While it's almost certainly a long, long way off, WoW 2 is something I'm really looking forward to. It's not going to be new, fresh, innovative, anything of that sort - it's simply going to be WoW, rebuilt on the foundation of three, five, ten, whatever years of experience.
I often say to myself, 'what would you do if you could go back in time to when WoW started, but with your current knowledge, skill and experience?' I think that I'd roll a warrior as my first main, get onto the first oceanic server as soon as it came out, and be a main tank in a bleeding edge guild - BWL, AQ40, Naxx, and I'm there in the forefront, tanking first kills. /wistful
But WoW 2 will be, I think, very similar to that scenario. The playing field will be completely reset. Sure, a few guilds might carry over, but the ball will be in my park so to speak - with entire servers full of unattached potential raiders, I'll be able to be one of the founding members of a proper, hardcore, raiding guild. And I won't be held back by my timezone, timetable, or attitude as I was in vanilla WoW.
But aside from the whole 'clean-slate' aspect, the game itself will be... better. More polished. More complete. Blizzard will know exactly what they set out to do in each individual facet of the game. Lowbie instances now are just a mess of mobs in seemingly random positions, as if they were outside. Not in WoW 2. Instances will have defined trash pulls and interesting bosses. Many levelling zones now lack centralisation, which is annoying, and feel bland, which detracts from the overall feel of the game. Not so in WoW 2. Quests will be found in logical and clear clumps, and every zone will be rich and cohesive. Compare Desolace - uh, there are... kodos here. Some Twilight's Hammer, I see, but what're they doing here? - to Hellfire Peninsula - There's a war going on here, and you'd better step sharply to keep alive - and you can see just how much Blizz have improved since they began their masterpiece back in whenever it was.
And, of course, you have to wonder - will MC be in WoW 2? AQ? BRM? CoT? Kara? Naxx? Will there be Scourge? Burning Legion? Illidan? Kael'thas? Arthas? Ragnaros? Black dragons? Trolls? Dark Iron dwarves? Murlocs? Silithid? Naga? Green dragons? C'thun? Kazzak? Medivh? Tirion Fordring? Scarlets?
With Sargaeras killed by Aegwynn and later Khadgar, Archimonde destroyed by a lot of fireworks, Kil'Jaedan (presumably) dying in SWP in 2.4, Tichondrius killed by Illidan, Mannoroth killed by Grom, and Kael'thas dead (again), the Burning Legion is pretty much leadershipless. So unless a minor character is promoted to top dog (Kazzak head of the Legion? I mean, he's killed all the time, but that didn't stop him from opening the Dark Portal for TBC... maybe world bosses don't count as dying lorewise O_o), a new character is invented, or one of the previous leaders ends up not actually being dead, that rules them out of the running for the Bad Guys.
With Illidan killed in TBC, the Illidari blood elves and demons look likely to collapse as well. The only other real candidate for leadership of the Illidari was Varedis, and he's 5-mannable. So they're also pretty much out of the running.
The Black Dragonflight is a strong possibility, with Deathwing still at large somewhere. Even though Nefarian and Onyxia, both his known children, have been dead for quite some time, he could easily have more children and lieutenants - and, indeed, in the fel orc camp in Netherwing Ledge a dragon in the guise of a blood elf talks to the overlord there, and they refer to 'the Master' and 'continuing the work of Nefarian,' as well as arranging for Netherwing eggs to get back to this Master. So it looks like Deathwing's getting ready to do Bad Things. (On a side note, he could already be doing Bad Things - he could very well be in charge of the Infinite Dragonflight).
Speaking of the Infinite Dragonflight, they're evil enough (want to destroy time itself) and mysterious enough (we know nothing of their leaders, etc) that they could make a good Bad Guy in the future.
Continuing on, although this is all wild speculation, I assume that by the time WLK is over, Arthas, Anub'arak, Sapphiron, and Kel'thuzad will be dead for good, leaving the Scourge leadershipless - and indeed, without a Lich King they're mindless.
Keeping with the undead theme, Sylvanas and the Forsaken could make a good Bad Guy (engineering a plague to destroy the Scourge and, oh, every living thing) - however if that happened people wouldn't be able to play Undead.
The Scarlets could be a Bad Guy I suppose... but as awesome as they are, they don't have what it takes to be a real major thing. They hate the undead, yeah, and so they kill the undead, yeah... but they don't want to, for example, conquer Outland or summon the avatar of a dark god. There's no reason to go and attack their fortresses or w/e. Apart from that, a fair amount of their leaders are alive, and they're of the nature that a new leader could just spring out of nowhere without feeling wrong. Plus they're awesome and they're related to the whole Ashbringer storyline.
The Qiraji, well... They were all in AQ, and that got pretty badly pwnt by players. C'thun with them. The Silithid, well... without Qiraji they're pointless.
Azshara seems like a prime candidate for a Bad Guy sometime in the future. Zin-Azshari could be large enough to be a raid instance, or a four-wing instance (three 5-mans, one raid, a la Coilfang), or a zone containing a couple of instances, or, hell, the setting for an entire expansion - it was a pretty damn huge city as far as I know, bigger than any modern Warcraft city. And the Naga are pretty cool, and they hate everyone, which gives them motivation to be Bad Guys.
And the other big thing which I think will be coming in future is the stuff happening in the Emerald Dream - Cenarius is there, and Malfurion is there, and Ysera is there, and apparently when they exploded Archimonde he broke it or something, making everything evil (hence the four Dragons of Nightmare). This has been explored a little - world green dragons, Sunken Temple and Eranikus, the whole Green Scepter Shard bit - but we've been dealing with the symptoms, not the problem. Of course, the Emerald Dream is supposed to be not exactly another world - more a sort of dream where druids and animals go - so unless they just decide to make it a proper, solid world it'll pose some problems.
At any rate (back to my original point), looking forward to WoW 2.
'Cos of stuff.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Friday, 22 February 2008
Instancetalk: SV, UBRS and MGT
So, just having caught up on reading Ciderhelm's blog at www.tankspot.com, I got to thinking. One of his entries was about how he learned tanking - the general gist of it was that UBRS taught it and Naxx refined it.
Personally, I think I learned to tank in Steamvaults. I wasn't a good tank pre-bc at all, nor as I levelled to 70 (I still remember joining a Slave Pens pug at level 64 or something, pulling a group of six lobsters, and them running over and killing the rest of the group. Everyone left after that, leaving me feeling rather inadequate). Right as I hit 70, a rogue in my guild asked if I wanted to run Shadow Labs with him, so I said 'okay,' specced prot and regretted it when I slogged through the Kara attunement prereqs the next day. But we cleared Slabs fine.
Steamvaults, however, was pretty much my instance. My small group of RL friends ran instances together every now and then, most usually SV and BM. When I started tanking SV the first time, I basically knew that I had to make the mobs not hit the others. Now I know all my tools - thunderclap, taunt, concussion blow, and intervene first and foremost - inside and out, as well as how to use line of sight, how to mark, what kinds of mobs to prioritise for CC, about how long I can leave mobs before the healer drags them off me, et cetera et cetera.
Anyway, tanking UBRS at level 60 was, I found, great fun, because you would run with two tanks. I think working co-operatively with another tank is a lot of fun, and it teaches skills you need in raid instances. It was always a great feeling when the second Warrior in the group worked well with you, and you found a nice balance of when to grab loose mobs, when to leave them to be re-CC'd, and when to let your co-tank get them.
So one of my hopes for WLK is a 10-man of UBRS's level - no lockout, blue loot (two items per boss, four from the last one), no more difficult than, say... Arcatraz. Trash that comes in numbers of two to eight, bosses that encourage more than one tank (saberlash kthx), and a good reason for people to run it a lot - say, trinkets in the vein of the [Bangle of Endless Blessings] or [Quagmirran's Eye], or a faction with awesome rewards.
On a side note, I recently brought my Warrior out of retirement and ran Magister's Terrace on the PTRs. I can really feel the difference between then and now, so to speak - I was tanking fairly badly the whole instance, I los'd mobs wrong, I lost aggro to healers, and I lost track of mobs. I think one main factor for this was the fact that, when a Druid tanks, they ideally keep their mobs all in a cone in front of them (swipe). When a Warrior tanks, although it's better to keep mobs in front of them, thunderclap is a 360 degree ability so they can generate aggro on stuff directly behind them. I think, once I'm finished with farming badges for my feral gear, I'll start playing my Warrior again while I'm not raiding - running heroics aplenty for all the delicious badge loot that's been and is being added.
Of course... I need 95 badges to finish my bear gear, plus more come 2.4, and then I need some ridiculous amount for my cat gear, and THEN I can start looking at my Warrior (if WLK's not out by then).
MGT, btw, was a fun instance. Trash was varied and interesting, although it did feel kinda funny at times - why are there ethereals and naga in the Sunwell? - and casters seemed more predominant than was neccessary. The Warlocks seemed slightly too powerful - their Immolate ticked on me for ~1.1k in def stance, on normal mode - but not entirely unreasonable for the difficulty of the instance. There wasn't very much trash anyway (plus!).
Bosses were mostly the same - the first boss is pretty much Kalithresh, except when you don't kill the thing in time he just hits everyone in the party a bunch of times for about 800 fire damage. Even if you do, he still does it once or twice, but if he breaks his crystal before you do it's a lot more. The second boss, I wasn't really sure exactly what was going on - he seemed somewhat similar to Curator, but he hits for arcane damage and the sparks seem to latch on to whoever kills them and make them deal more damage or something. I just tanked him and hoped the rest of the party killed him in time. Third boss is somewhat like Moroes - four adds and a boss. I dunno if the adds come from a larger table of possible adds or not. We had a naga who feared and meleed, a shirtless male bloodelf demon hunter, an ethereal who seemed to heal, and a gan'arg who threw bombs, I believe. The boss is a red shivan, who might also have healed. All of these adds and the boss are humanoid, despite shivans and gan'arg being demons, and the adds can be sheeped, iced, etc. They are all, however, immune to taunt - I lost control on the pull and was unable to get it back, so I basically ran around frantically trying to generate aggro on whatever was near me at the time, being mostly useless. Fourth boss is Kael, and he's somewhat simple. In his first phase, he fireballs (reflectable and interruptable), summons phoenixes which should be killed (you then have to kill its egg or else it'll respawn), and flamestrikes, which is really easy to avoid - a huge spinning yellow thing appears and basically screams 'GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE' for a few seconds before it hits. At 50%, he goes into his second phase, where everyone is thrown into the air and you get to swim around - he apparently turns gravity off. This deals about 500 damage per 3 seconds. He also summons five gigantic pink balls which fly around, and they hurt you if you get hit by them. If you swim down to the ground you get thrown up again, which means you can't really melee him, however every now and then he says something to the effect of 'arrrrgh' and falls to one knee, turning off the gravity lapse and the big pink balls for a little while.
The highlight of MGT was definitely the questline. (lolspoilers?) I got a quest from the Aldor guy who accepts marks to go talk to a guy on the Isle of Quel'Danas. Said guy told me to find someone in the Magister's Terrace. In the room of the second boss, we find him dying on the ground, hand the quest in to him, he tells us that 'they're feeding the sunwell' and to use some orb on a balcony, then dies. So we clear through the second boss, and there, hey, here's a balcony. We can see a different part of the Sunwell with a bunch of demons from here - perhaps that's part of SWP? There's void terrors and shivans and doomguards hanging around. Anyway, the orb (looks like the BWL teleport orb... teleporb?), so we click it, and are treated to a nice little cutscene which is basically just the camera flying through the bit of SWP we could see. It goes in a door, then we see M'uru (hella cool looking), then it goes a bit further and pans around and we see a few eredar channeling into... well, the Sunwell I guess. Looks like a pool of lava. Then the camera pans up again and zooms in to a closeup of Kil'jaedan's face, which is on the wall for some reason.
Okay, that's pretty cool, we say, and we turn around to go further into the instance - when all of a sudden a dragon flies out of nowhere! 'Wossat?' we cry in suprise. Well, it's Kalecgos, and he's pretty cool - he turns into a human with blue hair, lets us hand a quest in to him, and gives us a quest to kill the new Kael'thas. Awesome. Rewards are Crimson Spinels - the choice of a Bright, a Teardrop, or a Runed (no subtle? tch). These are special Crimson Spinels which are bind on pickup. Also rewarded from the quest is being attuned to Heroic MGT. Awesome, no repgrind. (Although... Seeing as I want jewelcrafting recipies and an epic neck from exalted on my Druid, and enchanting recipies and an epic shield from exalted on my Warrior... repgrind. Awh).
All in all, I'm really looking forward to running MGT on live, with a group of guildies that work together better than a pug. I'm also looking forward to getting the 'Of the Shattered Sun' title - but not looking forward to having to shell out 1000g for it. Awh.
Personally, I think I learned to tank in Steamvaults. I wasn't a good tank pre-bc at all, nor as I levelled to 70 (I still remember joining a Slave Pens pug at level 64 or something, pulling a group of six lobsters, and them running over and killing the rest of the group. Everyone left after that, leaving me feeling rather inadequate). Right as I hit 70, a rogue in my guild asked if I wanted to run Shadow Labs with him, so I said 'okay,' specced prot and regretted it when I slogged through the Kara attunement prereqs the next day. But we cleared Slabs fine.
Steamvaults, however, was pretty much my instance. My small group of RL friends ran instances together every now and then, most usually SV and BM. When I started tanking SV the first time, I basically knew that I had to make the mobs not hit the others. Now I know all my tools - thunderclap, taunt, concussion blow, and intervene first and foremost - inside and out, as well as how to use line of sight, how to mark, what kinds of mobs to prioritise for CC, about how long I can leave mobs before the healer drags them off me, et cetera et cetera.
Anyway, tanking UBRS at level 60 was, I found, great fun, because you would run with two tanks. I think working co-operatively with another tank is a lot of fun, and it teaches skills you need in raid instances. It was always a great feeling when the second Warrior in the group worked well with you, and you found a nice balance of when to grab loose mobs, when to leave them to be re-CC'd, and when to let your co-tank get them.
So one of my hopes for WLK is a 10-man of UBRS's level - no lockout, blue loot (two items per boss, four from the last one), no more difficult than, say... Arcatraz. Trash that comes in numbers of two to eight, bosses that encourage more than one tank (saberlash kthx), and a good reason for people to run it a lot - say, trinkets in the vein of the [Bangle of Endless Blessings] or [Quagmirran's Eye], or a faction with awesome rewards.
On a side note, I recently brought my Warrior out of retirement and ran Magister's Terrace on the PTRs. I can really feel the difference between then and now, so to speak - I was tanking fairly badly the whole instance, I los'd mobs wrong, I lost aggro to healers, and I lost track of mobs. I think one main factor for this was the fact that, when a Druid tanks, they ideally keep their mobs all in a cone in front of them (swipe). When a Warrior tanks, although it's better to keep mobs in front of them, thunderclap is a 360 degree ability so they can generate aggro on stuff directly behind them. I think, once I'm finished with farming badges for my feral gear, I'll start playing my Warrior again while I'm not raiding - running heroics aplenty for all the delicious badge loot that's been and is being added.
Of course... I need 95 badges to finish my bear gear, plus more come 2.4, and then I need some ridiculous amount for my cat gear, and THEN I can start looking at my Warrior (if WLK's not out by then).
MGT, btw, was a fun instance. Trash was varied and interesting, although it did feel kinda funny at times - why are there ethereals and naga in the Sunwell? - and casters seemed more predominant than was neccessary. The Warlocks seemed slightly too powerful - their Immolate ticked on me for ~1.1k in def stance, on normal mode - but not entirely unreasonable for the difficulty of the instance. There wasn't very much trash anyway (plus!).
Bosses were mostly the same - the first boss is pretty much Kalithresh, except when you don't kill the thing in time he just hits everyone in the party a bunch of times for about 800 fire damage. Even if you do, he still does it once or twice, but if he breaks his crystal before you do it's a lot more. The second boss, I wasn't really sure exactly what was going on - he seemed somewhat similar to Curator, but he hits for arcane damage and the sparks seem to latch on to whoever kills them and make them deal more damage or something. I just tanked him and hoped the rest of the party killed him in time. Third boss is somewhat like Moroes - four adds and a boss. I dunno if the adds come from a larger table of possible adds or not. We had a naga who feared and meleed, a shirtless male bloodelf demon hunter, an ethereal who seemed to heal, and a gan'arg who threw bombs, I believe. The boss is a red shivan, who might also have healed. All of these adds and the boss are humanoid, despite shivans and gan'arg being demons, and the adds can be sheeped, iced, etc. They are all, however, immune to taunt - I lost control on the pull and was unable to get it back, so I basically ran around frantically trying to generate aggro on whatever was near me at the time, being mostly useless. Fourth boss is Kael, and he's somewhat simple. In his first phase, he fireballs (reflectable and interruptable), summons phoenixes which should be killed (you then have to kill its egg or else it'll respawn), and flamestrikes, which is really easy to avoid - a huge spinning yellow thing appears and basically screams 'GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE' for a few seconds before it hits. At 50%, he goes into his second phase, where everyone is thrown into the air and you get to swim around - he apparently turns gravity off. This deals about 500 damage per 3 seconds. He also summons five gigantic pink balls which fly around, and they hurt you if you get hit by them. If you swim down to the ground you get thrown up again, which means you can't really melee him, however every now and then he says something to the effect of 'arrrrgh' and falls to one knee, turning off the gravity lapse and the big pink balls for a little while.
The highlight of MGT was definitely the questline. (lolspoilers?) I got a quest from the Aldor guy who accepts marks to go talk to a guy on the Isle of Quel'Danas. Said guy told me to find someone in the Magister's Terrace. In the room of the second boss, we find him dying on the ground, hand the quest in to him, he tells us that 'they're feeding the sunwell' and to use some orb on a balcony, then dies. So we clear through the second boss, and there, hey, here's a balcony. We can see a different part of the Sunwell with a bunch of demons from here - perhaps that's part of SWP? There's void terrors and shivans and doomguards hanging around. Anyway, the orb (looks like the BWL teleport orb... teleporb?), so we click it, and are treated to a nice little cutscene which is basically just the camera flying through the bit of SWP we could see. It goes in a door, then we see M'uru (hella cool looking), then it goes a bit further and pans around and we see a few eredar channeling into... well, the Sunwell I guess. Looks like a pool of lava. Then the camera pans up again and zooms in to a closeup of Kil'jaedan's face, which is on the wall for some reason.
Okay, that's pretty cool, we say, and we turn around to go further into the instance - when all of a sudden a dragon flies out of nowhere! 'Wossat?' we cry in suprise. Well, it's Kalecgos, and he's pretty cool - he turns into a human with blue hair, lets us hand a quest in to him, and gives us a quest to kill the new Kael'thas. Awesome. Rewards are Crimson Spinels - the choice of a Bright, a Teardrop, or a Runed (no subtle? tch). These are special Crimson Spinels which are bind on pickup. Also rewarded from the quest is being attuned to Heroic MGT. Awesome, no repgrind. (Although... Seeing as I want jewelcrafting recipies and an epic neck from exalted on my Druid, and enchanting recipies and an epic shield from exalted on my Warrior... repgrind. Awh).
All in all, I'm really looking forward to running MGT on live, with a group of guildies that work together better than a pug. I'm also looking forward to getting the 'Of the Shattered Sun' title - but not looking forward to having to shell out 1000g for it. Awh.
Monday, 18 February 2008
WLKtalk: 4HM
Well, again I'm thinking about stuff and writing it down. 'Spose that's what this thing's for.
Anywho, I was thinking today about how the Four Horsemen encounter will translate to a 25-man raid. I reckon it's extremely unlikely that it'll still require eight tanks to do, as five tanks in a raid is about the limit these days. So, how will it be toned down? I'm thinking that the marks will stack more slowly, so you can have one tank running between horsemen at any one time, letting tanks switch one-quarter as frequently as they did at 60. Or perhaps with the advent of DKs, six tanks will become standard for a 25, making it half.
At any rate, there is something that's (almost) certain about 4HM.
[The Ashbringer...]
And with Ashbringer comes Scarlets! Yaaaay!
Anywho, I was thinking today about how the Four Horsemen encounter will translate to a 25-man raid. I reckon it's extremely unlikely that it'll still require eight tanks to do, as five tanks in a raid is about the limit these days. So, how will it be toned down? I'm thinking that the marks will stack more slowly, so you can have one tank running between horsemen at any one time, letting tanks switch one-quarter as frequently as they did at 60. Or perhaps with the advent of DKs, six tanks will become standard for a 25, making it half.
At any rate, there is something that's (almost) certain about 4HM.
[The Ashbringer...]
And with Ashbringer comes Scarlets! Yaaaay!
Sunday, 17 February 2008
Speculation
So a couple of nights ago a few guildies and I were chatting in vent about World of Welfare, as it's rapidly becoming, and WLK. Our general consensus was that WLK was closer than people think - all this new badge loot (see www.worldofraids.com), nethers and vortices becoming unbound, 25s dropping badges, extra tier tokens, and more gold, pvp gear being purchasable with tier tokens, new awesome craftables, and the new easy epics from Magister's Terrace all seem remarkably similar to patch 2.0, when people dropped raiding to get all this awesome new pvp gear. I'm anticipating a lot of trouble in guilds that aren't already in T6 content when 2.4 comes out - people who raid for loot are gonna say, well, I could spend all this effort raiding, wiping, learning bosses, buying consumables and paying for repairs... or, I could run heroics and kara, pvp, and make craftables, and finish with better gear. Then they're gonna not show up to raids, and when they get called out about it, they're going to leave and join a guild that doesn't care if all they want to do is pvp and farm badges. Despite what I think is going to happen with this, Blizzard seems to want to rush people into BT/Hyjal - lifting attunements, making awesome gear easily obtainable - before WLK, which is fair enough, they don't want this stuff to be the Naxx of TBC, where only one or two guilds per server even get inside. And honestly, I think that guilds that can survive losing people to welfare epics in 2.4 will be the better for it. If you have a large core of extremely dedicated people, who raid for progress not loot, then if you lose a few fringe members you can recruit some more who will likely be more dedicated.
Anyway, I think that the fact Blizz seems to be pushing for guilds to get into T6 stuff means that WLK is close.
So this got me to thinking about DKs, in respect to tanking. What specialty role are they going to fill? All the other tanks have a role, so to speak, that they fill in a raid, so I wonder how the new class is going to fit in.
Warriors - Best all-round tanking class. Somewhat superior anti-magic defenses. Can interrupt, is easily uncrushable on most bosses, and has several 'ohshit' buttons.
Druids - Best offtank or hybrid. Can switch roles midfight. Superior physical mitigation; is completely crushable but makes up for it in raw hp/armour. Cannot parry but high dodge makes up for it.
Paladins - Best AoE tank. Can pick up a theoretically infinite amount of mobs, although too many and they start getting behind him and stuff. Can pick up large groups of mobs that have recently spawned by healing (see: morogrim), can pick up groups of mobs that are being bottlenecked through a small doorway (see: dragonhawks in TK), et cetera. Also has higher threat generation and can generate threat at 10 yards instead of melee to an extent, and has a ranged Taunt spell, which makes the paladin tank suited for bosses like Leotheras. On the downside, has very strict requirements for being uncrushable (but has more charges on their Shield Block), and is extremely gimped in fights that don't deal them a high amount of damage, because Spiritual Attunement is inferior to rage.
So where do Death Knights fit in? Perhaps they have better anti-magic tank abilities than the Warrior? (Heavy-armour anti-magic tank class... INQUISITOR! *hearts in eyes*) Although, for a boss that deals mostly magic damage as a general rule a Warlock or Mage (on gimmick fights like HKM or IC) tanks it, sometimes in resist gear. They won't have the bluerage problem as they have the rune system, but at the same time they won't have the benefit of rage. Managing runes while tanking will be an interesting task - like, perhaps, you need to save one Unholy rune every 6 seconds to keep yourself uncrushable, and at the same time you need to manage your other five to maximise your threat generation. Perhaps they will have superior threatgen to any other class, making them a good MT for bosses with enrage times or the first add to go down. It'd be interesting to see guilds with two primary main tanks, a Warrior for the ones that hit really hard and a DK for the ones that hit less hard but must must must be killed before X time is up. Perhaps they will be immune to stuns, fears, knockdowns, disorients, etc, to a lesser extent. Who knows.
What I do know is I'm looking forward to seeing their abilities and talent trees as the day of WLK draws closer. And, if I like what I see, I'm looking forward to socketing Solid Eyes of Northrend in my offhand Blade of the Frozen North as I prepare to tank Malygos next Saturday.
(Disclaimer: I made that all up. Except Malygos, he's in).
Anyway, I think that the fact Blizz seems to be pushing for guilds to get into T6 stuff means that WLK is close.
So this got me to thinking about DKs, in respect to tanking. What specialty role are they going to fill? All the other tanks have a role, so to speak, that they fill in a raid, so I wonder how the new class is going to fit in.
Warriors - Best all-round tanking class. Somewhat superior anti-magic defenses. Can interrupt, is easily uncrushable on most bosses, and has several 'ohshit' buttons.
Druids - Best offtank or hybrid. Can switch roles midfight. Superior physical mitigation; is completely crushable but makes up for it in raw hp/armour. Cannot parry but high dodge makes up for it.
Paladins - Best AoE tank. Can pick up a theoretically infinite amount of mobs, although too many and they start getting behind him and stuff. Can pick up large groups of mobs that have recently spawned by healing (see: morogrim), can pick up groups of mobs that are being bottlenecked through a small doorway (see: dragonhawks in TK), et cetera. Also has higher threat generation and can generate threat at 10 yards instead of melee to an extent, and has a ranged Taunt spell, which makes the paladin tank suited for bosses like Leotheras. On the downside, has very strict requirements for being uncrushable (but has more charges on their Shield Block), and is extremely gimped in fights that don't deal them a high amount of damage, because Spiritual Attunement is inferior to rage.
So where do Death Knights fit in? Perhaps they have better anti-magic tank abilities than the Warrior? (Heavy-armour anti-magic tank class... INQUISITOR! *hearts in eyes*) Although, for a boss that deals mostly magic damage as a general rule a Warlock or Mage (on gimmick fights like HKM or IC) tanks it, sometimes in resist gear. They won't have the bluerage problem as they have the rune system, but at the same time they won't have the benefit of rage. Managing runes while tanking will be an interesting task - like, perhaps, you need to save one Unholy rune every 6 seconds to keep yourself uncrushable, and at the same time you need to manage your other five to maximise your threat generation. Perhaps they will have superior threatgen to any other class, making them a good MT for bosses with enrage times or the first add to go down. It'd be interesting to see guilds with two primary main tanks, a Warrior for the ones that hit really hard and a DK for the ones that hit less hard but must must must be killed before X time is up. Perhaps they will be immune to stuns, fears, knockdowns, disorients, etc, to a lesser extent. Who knows.
What I do know is I'm looking forward to seeing their abilities and talent trees as the day of WLK draws closer. And, if I like what I see, I'm looking forward to socketing Solid Eyes of Northrend in my offhand Blade of the Frozen North as I prepare to tank Malygos next Saturday.
(Disclaimer: I made that all up. Except Malygos, he's in).
Friday, 15 February 2008
Art of Warcraft
Well this came to my attention directly after posting that thing about enraging, soo... here's a quick two posts in a day thing. Yeah.
Grizzly Hills - that's one of the zones in Northrend, for the uneducated - was just put up on the WLK minisite. Now of course there'd already been stuff announced about this zone, pictures here and there, but there were a couple of new stuffs there, including a nice short movie which showed what seemed to be the highlights of the zone. This got me thinking about the art of WoW.
I was a great fan of the art of vanilla WoW. It seemed... cohesive. It had some very different places, yeah, but all in all it was dark and gritty. I've heard it described as 'gothic fantasy' before, and I think that that's appropriate.
Take a look at, for example, Scholo. Scholomance is a school for necromancers. People learn evil in there. It feels like it, too. It's full of ridiculously ornate candelabras and bubbling alchemical contraptions and heavy wooden bookcases and piles of bones and cast-iron gates and furniture. The floors, walls and ceilings are stone, and there are tapestries and carpets all over the place.
Now compare that to the pink sparkliness of Tempest Keep, or the ridiculous steampunk-esque machines that populate Coilfang. I actually quite like the look of the Tempest Keep raid instance, but... it doesn't feel like WoW should. TBC in general felt wrong - the exception for me was the zones in Quel'thalas - sort of like it was full of weird machines and aliens, rather than kickass dragons and demons and undead. I mean, draenei? What is that? They're blue. And it's not subtle, like night elves are subtlely purple. They're bright freaking blue, and they have hooves, and they have tentacles on their faces. You can't simultaneously slay dragons and be bright blue. It's just not possible.
So, now back to the original point of my post - took long enough. I think that the Blizzard art team is doing an amazing job on the Northrend zones. They all look cold, despite not all being Winterspring. They all look different without sacrificing the overall theme of the expack. They tie in well with existing Azerothian zones without reusing the textures (at least from what I could tell).
Things I'm really looking forward to in WLK, art-wise:
-Seeing the fire effects in Utgarde ingame.
-Seeing the ice caves of Dragonblight ingame.
-Seeing what the team does in Coldarra - I've heard that the level 80 5-man is 'a series of floating rings, magically suspended above the ground.' That sounds like it could be freaking awesome. Especially if you can see off the rings, look from them down onto the zone from, say, one-thousand yards into the air.
-Seeing how Sholazar Basin, Crystalsong Forest, and the Storm Peaks are worked into the overall Northrend theme. Sholazar Basin especially - how can you make a lush tropical paridise fit into the theme of 'ice and evil'? I'm looking forward to finding out.
-Seeing Ulduar, if it's made into an instance (which I think it is). Also Uldum in Tanaris, if that's opened up. Some art I saw of Ulduar once (which may have been concept art and may have been from a WoW RPG book) was very cool, with arching stone bridges and purple lightning crackling from place to place. On a non-art-related note, I think that the whole Titans storyline that began in Uldaman rates very high on the 'stuff I wish they'd conclude' list - below the Ashbringer storyline, and above the Eranikus/Emerald Dream storyline.
-Seeing CoT: Stratholme, mainly because I just know that it'll have a similar layout to ingame Strath.
-Seeing the return of Scarlets and the Argent Dawn (please? c'mon, the Scarlets deserve a raid instance at least!) Come to think of it, that's not exactly art-related either.
-Seeing Icecrown Glacier. The defining moment of TBC for me was when I walked through the portal for the first time and realised just how massive it was, then looked out and saw a wave of demons attacking the Alliance and Horde defenders. I think that the defining moment for WLK is going to be walking up Icecrown Glacier for the first time. Not sure why... just a feeling. I really hope they keep the whole spiral-starcase-made-of-ice thing.
Grizzly Hills - that's one of the zones in Northrend, for the uneducated - was just put up on the WLK minisite. Now of course there'd already been stuff announced about this zone, pictures here and there, but there were a couple of new stuffs there, including a nice short movie which showed what seemed to be the highlights of the zone. This got me thinking about the art of WoW.
I was a great fan of the art of vanilla WoW. It seemed... cohesive. It had some very different places, yeah, but all in all it was dark and gritty. I've heard it described as 'gothic fantasy' before, and I think that that's appropriate.
Take a look at, for example, Scholo. Scholomance is a school for necromancers. People learn evil in there. It feels like it, too. It's full of ridiculously ornate candelabras and bubbling alchemical contraptions and heavy wooden bookcases and piles of bones and cast-iron gates and furniture. The floors, walls and ceilings are stone, and there are tapestries and carpets all over the place.
Now compare that to the pink sparkliness of Tempest Keep, or the ridiculous steampunk-esque machines that populate Coilfang. I actually quite like the look of the Tempest Keep raid instance, but... it doesn't feel like WoW should. TBC in general felt wrong - the exception for me was the zones in Quel'thalas - sort of like it was full of weird machines and aliens, rather than kickass dragons and demons and undead. I mean, draenei? What is that? They're blue. And it's not subtle, like night elves are subtlely purple. They're bright freaking blue, and they have hooves, and they have tentacles on their faces. You can't simultaneously slay dragons and be bright blue. It's just not possible.
So, now back to the original point of my post - took long enough. I think that the Blizzard art team is doing an amazing job on the Northrend zones. They all look cold, despite not all being Winterspring. They all look different without sacrificing the overall theme of the expack. They tie in well with existing Azerothian zones without reusing the textures (at least from what I could tell).
Things I'm really looking forward to in WLK, art-wise:
-Seeing the fire effects in Utgarde ingame.
-Seeing the ice caves of Dragonblight ingame.
-Seeing what the team does in Coldarra - I've heard that the level 80 5-man is 'a series of floating rings, magically suspended above the ground.' That sounds like it could be freaking awesome. Especially if you can see off the rings, look from them down onto the zone from, say, one-thousand yards into the air.
-Seeing how Sholazar Basin, Crystalsong Forest, and the Storm Peaks are worked into the overall Northrend theme. Sholazar Basin especially - how can you make a lush tropical paridise fit into the theme of 'ice and evil'? I'm looking forward to finding out.
-Seeing Ulduar, if it's made into an instance (which I think it is). Also Uldum in Tanaris, if that's opened up. Some art I saw of Ulduar once (which may have been concept art and may have been from a WoW RPG book) was very cool, with arching stone bridges and purple lightning crackling from place to place. On a non-art-related note, I think that the whole Titans storyline that began in Uldaman rates very high on the 'stuff I wish they'd conclude' list - below the Ashbringer storyline, and above the Eranikus/Emerald Dream storyline.
-Seeing CoT: Stratholme, mainly because I just know that it'll have a similar layout to ingame Strath.
-Seeing the return of Scarlets and the Argent Dawn (please? c'mon, the Scarlets deserve a raid instance at least!) Come to think of it, that's not exactly art-related either.
-Seeing Icecrown Glacier. The defining moment of TBC for me was when I walked through the portal for the first time and realised just how massive it was, then looked out and saw a wave of demons attacking the Alliance and Horde defenders. I think that the defining moment for WLK is going to be walking up Icecrown Glacier for the first time. Not sure why... just a feeling. I really hope they keep the whole spiral-starcase-made-of-ice thing.
enters a berserker rage!
Why do raid bosses go berserk precisely ten minutes after you enter combat with them? Do they have a hormone imbalance or something?
I'm picturing Leo down at the local chemist, chatting to the guy he gets his prescription from - 'yeah, I still start running really fast six hundred seconds after the guys who are banishing me are killed, but on the plus side, as long as I don't get put into combat I can go out with friends on Saturdays without enraging, so these things must be working.' Then he goes home, eats some leftover pizza, fights over what TV to watch with his demon. Next day he gets up and goes to work - you'd actually be suprised how much being banished in SSC for no particular reason pays.
I wonder if the boss knows he's going to enrage. Like, does he count down the seconds? 'And they wipe... nnnnow.' Or does he kinda guess about it - 'yeah, it's been about... eight minutes now maybe? their raid dps is pretty fast... oh wait, I miscounted, they wipe.' Or maybe he doens't know at all, he's just doing his thing and all of a sudden he gets really angry and kills everyone. Or maybe he blacks out, and when he wakes up the raid is rebuffing and he's back to... standing there waiting to be pulled. 'Huh,' he says. 'I guess the tank disconnected.'
Funny old world, innit.
I'm picturing Leo down at the local chemist, chatting to the guy he gets his prescription from - 'yeah, I still start running really fast six hundred seconds after the guys who are banishing me are killed, but on the plus side, as long as I don't get put into combat I can go out with friends on Saturdays without enraging, so these things must be working.' Then he goes home, eats some leftover pizza, fights over what TV to watch with his demon. Next day he gets up and goes to work - you'd actually be suprised how much being banished in SSC for no particular reason pays.
I wonder if the boss knows he's going to enrage. Like, does he count down the seconds? 'And they wipe... nnnnow.' Or does he kinda guess about it - 'yeah, it's been about... eight minutes now maybe? their raid dps is pretty fast... oh wait, I miscounted, they wipe.' Or maybe he doens't know at all, he's just doing his thing and all of a sudden he gets really angry and kills everyone. Or maybe he blacks out, and when he wakes up the raid is rebuffing and he's back to... standing there waiting to be pulled. 'Huh,' he says. 'I guess the tank disconnected.'
Funny old world, innit.
Saturday, 9 February 2008
Le sigh
So we haven't raided this week due to attendance issues. Here's hoping that we can get enough people on tonight, or it'll be another exciting night of 10-mans! /sigh
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Raiding with Chocolate
If you find yourself getting frustrated, stressed, or plain burnt out during raids, bring a block of chocolate to your next one. It works.
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