Blizzcon Thoughts

A lot has changed since the last time I wrote here. I went to Blizzcon. My Warhammer account was suspended after the trial because of some credit card confusion, and I never bothered to look into it. I traveled to Canada for my job. The 3.0 patch was released. I started a position on a new team at work. A new president was elected. It's all been a blur really. But since this is mostly where I wrote about WoW stuff, I'll mention my trip to Anaheim.

Blizzcon was awesome. Tons of fun. While there really weren't any bombshell Blizzard revelations, I did get to play all three games under development:

Starcraft II - This brought back so many memories for me. Starcraft is so old now, I forgot what it felt like when everything was fresh and new. I was really surprised at how polished it was. Really fun to play. As part of going to Blizzcon, I did find out I'll get to play in the Starcraft II beta whenever it starts!

Diablo III - While I did pay a little Diablo I and II, I never got too deep into them. The Diablo III demo was awesome as well. The guy sitting next to me actually got lucky enough to find some rare in-game item and won a poster signed by the devs. /jealous

WotLK beta - Since there's so much information about the Wrath beta out there already and the expansion was so close, I really wasn't all that excited about this. You got to log in and pick a pre-made level 80. My first time in line, I picked a mage. The first thing I noticed was the graphical overhaul. I didn't realize how much of an upgrade that really was. The pre-made was frost spec'd. I didn't have much time, so I just flew around aimlessly until I came upon an area with level 78 elites. I forgot how much fun it was to endlessly kite mobs with frost spells. Mirror image is pretty sweet. I also really like the random instant-fireballs from the Brain Freeze talent. My second time through, I went with a warrior. He was arms spec, which was actually pretty lame. I flew up to the frozen throne, but that was about it. The third time, I went in as a death knight. Talk about overwhelming. It was pretty fun, but I was just randomly pushing buttons. Those things are seriously hard to play without starting them from the beginning.

During the convention and also at Disneyland the next day (we were right there! How could we not go??), I thought a lot about what class I wanted to devote my time to. I was most assuredly done with the protection warrior. However, the prot warrior in Wrath has transformed into an entirely different class than the warrior in BC. On the other hand, while mages have historically been screwed in the DPS department, they finally got a lot of love in the latter stages of the beta.

In the end, all I could think of were the times where tanking was just plain awesome. I thought of how much fun it was to figure out the best place to use each ability, the way to generate the most threat possible, where to find the best gear, how to throw bonuses to the wind and cram +STA gems into pretty much every single socket I had, and how to best combine gear into avoidance, effective health, threat, and dps gear sets. I thought of the first time I killed each boss in Kara and the first few in ZA. I remembered what it felt like to successfully tank and defeat Magtheridon with a random, mismatched raid I assembled for my title. I remembered why I originally left my DPS/CC/Vending role to take up a sword and shield and be the first one in the raid to charge into a group of elite mobs or the boss. I remembered all those things and knew I had to try and keep them in spite of all the crap that goes along with tanking. What is it exactly that makes us forget the sharpness of painful memories and remember the good ones? As time passed, my tank-burnout has faded remarkably well, much of it credited to several incredible changes to the class mechanics.

That's right. I'm keeping the warrior.