I am noticing it already--far, far fewer sign ups for raids.
I think I have to officially declare that the pre-expansion blahs are hitting WoW--and it seems to me sooner and harder than either of the first 2 bouts of fatigue.
This is something I never really noticed in EQ--but there was not point in EQ where I was so well geared that the next upgrade was marginally useless expect in ICC. With my 245ish Fury gear mobs last maybe 10 seconds when soloing. In prot gear they lasted longer, but I have tested since I got 2 piece bonus on the Tier 10 prot warrior armor (20% DPS increase to shield slam and shockwave) and the massive buff to revenge.
This weeks Naxx 25 had a 40% absentee rate, and failed to finish going 20 man--too many alts. ToC25 was short. Our 10 is holding up nicely.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
What 3.3.3 means for me
About 1200 HP (if the Vitality change I had read about went through, from 6 to 9%).
And probably tailoring 450 since I had stalled out at 445 and absolutely didn't want to do the ridiculous transforms for cloth for the last 5 point on my up to now unmentioned 80 priest.
The raid weekly is Patchwerk, IIRC which is good, I can probably grab 10 extra frost badges for eventually getting enough primal saronite for Guthammer's boots. Primal saronite slaves for the win.
Umm...apparently I had missed the fact that Revenge is back.
Not a small change. And TankingTips is a great blog.
And probably tailoring 450 since I had stalled out at 445 and absolutely didn't want to do the ridiculous transforms for cloth for the last 5 point on my up to now unmentioned 80 priest.
The raid weekly is Patchwerk, IIRC which is good, I can probably grab 10 extra frost badges for eventually getting enough primal saronite for Guthammer's boots. Primal saronite slaves for the win.
Umm...apparently I had missed the fact that Revenge is back.
Not a small change. And TankingTips is a great blog.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
ICC 10 Progress: 5% or A Change
We are on a real roll in Pride and Joy's ICC 10. We tweaked our line up, having one of our druids go boomkin while our regular hunter has been bringing his shaman and our regular DK brings his hunter. And it seems to be working. The hunter was undergeared the first week, but got some nice drops last week and this week got the bow off Lady Deathwhisper.
Our regular group is fun, but ugh, our composition. 3 warriors, 2 druids, 2 shaman, no paladins, no warlocks, no rogues, 1 mage alt (sometimes),
But we are meeting with great success. We got Festergut for the second time this week, and Rotface fell to us for the first time this week. We tweaked our Festergut strategy a bit, holding Heroism until we have done our first tank transition, so that I (since I am the first Fester tank and Rawlnos takes the first round of 175% damage hits) have 8 stacks of Gastric Bloat and because 18k shield slams are yummy.
Rotface took no more than 2-3 tries and that was after a couple of weeks of not playing with him. Very satisfying. On a normal raid night we would have even had some time for Professor Putricide, but we had to call it 30 minutes early. So 3 hours, 6 bosses down including a first kill (and a small dinner break).
Our regular group is fun, but ugh, our composition. 3 warriors, 2 druids, 2 shaman, no paladins, no warlocks, no rogues, 1 mage alt (sometimes),
But we are meeting with great success. We got Festergut for the second time this week, and Rotface fell to us for the first time this week. We tweaked our Festergut strategy a bit, holding Heroism until we have done our first tank transition, so that I (since I am the first Fester tank and Rawlnos takes the first round of 175% damage hits) have 8 stacks of Gastric Bloat and because 18k shield slams are yummy.
Rotface took no more than 2-3 tries and that was after a couple of weeks of not playing with him. Very satisfying. On a normal raid night we would have even had some time for Professor Putricide, but we had to call it 30 minutes early. So 3 hours, 6 bosses down including a first kill (and a small dinner break).
Friday, March 19, 2010
FF13: Choice and the Illision of Choice
I have been playing some Final Fantasy 13. I just got into disc 2 on the 360. So far I have had to make lots of choices. Some of them interesting, most not so much. Few, I think, that will effect the story line that FF is taking me through.
Spending XP--CP in this game, at the moment at least, is an illusionnary choice. So far the choices are none, in that I can afford to fully develop everything I have access to on a character, or the choice is so blindingly bad (a tier 3 buff in a main spec for 220 XP, or that other off, off spec tier 1 ability for 330) that only the impaired will buy them before they have completely maxed out the character.
The game is real time and the basic decision unit is the 1 action bubble attack--though the normal mode of game play is to let the bar build up completely (to a number ranging from 2 to 6) and let all those commands execute at once. You can decide to interrupt your bar buildup to perform partial bar attacks.
Now there is a lot of rote button pushing. Most trash combat--so far--is just repeatedly hit A button (X for all you PS/3 types). Very dull. A good thing/bad thing is the AI is smart, choosing well among the moves you have, to maximize damage/stun/chain. Its good because the battles are timed and real time, bad because there aren't many decisions to be made in the game and taking most of the basic decision making out of the players hands for such a basic unit of interaction is bad.
The heart of the combat system, and where it gets interesting is stance dancing--paradigms in this game. Actually, to put it in more WoW like terms, you can respec on the fly, in combat--and you have groups of nothing but druids. A character can melee (commando), DPS (ravager--more ranged), heal, tank (sentinel), buff (synergist) or debuff (saboteur) . Any given character will probably be good at 2-3 of the roles and sub optimal for the others. Choosing which roles to do when and how is the real heart of the combat system. The one downside is that there very little time to make those decisions in and you are limited to more than 6 stances at once.
So the one place where choice shines in FF13 which, I think, is enough to keep me engaged for a while yet. The utterly weird Japanese (or over-engineered German) weapon XP system might be another place where there is some meaningfulish? choices to be made, but mostly the system is just weird.
Spending XP--CP in this game, at the moment at least, is an illusionnary choice. So far the choices are none, in that I can afford to fully develop everything I have access to on a character, or the choice is so blindingly bad (a tier 3 buff in a main spec for 220 XP, or that other off, off spec tier 1 ability for 330) that only the impaired will buy them before they have completely maxed out the character.
The game is real time and the basic decision unit is the 1 action bubble attack--though the normal mode of game play is to let the bar build up completely (to a number ranging from 2 to 6) and let all those commands execute at once. You can decide to interrupt your bar buildup to perform partial bar attacks.
Now there is a lot of rote button pushing. Most trash combat--so far--is just repeatedly hit A button (X for all you PS/3 types). Very dull. A good thing/bad thing is the AI is smart, choosing well among the moves you have, to maximize damage/stun/chain. Its good because the battles are timed and real time, bad because there aren't many decisions to be made in the game and taking most of the basic decision making out of the players hands for such a basic unit of interaction is bad.
The heart of the combat system, and where it gets interesting is stance dancing--paradigms in this game. Actually, to put it in more WoW like terms, you can respec on the fly, in combat--and you have groups of nothing but druids. A character can melee (commando), DPS (ravager--more ranged), heal, tank (sentinel), buff (synergist) or debuff (saboteur) . Any given character will probably be good at 2-3 of the roles and sub optimal for the others. Choosing which roles to do when and how is the real heart of the combat system. The one downside is that there very little time to make those decisions in and you are limited to more than 6 stances at once.
So the one place where choice shines in FF13 which, I think, is enough to keep me engaged for a while yet. The utterly weird Japanese (or over-engineered German) weapon XP system might be another place where there is some meaningfulish? choices to be made, but mostly the system is just weird.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Breakfast Club Special
My 25-man LO charter is Breakfast Club. Silver Hand is a PST server and I am an EST player and Breakfast Club starts our raids at 7 AM server. I am also a child of the 80s and, as I recall, I saw the movie in the theaters too. It seems an appropriate name.
BC has always been more about teaching and gearing up that progression--I mean why else would we /still/ be running Naxx?
We also seem to find new ways to wipe. Some weeks ago, on Thaddious I called a "go". One of the platforms wipes because the tank does nothing--they DCed just as I called go.
Last week, with 4 mages and a shaman in the raid we're fighting Noth. And bringing him down at a tremendous rate. Just as I wonder if we are going to down him before he teleports. BANG! 19 players dead. No one in the raid got rid of Noth's debuff. We could only laugh.
BC has always been more about teaching and gearing up that progression--I mean why else would we /still/ be running Naxx?
We also seem to find new ways to wipe. Some weeks ago, on Thaddious I called a "go". One of the platforms wipes because the tank does nothing--they DCed just as I called go.
Last week, with 4 mages and a shaman in the raid we're fighting Noth. And bringing him down at a tremendous rate. Just as I wonder if we are going to down him before he teleports. BANG! 19 players dead. No one in the raid got rid of Noth's debuff. We could only laugh.
The Tank's Conundrum
I want to see ICC25. I have a tank who is geared for it--39k HP unbuffed almost all ToC25 or ICC10 gear. I know the fights and I am at least a fair to middling raid tank and experienced raid leader.
My chances of seeing ICC 25 are low though due to the fact that the tanking core of any guild (or charter in the Leftovers system) are among the most reliable players and, often, like me leaders. Bringing in a new tank to a raid for the first time is almost a guaranteed wipe somewhere in the instance to do different styles of doing encounter fights. Its likely that new tanks will have real costs on raids unless you massively over gear the place.
The one thing that makes is more likely for me to see ICC 25 is that Cataclysm burnout seems to be hitting WOW hard and early (we don't even have a release date--a bad sign if you ask me) and since there are so man 25 mans running ICC can sub in somewhere sometime soon.
My chances of seeing ICC 25 are low though due to the fact that the tanking core of any guild (or charter in the Leftovers system) are among the most reliable players and, often, like me leaders. Bringing in a new tank to a raid for the first time is almost a guaranteed wipe somewhere in the instance to do different styles of doing encounter fights. Its likely that new tanks will have real costs on raids unless you massively over gear the place.
The one thing that makes is more likely for me to see ICC 25 is that Cataclysm burnout seems to be hitting WOW hard and early (we don't even have a release date--a bad sign if you ask me) and since there are so man 25 mans running ICC can sub in somewhere sometime soon.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The 5% Buff
So this week our group of ICC 10 raiders finally got to do ICC 10 with the buffs and their raid leads--last week our firewall/router was giving us 2+ second (2000MS) lag and we called in a friend to lead and got out of our raider's way.
This week Pride and Joy (my 10 man charter) got everyone in and up and going more or less on time. Speaking as a tank, the 5% buff was fairly invisible. As a raid lead the 5% made our raid feel like it was one of the days on which we were clicking and things going well. Marrowgar was 2 healed--the healers (She Who Speaks Horde and a leafy friend) said that the 5% was hugely visible to them. On Lady Deathwhisper I was noticing that the 5% was giving us an 5 to 10 seconds of DPS time on the mana shield--we seemed to average about 25-30 seconds of DPS time between adds.
Sourfang punished us for sloppy execution went down after we adjusted. We also downed Festergut for the first time and downed the extra frost badge boss. Assuming the performance is repeatable that puts me right on 30 badges a week if I am consistent. I picked up the tanking hat too and now have the 2 piece warrior bonus--a 20% bonus to shield slam and shock wave!
This week Pride and Joy (my 10 man charter) got everyone in and up and going more or less on time. Speaking as a tank, the 5% buff was fairly invisible. As a raid lead the 5% made our raid feel like it was one of the days on which we were clicking and things going well. Marrowgar was 2 healed--the healers (She Who Speaks Horde and a leafy friend) said that the 5% was hugely visible to them. On Lady Deathwhisper I was noticing that the 5% was giving us an 5 to 10 seconds of DPS time on the mana shield--we seemed to average about 25-30 seconds of DPS time between adds.
Sourfang punished us for sloppy execution went down after we adjusted. We also downed Festergut for the first time and downed the extra frost badge boss. Assuming the performance is repeatable that puts me right on 30 badges a week if I am consistent. I picked up the tanking hat too and now have the 2 piece warrior bonus--a 20% bonus to shield slam and shock wave!
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