So, I've been pretty busy with not only playing wow's patch 4.3 as well as SWTOR early access and now through the launch, but of course with non-gaming related holiday things as well.
I've been pretty happy with patch 4.3 in spite of the raid finder and how I feel about it - I still feel obligated to participate in it as there are upgrades to be had, and alts to be geared. However, I've been scheming about what to do once I've gotten the gear I need; when I'm just going for the badges or whatever. I'm thinking I should use my rolls as tool for good - because I'm sick of seeing loot going to lazy/bad players. So, here's my plan: when I no longer need loot but am given the choice of rolling need, I shall henceforth roll need on said items and distribute anything I win based on who I think deserves the loot. It's like vigilante loot justice. It doesn't have to go to anyone I know, but I want to reward people who actually put forth effort in raid finder groups. Maybe they'll be encouraged to do likewise and together we can improve the system.
As for "real" raiding, my guild is 1 of 8 heroic, and although we've made a few heroic pulls on the next few bosses, progression doesn't look promising. I know it's not the popular thing to say and I'll probably take a lot of shit from my guildies for sayin it, but I just think the shit is too hard. I'm not sayin it should be easier, I understand why it is the way it is, who it's really made for, the prestige that comes with gated content, etc., but I can't help but wish for a difficulty somewhere between normal and heroic.... like say, nerfed heroics?
Let me throw this metaphor at you: In terms of difficulty, raid finder is like driving down-hill on a straight road; you can just coast and as long as you don't do anything incredibly stupid, you'll be fine. Normal mode is like driving along a flat straight road with a few curves at the end. You'll need to keep your foot on the gas and pay attention to the road, but once you've made the trip once or twice, you get used to it. Finally, heroic mode is like trying to drive through a series of walls of increasing thickness. We went through one wall, and it felt great. I won't deny that, but that's basically where we're at. We've driven into the next 3 walls and found they're not really cracking for us yet, and all we can hope for now is that maybe getting more gear (and tuning up the car so to speak) will make the difference. And if it doesn't? We're just going to have to wait for the nerfs (which i guess would be like somebody drilling a series of holes in all the walls to weaken them) but we have no idea when those will come. It could be a few weeks, a few months, or not at all.
Lots of people I know bitch about post-nerf heroic content. Because the walls they've been throwing themselves against will have been weakened and can now be cracked in a few hours of attempts. They feel robbed of the REAL heroic difficulty. However, to me, that's the ideal situation. So what if everything has 10% less health and deals 10% less damage. It means you don't need the best healers or DPS in the world, but the mechanics generally don't change and as long as there's new fight mechanics to learn, it's not like it will be some kind of raid-finder handout. I mean, it's still more difficult than normal, and that's all I'm really looking for.
Blazing Drake
For those of you who don't know already, I am a huge mount-whore. I do pretty much anything I can to get as many mounts as possible. My newest mount is a rare drop from the Madness of Deathwing (final raid boss in the Dragon Soul). A guildie of mine, Gettokiwi, actually won the roll and gave it to me. And I can't stress this enough, but that's the most generous thing I've ever seen since I've been playing this game. I am very very thankful to him.
This is my 169th mount! And since I know there will be doubters, here's the proof.
This is my 169th mount! And since I know there will be doubters, here's the proof.
The Dragon Soul and Raid Finder
Well, I've been really busy trying to get the most out of Patch 4.3 - with the Dragon Soul and the Darkmoon Faire taking up a bit more time than I'd anticipated. Today I just want to touch on the Raid Finder and Dragon Soul raid dungeon in general.
Having now cleared the Dragon Soul raid on normal, and done some of it on the new Raid Finder difficulty, I feel comfortable is saying it seemed a bit under-tuned. The Raid Finder, in particular, is a joke, and I don't think it's introduction is really a good thing for the game. Just following the blue-tracker (a tool that highlights Blizzard's post on their forums) on mmo-champion, I've seen a few posts with players absolutely gushing about how much they love the Raid Finder and how they'll never go back to normal. I think these people are deluded. The Raid Finder isn't difficult in the slightest, but it's working as intended. It's tuned to be so easy as to allow a group of random players succeed. Blizzard is basically tearing down a wall that seperated players who put forth a minimal effort - in terms of gameplay, teamwork, gear, and use of consumables - from those that aren't willing to do so. Going in to a Raid Finder raid and being successful is the equivalent of giving every child on the peewee football team a trophy at the end of the season. Players are rewarded just for showing up - just for participating. The loot is a step down from the quality dropped in normal raids, but it's still too generous. I'm not saying a Raid Finder type system is inherently flawed, but I would rather have seen a system that stayed true to the raid experience in terms of the effort required. Lazy players who queue up and under-perform or can't follow a simple strategy shouldn't be rewarded with success. Their take-away should be "I really need to improve if I want to clear this content" instead of "Now I can finally get all the gear and see all the content I'm entitled to."
As for the normal mode content, and the design on the raid in general, it seemed rather bland up until the Spine of Deathwing encounter. Most of the dungeon feels recycled because it takes place in places we've already seen. The first boss takes places south of the Wrymrest Temple in the Dragonblight. The second and third bosses take place inside the old-god inspired sarlac-pit type areas we first saw in the Twilight Highlands. The third boss encounter takes place in the Eye of Eternity (where we dispatched Malygos). The fourth takes place on top of Wyrmrest Temple, and the Fifth is on-board the same gun-ship (loot-ship) from Icecrown Citadel. It's painfully obvious that all of the environmental artists are hard at work on Mists of Pandaria content at this point. That being said, the Spine of Deathwing encounter was great, and the Madness of Deathwing encounter was decently challenging and left a lot of room for using different strategies.
I said I feel the Dragon Soul was under-tuned, even on normal, primarily due to the high number of guilds that cleared it on normal within the first two weeks.(On my realm, it's something like 20 guilds). Next week my guild will begin working on hard-mode progression, and I'm torn about what to expect. Part of me thinks this is where we'll face some real challenges, but on the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of incredibly difficult, R.N.G.-dependent, 50+ wipes-to-down ecounters. And as of yet, I've only seen reports of the first 5 or 6 encounters being cleared in Heroic mode by the best guilds in the world, and those guys usually cruise through anything that isn't damn-near-impossible. I realize that this is the last major raid tier of this expansion and so the content needs to last at least 6-8 months ... perhaps even a year before Mists of Pandaria will give us all something new to do; However, I've also been raiding long enough to know that being stuck on one boss or another for weeks at a time will inevitably stress people out and make for some truly unpleasant raid nights.
Having now cleared the Dragon Soul raid on normal, and done some of it on the new Raid Finder difficulty, I feel comfortable is saying it seemed a bit under-tuned. The Raid Finder, in particular, is a joke, and I don't think it's introduction is really a good thing for the game. Just following the blue-tracker (a tool that highlights Blizzard's post on their forums) on mmo-champion, I've seen a few posts with players absolutely gushing about how much they love the Raid Finder and how they'll never go back to normal. I think these people are deluded. The Raid Finder isn't difficult in the slightest, but it's working as intended. It's tuned to be so easy as to allow a group of random players succeed. Blizzard is basically tearing down a wall that seperated players who put forth a minimal effort - in terms of gameplay, teamwork, gear, and use of consumables - from those that aren't willing to do so. Going in to a Raid Finder raid and being successful is the equivalent of giving every child on the peewee football team a trophy at the end of the season. Players are rewarded just for showing up - just for participating. The loot is a step down from the quality dropped in normal raids, but it's still too generous. I'm not saying a Raid Finder type system is inherently flawed, but I would rather have seen a system that stayed true to the raid experience in terms of the effort required. Lazy players who queue up and under-perform or can't follow a simple strategy shouldn't be rewarded with success. Their take-away should be "I really need to improve if I want to clear this content" instead of "Now I can finally get all the gear and see all the content I'm entitled to."
As for the normal mode content, and the design on the raid in general, it seemed rather bland up until the Spine of Deathwing encounter. Most of the dungeon feels recycled because it takes place in places we've already seen. The first boss takes places south of the Wrymrest Temple in the Dragonblight. The second and third bosses take place inside the old-god inspired sarlac-pit type areas we first saw in the Twilight Highlands. The third boss encounter takes place in the Eye of Eternity (where we dispatched Malygos). The fourth takes place on top of Wyrmrest Temple, and the Fifth is on-board the same gun-ship (loot-ship) from Icecrown Citadel. It's painfully obvious that all of the environmental artists are hard at work on Mists of Pandaria content at this point. That being said, the Spine of Deathwing encounter was great, and the Madness of Deathwing encounter was decently challenging and left a lot of room for using different strategies.
I said I feel the Dragon Soul was under-tuned, even on normal, primarily due to the high number of guilds that cleared it on normal within the first two weeks.(On my realm, it's something like 20 guilds). Next week my guild will begin working on hard-mode progression, and I'm torn about what to expect. Part of me thinks this is where we'll face some real challenges, but on the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of incredibly difficult, R.N.G.-dependent, 50+ wipes-to-down ecounters. And as of yet, I've only seen reports of the first 5 or 6 encounters being cleared in Heroic mode by the best guilds in the world, and those guys usually cruise through anything that isn't damn-near-impossible. I realize that this is the last major raid tier of this expansion and so the content needs to last at least 6-8 months ... perhaps even a year before Mists of Pandaria will give us all something new to do; However, I've also been raiding long enough to know that being stuck on one boss or another for weeks at a time will inevitably stress people out and make for some truly unpleasant raid nights.
SWTOR is coming...
So, it's been difficult to decide what kind of post this is going to be, but I did get to play the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta last weekend, and lots of people have been asking what I thought about it, so I'll do the best I can.
I think what most people want to know is whether or not it is a complete rip-off of World of Warcraft? Well, the not particularly satisfying answer is "sort of." First off, if you can make your way around World of Warcraft, SWTOR is a game you can really jump right into as most of the key-bindings are the same. However, combat is a different beast since there are no auto-attacks - unless you've played a caster in WoW in which case it's a lot like that. You've got mission (quest) hubs, taxis (flight points), class trainers, crew skill (profession) trainers, durability/repairs, and a fast-travel (hearthstone) ability. Major differences come in the form of what seems to be a more advanced item-modification system, space combat, and graphics that will make you shit rainbows.
So what's different. Well, the biggest thing is the voice dialog. It's everywhere. Every time you pick up or turn in a mission, you'll have to listen to a good minute or two of back and forth between your character and the NPC. Is it really cool? Yes. Does it suck you into the story like WoW quest text never could? Yes. Does it eat up a large portion of your play-time? Yes. Can you skip over it? Sort of. You can skip much of it, and only see the last line of dialog as text. You're going to want to read that text because otherwise you'll be blindly picking your responses - which can be detrimental to your light/dark standing as well as your reputation with your companion. It's a key part of the game, but it's hard to imagine that after some point in the game, or after leveling multiple characters, I won't just wish for a way to skip the interactions entirely. On the subject of missions, one thing WoW players might not fully appreciate is how far Blizzard has come in quest-hub/design/flow. They've mastered the concept of packing as many things to do into an area as possible with a flow that prevents the player from being frustrated by redundant trips to the same area. I wouldn't say SWTOR is brutal in this regard, but to the extent to which the difference is noticable, I feel WoW has spoiled me.
The item modification system is implemented a lot like gems/sockets in WoW, but in SWTOR there's many different kinds of sockets for gear, weapons, even the players own space ship. In addition, it appears most modifications can be removed from items, un-socketed if you will, and returned to the players inventory for a price.The crafting-based crew skills of which you are allowed one, typically allow players to craft certain type of items- say weapons - as well as certain types of modifications applicable to the type items crafted. Of course, there are crew-skills based on gathering, and still others which I did not read up on entirely. One of the main things that sets crew-skills apart from professions in WoW, is that they serve was a way to keep your companion character busy while you're free to do whatever you'd like. Crafting items takes considerably more time in SWTOR than in WoW, and learning to make new things will require you send your companion to complete their own missions. You start off with craft-ables taking 1-2 mins per, and missions requiring 3-6 mins, however, I've heard that at higher levels, crafting missions can take as long as 24 hrs - and I sure hope that clock ticks when you're offline.
I only went as far as level 17 (max level is 50) but one of the highlights for me was at level 15 when I got my own ship and was able to try out the space combat. There's nothing like this in WoW. You might say it's like Halaa bombing run, but I'd have to punch you in the face for being stupid. To be honest, it kinda reminded me of Starfox - in a good way. Then there's the little things that set SWTOR apart - not every mob drops loot, but when they do, they don't sparkle. Instead, they emit a colored beam of light skyward. This colored beam of light indicates what kind of items are available to be looted. The standard light blue means the creature has just grey items/credits. A green beam means there's an uncommon quality item, with a darker blue and purple indicating the rare and epic items respectively. In addition, an area-loot option exists which allows you to quickly loot everything in a small area at once. This is a nice touch when, due to high respawn rates, you've dispatched 20-something mobs in a small room and you're more insterested in vacating the area before they respawn (again) than sifting through corpses for loot.
Did I mention the game is fucking beautiful? I was constantly suprised at how good this game looks. Some of the areas I just walk into and my jaw drops. And it's not that WoW looks bad, but seven years is seven years. Right from the start, with character creation, there's tons of options and variation within each race - with variable body shapes, head shapes, etc. With the gear, it's nice to see that an upgraded chest piece, for example, actually changes the character-model's shape - unlike in wow where there's a handful of glove/boot/belt models, unique shoulder/head armor, and everything else is just a texture. So many times I see Blizzard posters comment about how many resources it takes to change/modify 3d models, but in SWTOR they seem to be delivering on the impossible with all this armor with unique models and art and those close-up dialog interactions show it all off nicely.
So is it a WoW killer? Is doab going to abandon Azeroth? Well, No. I'm still going to play WoW, at least for now. As nice as SWTOR seems right now, there's plenty of room for Bioware to fail. They're going to need to prove they can do more than develop a pretty WoW mirror. I'm going to have to see the end-game content and get a feel for the class-balance. Frankly, there's any number of issues that can arise that could sink this titanic of a game if not handled properly. When the game is released, you can expect that I will spend most of my free time playing it - until raid time. Then I'll be back in Azeroth putting baddies like Deathwing in his place.
Finally, allow me to leave you with a few screencaps from SWTOR, and as always, I welcome you to comment!
I think what most people want to know is whether or not it is a complete rip-off of World of Warcraft? Well, the not particularly satisfying answer is "sort of." First off, if you can make your way around World of Warcraft, SWTOR is a game you can really jump right into as most of the key-bindings are the same. However, combat is a different beast since there are no auto-attacks - unless you've played a caster in WoW in which case it's a lot like that. You've got mission (quest) hubs, taxis (flight points), class trainers, crew skill (profession) trainers, durability/repairs, and a fast-travel (hearthstone) ability. Major differences come in the form of what seems to be a more advanced item-modification system, space combat, and graphics that will make you shit rainbows.
So what's different. Well, the biggest thing is the voice dialog. It's everywhere. Every time you pick up or turn in a mission, you'll have to listen to a good minute or two of back and forth between your character and the NPC. Is it really cool? Yes. Does it suck you into the story like WoW quest text never could? Yes. Does it eat up a large portion of your play-time? Yes. Can you skip over it? Sort of. You can skip much of it, and only see the last line of dialog as text. You're going to want to read that text because otherwise you'll be blindly picking your responses - which can be detrimental to your light/dark standing as well as your reputation with your companion. It's a key part of the game, but it's hard to imagine that after some point in the game, or after leveling multiple characters, I won't just wish for a way to skip the interactions entirely. On the subject of missions, one thing WoW players might not fully appreciate is how far Blizzard has come in quest-hub/design/flow. They've mastered the concept of packing as many things to do into an area as possible with a flow that prevents the player from being frustrated by redundant trips to the same area. I wouldn't say SWTOR is brutal in this regard, but to the extent to which the difference is noticable, I feel WoW has spoiled me.
The item modification system is implemented a lot like gems/sockets in WoW, but in SWTOR there's many different kinds of sockets for gear, weapons, even the players own space ship. In addition, it appears most modifications can be removed from items, un-socketed if you will, and returned to the players inventory for a price.The crafting-based crew skills of which you are allowed one, typically allow players to craft certain type of items- say weapons - as well as certain types of modifications applicable to the type items crafted. Of course, there are crew-skills based on gathering, and still others which I did not read up on entirely. One of the main things that sets crew-skills apart from professions in WoW, is that they serve was a way to keep your companion character busy while you're free to do whatever you'd like. Crafting items takes considerably more time in SWTOR than in WoW, and learning to make new things will require you send your companion to complete their own missions. You start off with craft-ables taking 1-2 mins per, and missions requiring 3-6 mins, however, I've heard that at higher levels, crafting missions can take as long as 24 hrs - and I sure hope that clock ticks when you're offline.
I only went as far as level 17 (max level is 50) but one of the highlights for me was at level 15 when I got my own ship and was able to try out the space combat. There's nothing like this in WoW. You might say it's like Halaa bombing run, but I'd have to punch you in the face for being stupid. To be honest, it kinda reminded me of Starfox - in a good way. Then there's the little things that set SWTOR apart - not every mob drops loot, but when they do, they don't sparkle. Instead, they emit a colored beam of light skyward. This colored beam of light indicates what kind of items are available to be looted. The standard light blue means the creature has just grey items/credits. A green beam means there's an uncommon quality item, with a darker blue and purple indicating the rare and epic items respectively. In addition, an area-loot option exists which allows you to quickly loot everything in a small area at once. This is a nice touch when, due to high respawn rates, you've dispatched 20-something mobs in a small room and you're more insterested in vacating the area before they respawn (again) than sifting through corpses for loot.
Did I mention the game is fucking beautiful? I was constantly suprised at how good this game looks. Some of the areas I just walk into and my jaw drops. And it's not that WoW looks bad, but seven years is seven years. Right from the start, with character creation, there's tons of options and variation within each race - with variable body shapes, head shapes, etc. With the gear, it's nice to see that an upgraded chest piece, for example, actually changes the character-model's shape - unlike in wow where there's a handful of glove/boot/belt models, unique shoulder/head armor, and everything else is just a texture. So many times I see Blizzard posters comment about how many resources it takes to change/modify 3d models, but in SWTOR they seem to be delivering on the impossible with all this armor with unique models and art and those close-up dialog interactions show it all off nicely.
So is it a WoW killer? Is doab going to abandon Azeroth? Well, No. I'm still going to play WoW, at least for now. As nice as SWTOR seems right now, there's plenty of room for Bioware to fail. They're going to need to prove they can do more than develop a pretty WoW mirror. I'm going to have to see the end-game content and get a feel for the class-balance. Frankly, there's any number of issues that can arise that could sink this titanic of a game if not handled properly. When the game is released, you can expect that I will spend most of my free time playing it - until raid time. Then I'll be back in Azeroth putting baddies like Deathwing in his place.
Finally, allow me to leave you with a few screencaps from SWTOR, and as always, I welcome you to comment!
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