A Spiderheart Miscellany, With Tree Moods

Yeah, it's another grab bag.

I've mentioned the kalu'ak several times lately. Here, as a reminder, is what they look like:

Part of WoW's success is its wonderful attention to detail. Take, for instance, the kalu'ak method of lighting their roads:

What's this? This is all the abominations in Slaughter Square, just outside Baron Rivendare's place, killed in one fell swoop. Admittedly I didn't do it solo; Spider had help from guildmates Linsey (druid, 57), Jaldorn (shaman, 62), and Desix (paladin, 60). Even so, was giddy excessive fun.

Druids in WoW get to change shape. They learn a growing variety of forms: bear for warrior-like combat, cat for stealth and rogue-like meleeing, a sea lion form for fast swimming, and so on. Restoration-specced druids, the ones who focus on healing talents, get a tree form, in which their healing power is boosted substantially. Here's Linsey as a tree:

Originally, tree form didn't offer much scope for animated action. But they've been adding to it. Check out a tree cheering, waving, crying, and sleeping:

And that's all for this time!

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.

Son of the Scarlet Monastery

I heard from several folks, here and in e-mail or IM, who didn't actually know you could pull off getting the whole Scarlet Cathedral with one pull. Well, yeah. This evening Spiderheart went back with Akaa and two friends of ours with new characters in the upper 20s, and did it repeatedly.

Spiderheart is currently frost-specced, so she has lots of spells to reduce damage, the chance of her being stunned, and like that. I turn on these things while charging straight at Morgaine, then spread plagues in all directions, and just sort of go to town. Akaa, being a holy paladin, keeps Spiderheart healed up and flying right.

Taking it easy, not letting the sounds of my own wheels drive me crazy

I was chatting with a friend yesterday afternoon, and they pointed out that I usually do best with stressful stuff by just setting it all aside for a while, giving it time to settle down or clearly not settle down or do whatever it's going to regardless of my efforts. They're right. Anything that has me fretting as much as hunter and guild stuff have recently is, whatever else may be said of it, not working as a game.

While I was thinking over that, I read a typically smart post by my friend Adam, "Retro Raiding and the Calm Casual". The upshot of this particular post is that accepting his position well behind the cutting edge and not worrying about it has opened up a lot of fun for him. He's taken his druid Leafshine into Zul'Aman, which was still a very tough nut for his guild to crack pre-Lich King, and done some other retro-raiding sightseeing, and like that. Go see the details for yourself, if you wish; what matters here is that he feels at liberty now to move as he wishes, rather than according to any external timetable like that created by raiding needs.

That's resonating very deeply with me today.

I loved being among the first in Archon to 80, as I posted about at the time. Then guild bickering stole away a lot (though not all) of that pleasure, and chronic insomnia and health crud has kept me rattled and disoriented. One of the great pleasures, I've identified, in playing Spiderheart is that nobody I'm playing with cares in the slightest what pace of progress I set. My friends are happy when I'm happy, and enjoy teaming up when it's appropriate, and there just aren't egos or competition at stake. And I'm freed of the fun-sapping side of the impulse to advance because I can't be in the first wave with any of my alts—not without a time machine, at least, and I have none.

I've been playing this way this week already, but hadn't quite so consciously formulated it as an actual goal until today. So:

• Tivara is on the shelf for the moment, because I'm bothered by hunter stuff. I will let the theorycrafters sort out post-3.0.8 options and then see how I feel.

• Archon in on the shelf for now, because even where I feel I've genuinely mended fences, I can't stop the stuff rattling around unpleasantly in parts of my mind where memory does not care to pay attention to current judgments.

• Spiderheart goes front and center for now, because death knights have nearly everything I love about warriors, plus magic that doesn't require me to hassle mana, plus that great gothic ambience. Speaking of which:

That's Spiderheart in the middle, with a lich's cackling head over hers to show she's using the Lichborne talent to improve her defense and intimidate bystanders. The floor is angry red and the people are dark purple because Death & Decay is rotting the bodies and burning the souls out of everyone in the vicinity—that's what all those 155-hp ticks are from. Commander Mograine is face down on the floor facing her, just to her left; Whitemane's also on the floor back by the altar, hard to see in this picture.

It wasn't a single-pull clear of the Cathedral. I tried that and got close, but didn't quite make it. A level or few more, though, and it'll work.

• I'm thinking about a dual-gathering alt to support Spider financially; enchanting + tailoring is a very handy combo, but not cheap. I might do a night elf druid, which I've been vaguely talking about forever, or something else. We'll see. Something with stealth would be nice, and I'm not worried about leveling fast, given how lucrative mining is right from the outset.

I'm not committing myself in the long term to any general shift of priorities. This is what I'm doing right now to accommodate physical and mental stresses, mostly from illness and its side effects. This seems fun-maximizing right now, and there'll be time to consider what else might be fun right then when my situation changes, as inevitably well.

Now if you'll excuse me, Spiderheart has an appointment with mana-hogging members of the blue dragonflight. She doesn't touch the stuff herself, but allies do, and besides, it's just rude....