WotLK - A Week's First Impressions

In short, I LOVE it. The areas are beautiful. The quests are fresh and interesting without being too gimmicky. Story lines draw me in much better than anything in BC did. Quest giver NPC's actually have personality. The music is perfect, the best I've heard in WoW. Instance runs aren't too difficult and can be done without a 2-3 hour commitment. Like my good druid friend said the other night, "I don't even feel like I'm leveling. I'm just having fun playing a game."

Seriously, Blizzard did this one right. I've been pleasantly surprised and impressed by Wrath. I've had more "Woah...awesome!" moments than I've had with this game in a very long time. The quests have probably been the biggest surprise for me. Blizz really put some focus on giving us better quests than "kill X of these..." or "kill these until you get the item that has a 2% drop rate."

I know a lot of players just made a goal to get to 80 as fast as possible. I think that would be a mistake. There is so much here to enjoy. We'll all be raiding at 80 soon enough.

Why I Will be Tanking in Wrath

Yep, I changed my mind, but Blizzard really came through for protection warriors. I expected them to fix a few things for Wrath, but I never expected them to totally revolutionize the way the class was played in such a great way. The protection warrior changes in Wrath are absolutely fantastic. These are the things that made me love tanking again:


Charging in Defensive Stance - At first, I thought the warbringer talent wasn't that big of a deal and would mostly help warriors while farming in their prot gear. I was wrong. It's completely awesome, it's a great rage generator, and I find myself using it quite often.

AoE Tanking - Shockwave and Unlimited-Target Thunder Clap. Not to mention glyphs like this. It's about time. I can't explain how satisfying it was to run through heroic shattered halls and mount hyjal while trying these out.

Removal of crushing blows/Better tanking rotation - In BC, warriors had the most ridiculous ability rotation of any class in the game, especially for bosses. First, you constantly kept your global cooldown occupied with this: SS->rev->dev->dev all while spamming shield block (not on the GCD) every few seconds to keep from getting crushed. On top of that, there was this list of other stuff to keep up with: renew tclap and possibly demo shout on the boss every minute, renew commanding shout every two minutes, hit trinkets every 2 minutes, drink pots, use healthstones, and watch for the best place to hit last stand and shield wall.

Thankfully, Blizzard recognized this. Crushing blows are history, and shield block is now on a 60 second cooldown and now gives a really nice block value bonus. We also got a new talent that keeps things a little more interesting by creating a random chance for SS to be refreshed and free!

All Content in 10-man form - I was really excited about finding this one out. I have always had a lot more fun in 10-man raids than 25-man ordeals. It's very cool being able to see all the content without having to necessarily jump that hurdle from 10 to 25. I'll still eventually want to check out the 25-man versions, but at least I won't feel like I have to just to see everything.

Dual Specs - When the rumors for dual specs came out, it was too good to be true. But now we've all heard the devs promise this to us, and it sounds nothing short of amazing. Being able to instantly switch over from Fury to Protection wherever I am is revolutionary. If I'm in a raid and there are too many tanks, it's not a problem anymore. It apparently will even remember your glyphs!

Reasonable Threat vs. Avoidance trade-off: Much of the warrior community debated this for years. Many protection warriors (me included) felt that it wasn't fair that they always had to significantly 'downgear' when fighting anything other than the hardest boss they were currently working on, lest they be completely rage starved and the raid get angry at them for not pumping out enough threat. The argument was that DPS classes really didn't have this problem. I think most of us were actually fine with needing several 'threat' type gear pieces, but I always felt that I was having to spend too much time constantly adjusting my gear to find that perfect balance depending on if I was in a heroic, Kara, or SSC. Not finding that balance either resulted in getting squashed too quickly or not getting hit hard enough, which was sometimes a very slim window, especially if running with a weaker healer and insane DPS. Some warriors felt special by having that extra challenge. I thought it got incredibly old.

This problem has essentially been eliminated. The concept of having to maximize threat is pretty much gone since defensive stance gives more base threat and all classes were basically given Blessing of Salavation permenantly. Outgearing content is not really an issue anymore with Damage Shield. Rage starvation is much less of an issue in general, with several glyphs to help out with it. I'm guessing we'll still have our separate avoidance and threat gear to some extent, but the trade-off should be much more reasonable and won't require so much attention, which is fine with me. There's plenty of other more interesting stuff out there to concentrate on.

Expansion Eve

I was kinda hoping for a slightly sentimental last goodbye to Outlands tonight - to hearth to Shatt one more time and maybe fly over Zangarmarsh, Nagrand, and Hellfire (probably too lazy for any further out than that). In 24 hours, all these zones will fall away into insignificance, only visited by players passing through to level 80 or else occasionally by those who want to take a quick trip for fun or an achievement. I thought maybe I would do one last daily bombing run or perhaps even a quick heroic before I respec'd to fury and went through my gear inventory to decide what gear I would be using to level with.

But of course, the servers are down. Thanks, Blizz. You guys really know how to keep your reputation up for being rock solid at when crunch time hits. It's true that BC has really been stale the last several months, especially before the 3.0 patch, but I had a lot of great times in Outlands. Anyway, I guess I'll do an abbreviated /farewell tomorrow when I get home from work and log off in front of the boat that will take me to Northrend. After that, it's off to a midnight release! ...followed by a really, really long day at work, which I couldn't take off.

So worth it.

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.

WoW Off-Season and Warhammer

It's been over a week since I've even logged into WoW. Even then, it was just to do some mindless dailies on my mage. I got bored and didn't even finish all of them on the isle. In preparation for the pre-Wrath patch, I dropped skinning and power-leveled herbalism to 375. Once it actually hits, I'll drop mining and pick up inscription.

I haven't even really been motivated to log in and check out Brewfest. Aside from being busier than normal with RL stuff, I've also been playing my bright wizard in Warhammer and having a lot more fun than I thought I would. Mythic seems to have gotten the glass cannon DPS class right, unlike Blizzard. The damage is aboslutely ridiculous, and I die in about 2 hits from any melee class. I have a feeling they'll get nerfed a bit. During one of the last RvR (like WoW BG's) scenarios I ran, I did 3 times the amount of damage than the second place person in there. Granted, I was at the level cap for that zone and most others were several ranks below me, but still...that's an extremely wide gap. As I walk around incinerating trolls and searing monsters to a crisp before they even touch me, I get a feel of what it must be like to be a Warlock in WoW. It feels good to be OP.

The game isn't perfect. It's still somewhat buggy. When I root something, my screen shows it as still following me, so I can't tell where it's actually been rooted until after the root breaks. Quests are sometimes tedious and annoying to figure out exactly what it's trying to have you do. The interface itself tends to feel clunky at times, certainly not as polished as WoW. I'm still enjoying it, so I'll keep playing and see how it goes.

I've tossed around the thought of reversing my decision and pushing onward into Wrath with my warrior as my main, especially with things like removal of tclap limit, general increasing of damage dealt, removal of crushing blows, aoe ability, etc. It looks like Blizzard is finally coming through for the prot warriors. In the end, though, I think I would still get burned out. Raid tanking can be very rewarding but takes too much commitment for me.

Blizzcon is coming up very soon. It's gonna be an awesome trip - can't wait!

Not much else to add. It's very much WoW off-season. Even PvP is basically worthless since it was recently announced that honor points are being reset for the expansion. I'm guessing patch 3.0 will hit either next Tuesday or the week after, which will give a month to mess around with it before the big event November 13. Until then, I'll keep running around in Warhammer.

Why I Won't be Tanking in Wrath

My thoughts on playing a warrior tank have really boiled down to two things:

1.) I have no interest in being an off-tank. Ever.
2.) I don't necessarily want to be the main tank for every single raid I go to, and I don't always want all the extra responsibilities that fall on the MT position.

These statements do not exist well with each other.

Put a different way - I don't want to tank half-way, but tanking all-out is just too demanding to keep up. At least, not as long as I want to have a life outside of raiding.

You can't be a raid's MT only when it's convenient for you. A boss tank's consistent attendance is probably more important than any other position for most fights. It's hard enough to work up to a MT spot to begin with - if you miss a week or two, you'll probably find yourself replaced. WotLK will likely be this way, too. Guilds put an awful lot of reliance on one or two main tanks. It's not really their fault; the game was just designed that way. I really liked being that tank. It was a lot of fun, and I got very good at my role. But I realize I can't have it both ways.

That's why I've all but finally decided that my mage will be the first one I take to Northrend. I'm sure I'll still take my warrior to 80 to satisfy the occasional urge to tank, but my main activity will be burning, freezing, and blasting mobs to pieces. I'm looking forward to the change of pace. Now I just have to figure out whether to take up enchanting or inscription...

WoW is Boring

It's been over three weeks since the last time I went on a raid -- the longest I've gone in over 8 months. I didn't realize how little time I've spent logged in until yesterday when I discovered that I've had the same Flask of Fort buff for the last two weeks.

I am absolutely amazed with how quickly the game has gone from immensely fun and satisfying to painfully boring, meaningless, and empty. A lot of it is definitely due to WotLK rapidly approaching. I remember feeling this same way in the months before BC was released. Even still, a big part of why I think I've dropped off the raiding calendar is the guild.

Last night, the guild was in Black Temple for the first time. I didn't sign up because there were already three other tanks on the list, as usual. I logged in to check some mail and got an invite -- "Can you come in to help clear trash?" Great, now I really am just the guild trash b****. I accepted just because I wanted the chance to say I've been inside BT. After getting summoned and being useless for ten minutes since I wasn't even given a dedicated tank target, we were at a boss. I got another whisper, "Thanks for coming. Would keep you if this boss needed more than one tank." I told him I was probably done with tanking and logged out. And people wonder why there is a 'tank shortage'. It's because there are plenty of spots for tanks in 5-man opportunities, but those spots do not scale with 10 and 25-man raids.

It's sad, really, thinking about how much fun it used to be. All that effort put into this character going to waste on trash mobs. Not exactly how I would have imagined my time in Outlands would end. At least I had a blast while it lasted.

There are good things about it I suppose. I have time to do other things and kill time with other games. Warhammer is coming out soon, so I'll be trying it out. It's nice to have a break from raid schedules. November will be here before we know it, and it will start all over again.