Anyone Want to Recruit Me for Warhammer?
So after talking to some people over the past couple days, I've decided I will in fact give Warhammer Online a try. I'll be playing a Zealot if I go Destruction or a Rune Priest if I go Order. Does anyone have a recruit-a-friend invite they could send me for Warhammer? Also, could anyone suggest a good server for me to roll on?
Warhammer Online: Past, Present and Future
I am weak. I am very weak. This new news that came from Mythic today may or may have made me interested trying Warhammer. Anyways, I'll talk about that later. As for right now, I have some questions on why certain things are being treated the way they are.
Why were the Knights of the Blazing Sun and now the Choppa and Slayer seen as "new content"? In all the news posts I read, it says things like "Mythic is adding brand new classes to the game" like it is something new huge. But in actuality, they're not adding anything new, they're just adding back what they had previously cut (yes yes, I know they classes may have had mechanic tweaks or whatever, but they still had them mostly made when the game was still in development). I just don't understand why they're being praised for what they should have shipped the game with. They're not adding to the game, they're completing what should have already been done before the game officially launched.
Also, what is the future for Warhammer players that don't like alts? What is the future for someone who just likes to play one main and never switch? Almost every blogger I subscribe to has at least one and often a multitude of alts.
What is the future of the game beyond the implementation of the Choppa and Slayer? I'm talking about what will there be to do that isn't going to get boring and repetitive. Running the same scenarios again and again gets repetitive. It's why I never would do battlegrounds grinding in WoW. Charging the same keeps again and again in the same ways gets boring after a while as well. Right now, there's only one enemy city to attack (if your realm ever gets the chance) which would lead to it being quite boring. If they ever patch in the other two cities, that will add a little bit of content but since city sieges are few and far between, not enough content.
There's news of this new Darkness Falls style dungeon that will be neat for a while but after a while, I think it'll get boring as well. The raids in WoW get boring but every 6 months or so you get new ones to keep it entertaining.
What will the expansions of Warhammer contain? They can't raise the level cap. That wouldn't be feasible. The kings of the cities are the final boss of the game. They are today, they will be tomorrow and they will be in 5 years. So that means they have to expand horizontally and just add new races, new cities and new classes. This ties back into the fact that I don't like alts. I have one main. Always. So what would expansion content offer for someone like me.
Either way, I think I might be interested in hoping into the game for a 7 day trial or whatever they offer but I have to pick the race/class I want to play. I need your help for this.
I want to be a healer. That's it. I want to stand back from the front lines and heal people. I don't want to do damage, I don't want to be "in the action". I just want to stand back and throw heals until the cows come home. It's what I do best and it is what I enjoy. At the same time, I am used to playing a paladin in WoW. I want to be decently armored. I don't want to be wearing cloth and die to one hit of whatever blinks at me. So what is a class where I can just be resilient as hell, throw heals for eternity and not do any damage?
Anyways, I hope some of you leave some comments and suggestions about topics in this post because I'm really curious.
Away from the Daily Grind
Sorry I haven't been blogging much again. All in all, just nothing much exciting is happening. It has been pretty slow in my world. Ever since I got my 360, I haven't been playing WoW much. I don't feel like getting into the raid grind at the moment (maybe in the future, just not right now) and Rynala doesn't either.
At first, I had found it really hard to break from the MMO addiction. I love having a character I can constantly grow with . With single games, you reach a point when you're at a hard cap and you will never ever get another ounce of power. You maxxed out all your stats, you grabbed the character's ultimate weapons and armor and you finish the game and it's over. When I play MMOs, I may reach a hard cap at one point, but the game will be expanded and I'll be able to grow again.
Either way, I think I've been doing pretty well to break the addiction. There are still some things I'd like to accomplish in WoW, but for the first time in three years, I feel a sense of completeness. The pull is fading. Don't get me wrong, I'm not losing my love for the game, I just no longer feel the need to log in and play all day every day. It feels good to be free. I am in control of my love for the game instead of the game being in control of me.
I've mainly been playing Fable 2 and getting back into Fallout 3. I'm about halfway through Fable and then I hop on Fallout whenever Rynala wants to go play Fable. She's been absolutely loving the game and so have I.
Fallout, on the other hand, is somewhat of a love/hate thing. The story is somewhat interesting but I just grow so tired of the world. I understand what they are trying to portray and I don't think that there is any better way for them to portray it, but it's just... boring to me. Seeing either a bunch of gray buildings or gray rocks or gray trees or gray corridors or gray monsters. It is very dry. I can only play it in short spurts because I just get burned out.
I have some blog posts subjects that I still want to write about but work has just been kicking my ass lately and I've had little time to do anything.
The new Warhammer announcements came out today, I plan to write about my thoughts on those right after I get this posted as I think it deserves it's own post.
The Major Flaw With XBox Live
So I've been playing a great deal of Rock Band 2 on the 360 this past week. Fable 2 just came in from Gamefly as well so I expect that will be taking up a lot of my time. I know that I'm a bit late on jumping into the next-gen console bandwagon, but the PC game front is pretty quite right now and for the immediate future. I do though have another write up to do on a game a played recently.
Anyway, all this gaming on the 360 has really opened my eyes to what the major flaw is with XBox Live. Had I not come from a strong PC gaming background it would have never bothered me as I probably wouldn't have noticed it. XBox Live seems to have a huge focus on bringing friends together to play games online but it lacks what I believe is a very important aspect of this: community tools.
Microsoft needs to take a look at what Valve did with the Steam Communities and just copy it. They could give it some hip name or something but either way, they need community tools.
It seems one of the big complaints by people I know is that the XBox Live friends list caps at 100 friends. This wouldn't be nearly a problem if they had the ability to create communities. At the current time everyone is just having to friend up everyone in their communities to keep contact on XBox. The implementation of Steam-style community tools wouldn't take much retooling and would be a major boon for XBox live. The friends list could take role of just being your more personal contacts the community would be your more associate-like contacts.
All in all, I believe the Steam Community is flawlessly executed in its present iteration. I would love to be able to have XBox community tabs for each community I frequent such as Gamers With Jobs, Something Awful, or a group from my WoW server.
Please Microsoft, please add communities.
I Think Consoles Intimidate Me (A Rant on Social Gaming)
So I picked up an XBox 360 yesterday and I've found that I'm having a hard time adjusting to playing a console again.
I think it is just that I play MMOs too much. For the past five years, 95% of my gaming time has been in an MMO. For the years before that, 75% of my gaming time was in MUDs. Sure, I'd play a bit more console games before then, but I always had a console and TV in the room with my computer. Now the computer is in the office and the TV and console are in the living room so I'm playing one or the other, not both anymore.
Looking through my gaming collection, I find most of it is made up of various RPGs. From the Final Fantasy's to Chrono Cross to Shadow Hearts to .Hack to Kingdom Hearts, most of my previous console games are JRPGs. The action games I play such as Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty are all superior to me on the computer, but even those games fight for computer time vs MMOs.
All in all, the last decade of my life has been dominated by very social gaming. Now don't get me wrong, I understand that the XBox 360 has some social networking tools, but the pale in comparison to those on the computer. The last couple consoles I have owned have been the Playstation, the Playstation 2, and the Wii (which I later sold because it is a terrible console and Nintendo hates gamers). None of those three consoles are known for social gaming. They are all for either single player games or playing games right next to someone else in the room.
With the time I've put into the 360 so far, when I start playing a game I feel a strange lack of satisfaction because I don't feel a community around me like I do when I play MMOs. I've even seen this as of lately when I'd try to play a single player game on the PC like The Witcher of Fallout 3. I'll put in an hour or two in the game and then just start thinking about how I wish I could be chatting with my buddies in WoW. Granted, if I go log into WoW, it would be very unlikely I got anything accomplished or even if I did any actually talking with friends. But I still have that feeling of community just being in the game. MMOs are the only way I feel like games are alive anymore.
This is all really putting a damper on my playing of other games.
Back To Blogging
I know, I know, I haven't been updating as much as I should be. It's hard to get back into the swing of things after so much time off. As of lately, I've been just doing the normal business on WoW as well as the occasional other game thrown in. The main offenders are Left 4 Dead at home and Nethack at work.
As for future outlook, I'm hoping to pick up Lord of the Rings: Conquest as well as Red Alert 3 sometime soon.
WoW has been going decently. Rynala and I have been just finishing out our quests in Icecrown. We ran the last half of a 10man Naxx last week where she was able to pick up some upgrades. On Tuesday, I ran a 25man Obsidian Sanctum PUG and she was #3 on DPS pulling a steady 3000 DPS for the entire instance. Considering that her gear is mainly blues and crafted or rep epics, I think she's doing really well. I also have to keep in mind that she's only been playing for a little over four months. The progress she has made as still a new player is fantastic. I'm so proud of her.
I have a couple blog posts planned for this week if I can just stop being lazy.
A Look At Future Raids: Ulduar
So the other day after I wrote my last post on the joys of being unguilded due to the "set your own difficulty" of WotLK's raids I saw some of the news from the blues about the patch 3.1 raid: Ulduar.
Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.
That being said, there's going to be a LOT of encounters to test in both 10 and 25 player modes. There will also be a whole lot of "hard modes" and achievements to test. We're shooting for most all of the encounters to have "hard modes" that allow raids to increase the challenge and reward level if they're up to it. We're pretty pleased with how Sartharion and his drakes worked, and we're going to expand on that idea extensively in Ulduar and future raids.
So it looks like the Obsidian Sanctum trend will continue. While the difficulty of the raid will go up, I expect it will not go up nearly as much as the hardcore would like. If comparing it to the school system, I think the hardcore see the current raids as Kindergarten/First Grade level and would prefer AP Calculus level raids. We won't see that.
I am overjoyed about this. Even on my server plenty of my friends on the top guilds complain about the lack of difficulty in the raids yet none of them have finished The Twilight Zone achievement. Apparently to them raids are only fun if you have to bang your head against the wall for two plus weeks to get a boss down. I like this "set your own difficulty" style of raiding because if you're running with a pug or lesser geared/skilled group, you can just go fight him normal but if you're using a solid top-of-their-game group you can push yourselves and get that hard version. Artificial difficulty is still difficulty in my eyes. Apparently a lot do not see it this way.
I am glad, however, that Blizzard is going to reward doing the harder difficulty. In the current tier, Obsidian Sanctum is the only raid that has a "hard mode". All of the other ones just give achievements. I would like it if for example if your guild succeeded in the Heigan dance every week without a single person taking damage, you would get an extra piece of loot off the boss. It looks like this will be the goal with Ulduar; a lot more reward for challenging yourself.
One last thing, I would like for people to get past the stigma of "10mans should be the easy version and 25man should be the hard versions". Blizzard stated many times that by making 10/25man versions of each raid it wasn't their plan to scale the difficulty differently between them. The intention was that no matter if you're in a small guild or a big guild, you can see the same raids at the same difficulty level as each other. 10mans just require less people. The difficulty of 25mans isn't in the encounters, it's in getting 25people together to run the raids and holding them accountable.
The flip side to this all is that often times the 10man fights end up having a little more challenge to them because with less people in the raid, there is less room for error. If one DPS dies to the Heigan dance in 25, it isn't a critical loss as there are 14-16 or so others. If one DPS screws up and dies in 10man, there are only 4 or so others so it has a much bigger impact.
My Favorite Thing About WotLK: Being Unguilded
We are almost two months into Wrath of the Lich King. People are once again getting settled into their routine. Most people are level 80 by now. This time, things are a little different for me.
For a few months before Burning Crusade, I had big plans. I had shelved my holy raiding priest and leveled a hunter to farm gear for an upcoming paladin. As a priest, I had raiding all the way through the initial Naxxramas bosses but I really couldn't get behind the healing style of the priest. That added to the lack of survivability made me want to make a change so I dedicated myself to leveling a Blood Elf Paladin at Burning Crusade launch.
This was still before the accelerated leveling for level 1-60 so it still took at least a decent amount of time to reach the level cap. I had a goal in sight though. Burning Crusade was still all about raiding guilds trying to get server firsts and be the best on their server. I sped through all the Burning Crusade content as fast as possible to reach that level cap. I was the 7th blood elf to 70 on my server. I jumped into raiding the day I hit 70. The guild's main tank formed a group to speed through Arcatraz to finish up the Karazhan achievement. That was hell in itself as Arcatraz was a truly difficult instance at launch and complicated by the fact I was in terrible gear due to the lack of holy paladin quest items.
Out of the 20 months the Burning Crusade was around, I was only not raiding for about six of those months. There was the initial month for leveling, a two month period when I went to play Lord of the Rings Online, one month where I had to work night shift so couldn't play WoW at all, and then the last two months of the expansion I spent unguilded. If you wanted to see the end game content of Burning Crusade, unguilded is the last thing you wanted to be.
I know my server has always been a bit behind progression-wise, but I'm not sure quite how far. There weren't very many, if any, Karazhan PUGs being run until about the launch of Zul'aman. Very few Zul'aman pugs were run and even less Tempest Keep/Serpentshrine pugs. Anything beyond that was nonexistent for PUGs. If you expected to see past tier 5, you had better be in a guild.
Now I look at Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum. Less than a month after launch, PUGs are being run of those. A LOT of them. No matter what time of day you play, you can probably get PUGs for those raids. In my opinion, this is Blizzard's greatest success. This is also something the hardcore despise. The hardcore don't want these instances pugable because they feel it lessens their accomplishments. I remember being that same mindset.
My hope is that Blizzard keeps up this design choice. Keep the instances in the lower end of difficulty and make the higher end of the spectrum be special challenges for gear and achievements. This rewards everyone and benefits all players (even though the hardcore still don't like that). I still think the best implementation if this is seen via the drakes on Sartharion in Obsidian Sanctum.
In 25 man, if you kill him with one drake up, you get an extra piece of loot. Two drakes gets you the extra piece of standard loot and a piece of the next tier quality loot. Three drakes gets you those extra two pieces and a black drake mount. The difficulty increases dramatically when you add drakes to the fight. No drakes makes it a fairly easy fight. New players to raiding may have to attempt him four or five times to get it but hardcore players should never wipe on the encounter. Gone are the days of the original Four Horsemen or pre-3.0 M'uru
Who does this benefit most? People like me. Now, I don't have to worry about the stresses of guild drama or a strict raiding schedule. Most of my friends on the server are in a variety of different guilds anyway, so we have a private chat channel where we chat most of the time. Now I can log on whenever I want and still be able to go see the content that is out there. I hope Ulduar continues this trend by further refining the Obsidian Sanctum style difficutly/reward ladder.