of mysterious bug-like creatures identified as silithids. They're a good challenge for characters of level 18-20 or so. Bigger, more complicated hives turn up in more zones characters go to in the 20s through upper 40s or low 50s: in the Shimmering Flats desert part of Thousand Needles, deep in the tropical forests of Feralas, and in the titan-preserved ancient wilderness inside Un'Goro Crater. Clues come together.
Back in the ancient days, one of the elder gods, C'thun, had its lair in the southwest corner of Kalimdor, in what was then lush forest. One of the titans fought it to the mutual death, or so it seemed. Alas, it's hard to get rid of elder gods. C'thun made avatars of itself in the Qiraji, an other-dimensional race of semi-humanoid insect creatures, and used them to direct an army of silithids. The Barrens silithids are a few feet long and a couple feet high; the ones used in the invasion of what's now called Silithus were (and are) huge. A thousand years ago their armies built up a fortress at the south end of the zone where C'thun fell, and called it Ahn'Qiraj. From there they headed north, sweeping everything ahead of them until an alliance of all the sentient races on Kalimdor at the time turned them back. The gates were sealed up, a watch set, and a thousand years passed.
One of the big, big events in the tail end of "vanilla WoW", as we hip veterans call the time before release of the first expansion back, was the return of the silithids and Qiraji in force. A fascinating spread of cross-faction quests and challenges culminated in the re-opening of the gates of Ahn'Qiraj to let adventurers take on the newly reinvigorated challenges behind. The ruins of Ahn'Qiraj is a 20-person raid instance, the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, with C'thun waiting in its depths, a raid for 40 people.
In roleplaying terms, this was a special bit of fun for me. Spiderheart had some of her best moments as tank and off-tank in AQ20 (the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, that is) but never got past the first boss in AQ40 (the Temple). Then she went off to Outland, and died, and came back undead, and is now carving a new place for herself. This was a chance to revisit old glories and help put a spoke in the wheels of the silithid effort to make a fresh comeback while everyone's busy with things through the Dark Portal and up in Northrend.
This is a good sample of Silithus scenery, with one of the several hives that dot the wasteland:
The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, seen on the approach:
The courtyard behind them, looking back the way Spiderheart came in. showing the funky silithid mix of Egyptian-ish elements and gratuitous magic like floating spires:
Inside the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, with some of the Alien-esque massive chitin and other extrusions on display:
Here we are putting the boot in on General Rajaxx, who led the big fight a thousand years back, and ripped apart the only son of night elf Archdruid Staghelm along the way:
I mentioned earlier about the big bugs. Here's a typical pack of them, in the process of being squished by us. Overhead there's a druid's thunder cloud with lightning zorching down on the left. On the ground, at least two death knights' Death & Decay area-effect cursing and a paladin's Consecrate holy damage spell compete for pixels. Whole lotta squishin' goin' on:
AQ has another of my very favorite monsters, a race straight out of Babylonian carvings. This is their leader, Moam:
And then there are the Anubisaths. Here's one now, walking somewhat like an Egyptian:
And here it is up close and personal:
Ossirian the Unscarred is the commander of all the forces in the ruins. Here he is in mid-fight...
...and at its conclusion:
And that's about enough pictures for one post, so I'll cover AQ40 and BWL later.
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!
This is Sartharian of the Obsidian Sanctum (picture swiped from Wowwiki):
This is a fairly typical diagram from a raid strategy page (also from Wowwiki), showing how the main tank (green dot) is to position Sartharion (yellow ellipse) and where the meleers (purple dots) and ranged damage-dealers and healers (blue dots) should stand when lava waves (orange bars) come in from the left:
With that in mind...
Go look at this guide to the Sartharion fight.
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