Warcraft Diary
Jan. 29th, 2007 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayRumpelstilt has now been Beyond the Dark Portal. Yahoo!
Man, it's been ages since I've seen wandering monsters that showed up as level: skull. Refreshing, to actually have things to fear again. Luckily, they are fairly easy to see coming and avoid -- they're the size of freakin' skyscrapers! They also shake the ground nearby, and their ambient sound fx change subtly when they get close to you. It only took one stomping-flat for me to learn that when you hear that noise, you run, no matter whether you're already in combat or what.
The loot in the Outland is stunning. I'm back to a situation where a quest reward is usually better than what I have equipped -- and remember that much of my equipment is blue and purple stuff from the Auction House! After one evening, I've alread boosted my spell damage, spell crit chance, and my stats by significant amounts. (Later: by the end of the weekend, my chance to land a critical with a fire spell (which is the bulk of what I do) is just shy of 20%!)
Rumpel used to be part of Irrational Fear, a guild that was mostly IG game design folks. But the guild has been languishing for some time, and the guild head disbanded it recently in a momentof passion. It does make the idea of changing servers more appealing. Is anyone reading this playing Alliance on a server that is accepting character transfers?
---
Bombing Run missions are, as the say, da bomb! All the fun of flying around on a Griffin, combined with the fun of dropping bombs on people's heads.
The quest *after* the second bombing run mission, however, was situationally borked today. Technically, it was probably completable, but very difficult in practice. The mission structure was quite standard: "Kill the Big Bad and 10 of his minions." Usually is such missions, the minions are the easy part -- but not today. You see, this particular mission had at least 20 players trying to complete it at once. As it turned out the Boss had a higher respawn rate than his minions. So every (infrequent) time a minion appeared, the nearest player would immediately mug it. But to actually get 10 minions would take hours of annoying 'gameplay' under that kind of competitive pressure. I decided to give it a miss for now, and come back some time after it cools down.
Rumpelstilt got a weird in-game email, that I'm pretty sure was a fraud attempt. It was written as if it was an game-generated quest-related email from the Argent Dawn (an actual faction), offering me a 'useful piece of equipment'. But it was badly spelled, in the way of your typical Nigerian email, and the attached 'brightly wrapped present' was C.O.D. for 100 gold. Rather than open the attachment and send this joker a pile of gold, I reported it to a GM. He said he would take "appropriate actions".
I've started Marfisa down the path of jewelcrafting. I would have done so with my higher-level character, but that turned out to be inconvenient. For some reason, the only jewelcraft trainers in the world are located in the home cities of the new races. Odd decision. It's not like people aren't already heavily incentivized to go to those places. And the other capitol cities (cleverly) were built with lots of not-yet-occupied storefronts, so it would be easy enough to find a spot for them.
Implaq the Warrior went into her first dungeon, Ragefire Chasm, along with a Priest played by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
herooftheage, a Rogue played by rickthefightguy, and two pick-ups, another Warrior and a Mage. Things were a bit chaotic at first, but reasonably successful. After a while, the other Warrior had to leave before we were done. Interestingly, the party performance actually improved without him. He had been the main source of the chaos, and once he was gone, we stayed almost constantly in control of the situation.
As a player, this was my first real experience taking on the role of Tank. The bulk of my experience has been playing Mage and Healer classes, so this was very different, but cool. There were only a few instances where I briefly lost aggro on one of the monsters and he went for the mage -- but every time, I managed to get the mob in question focused on me again within a few seconds. Acting as Tank took up so much of my attention that I had none left over to pay attention to my own health bar -- but that's what the Priest is meant to be doing, andherooftheage did a fine job and never let me die. I eventually started using my Bloodrage skill (trade Health for Rage) pretty much as often as I could, since my Health was being kept up handily by the Priest. Tanking *without* a skilled Healer must be quite a challenge...
---
At the back of Silvermoon City (the Blood Elf capitol), Marfisa discovered a mysterious looking "teleportal device". She frobbed it (because she could) and found herself in the Undercity (capitol city of the Forsaken), hundreds of miles away! Luckily, it was a two-way device. So this gets added to my mental "subway connectivity" map of Azeroth.
When I mentioned this toherooftheage, he asked if it looked like Gnomish technology (since they've been known to build similar devices). He asked in a somewhat concerned tone, since Gnomish Engineering is notoriously unreliable. I replied that it didn't, it was clearly of Elven Magic -- not that that was necessarily *better*, come to think of it. Maybe the Gnomes don't deserve their bad reputation so much. Sure, their work often backfires. And it's undeniably true that a recent (historically speaking) screw-up destroyed their entire capitol city. But when the *Elves* screw up big time, they've been known to accidentally summon Elder Gods that end up ravaging an entire continent or two. So who is really the bigger threat here?
---
I see that Blizzard has made a long-overdue usability upgrade to their quest log. What were formerly called "Elite" quests are now referred to as "Group" quests, thus clearly conveying the fundamental pointam which is that you shouldn't try and tackle them on your own. Now they just need to add that label to most of their escort quests...
---
There are some interesting new monster mechanics in the Outlands, that cause a fire mage like Rumpelstilt to have to change his strategies. He prefers to open every fight with a spell which takes a long time to cast, but does massive damage; if this can be done before the monster notices you, you have a significant advantage in the rest of the fight. But some monsters in the Outland *can't* be engaged from a distance. They act like sandworms, and only emerge from the ground (and become targetable) when they are very close to you. You can tell roughly where they are, by the clouds of dust they raise on the surface. But you can't attack them until they have already decided to attack *you*.
There's also a new "carrion" mechanic. Buzzards in the Outland have a pretty standard aggro radius -- they don't become hostile until they get pretty close to you. But they appear to have a quite *large* "detect fresh carrion" radius. If you kill a monster anywhere within a considerably large distance of a buzzard, it will immediately zoom over to inspect the corpse -- and unless you move *very* fast, that will bring it within aggro radius of you. So if you kill monsters any where near buzzards (including other buzzards), you have to be prepared for the possibility of one fight turning into two or three, with no time to recuperate between them.
On Saturday, Rumpelstilt had his first Dungeon experience in the Outlands -- the Ramparts of Hellfire Citadel. It was a very challenging instance, and the group wasn't terribly cohesive. We wiped many times before the end, with at least four wipes on the end boss alone Killing dragons sure is hard. But it was satisying when he finally went down.
Turning in the quest for that instance brought me to level 62, and also to Honored status with the Honor Hold faction. The goodies I got brought my critical strike rating into the vicinity of 25%! Interestingly, I'm starting to put less value on my Combustion 3alent that gives me a better chance at criticals until I've gotten a few of them -- since I get so many crits on my own, Combustion has much less effect on my damage throughput than it used to. Maybe that means I should start using it whenever it's available, instead of saving it up for just the big fights...
Finished up the night by bringing out Implaq to helppatrissimo on his first RFC run, along with herooftheage and one other guildie. The group was Warrior (me), Paladin, Druid, and Shaman. With practically everyone able to heal, and no clothies, there was no real need to tank. There was only one death, when I pulled a bigger group than I should have, but it went quite smoothly other than that.
Man, it's been ages since I've seen wandering monsters that showed up as level: skull. Refreshing, to actually have things to fear again. Luckily, they are fairly easy to see coming and avoid -- they're the size of freakin' skyscrapers! They also shake the ground nearby, and their ambient sound fx change subtly when they get close to you. It only took one stomping-flat for me to learn that when you hear that noise, you run, no matter whether you're already in combat or what.
The loot in the Outland is stunning. I'm back to a situation where a quest reward is usually better than what I have equipped -- and remember that much of my equipment is blue and purple stuff from the Auction House! After one evening, I've alread boosted my spell damage, spell crit chance, and my stats by significant amounts. (Later: by the end of the weekend, my chance to land a critical with a fire spell (which is the bulk of what I do) is just shy of 20%!)
Rumpel used to be part of Irrational Fear, a guild that was mostly IG game design folks. But the guild has been languishing for some time, and the guild head disbanded it recently in a momentof passion. It does make the idea of changing servers more appealing. Is anyone reading this playing Alliance on a server that is accepting character transfers?
---
Bombing Run missions are, as the say, da bomb! All the fun of flying around on a Griffin, combined with the fun of dropping bombs on people's heads.
The quest *after* the second bombing run mission, however, was situationally borked today. Technically, it was probably completable, but very difficult in practice. The mission structure was quite standard: "Kill the Big Bad and 10 of his minions." Usually is such missions, the minions are the easy part -- but not today. You see, this particular mission had at least 20 players trying to complete it at once. As it turned out the Boss had a higher respawn rate than his minions. So every (infrequent) time a minion appeared, the nearest player would immediately mug it. But to actually get 10 minions would take hours of annoying 'gameplay' under that kind of competitive pressure. I decided to give it a miss for now, and come back some time after it cools down.
Rumpelstilt got a weird in-game email, that I'm pretty sure was a fraud attempt. It was written as if it was an game-generated quest-related email from the Argent Dawn (an actual faction), offering me a 'useful piece of equipment'. But it was badly spelled, in the way of your typical Nigerian email, and the attached 'brightly wrapped present' was C.O.D. for 100 gold. Rather than open the attachment and send this joker a pile of gold, I reported it to a GM. He said he would take "appropriate actions".
I've started Marfisa down the path of jewelcrafting. I would have done so with my higher-level character, but that turned out to be inconvenient. For some reason, the only jewelcraft trainers in the world are located in the home cities of the new races. Odd decision. It's not like people aren't already heavily incentivized to go to those places. And the other capitol cities (cleverly) were built with lots of not-yet-occupied storefronts, so it would be easy enough to find a spot for them.
Implaq the Warrior went into her first dungeon, Ragefire Chasm, along with a Priest played by
herooftheage, a Rogue played by rickthefightguy, and two pick-ups, another Warrior and a Mage. Things were a bit chaotic at first, but reasonably successful. After a while, the other Warrior had to leave before we were done. Interestingly, the party performance actually improved without him. He had been the main source of the chaos, and once he was gone, we stayed almost constantly in control of the situation. As a player, this was my first real experience taking on the role of Tank. The bulk of my experience has been playing Mage and Healer classes, so this was very different, but cool. There were only a few instances where I briefly lost aggro on one of the monsters and he went for the mage -- but every time, I managed to get the mob in question focused on me again within a few seconds. Acting as Tank took up so much of my attention that I had none left over to pay attention to my own health bar -- but that's what the Priest is meant to be doing, and
herooftheage did a fine job and never let me die. I eventually started using my Bloodrage skill (trade Health for Rage) pretty much as often as I could, since my Health was being kept up handily by the Priest. Tanking *without* a skilled Healer must be quite a challenge...---
At the back of Silvermoon City (the Blood Elf capitol), Marfisa discovered a mysterious looking "teleportal device". She frobbed it (because she could) and found herself in the Undercity (capitol city of the Forsaken), hundreds of miles away! Luckily, it was a two-way device. So this gets added to my mental "subway connectivity" map of Azeroth.
When I mentioned this to
herooftheage, he asked if it looked like Gnomish technology (since they've been known to build similar devices). He asked in a somewhat concerned tone, since Gnomish Engineering is notoriously unreliable. I replied that it didn't, it was clearly of Elven Magic -- not that that was necessarily *better*, come to think of it. Maybe the Gnomes don't deserve their bad reputation so much. Sure, their work often backfires. And it's undeniably true that a recent (historically speaking) screw-up destroyed their entire capitol city. But when the *Elves* screw up big time, they've been known to accidentally summon Elder Gods that end up ravaging an entire continent or two. So who is really the bigger threat here?---
I see that Blizzard has made a long-overdue usability upgrade to their quest log. What were formerly called "Elite" quests are now referred to as "Group" quests, thus clearly conveying the fundamental pointam which is that you shouldn't try and tackle them on your own. Now they just need to add that label to most of their escort quests...
---
There are some interesting new monster mechanics in the Outlands, that cause a fire mage like Rumpelstilt to have to change his strategies. He prefers to open every fight with a spell which takes a long time to cast, but does massive damage; if this can be done before the monster notices you, you have a significant advantage in the rest of the fight. But some monsters in the Outland *can't* be engaged from a distance. They act like sandworms, and only emerge from the ground (and become targetable) when they are very close to you. You can tell roughly where they are, by the clouds of dust they raise on the surface. But you can't attack them until they have already decided to attack *you*.
There's also a new "carrion" mechanic. Buzzards in the Outland have a pretty standard aggro radius -- they don't become hostile until they get pretty close to you. But they appear to have a quite *large* "detect fresh carrion" radius. If you kill a monster anywhere within a considerably large distance of a buzzard, it will immediately zoom over to inspect the corpse -- and unless you move *very* fast, that will bring it within aggro radius of you. So if you kill monsters any where near buzzards (including other buzzards), you have to be prepared for the possibility of one fight turning into two or three, with no time to recuperate between them.
On Saturday, Rumpelstilt had his first Dungeon experience in the Outlands -- the Ramparts of Hellfire Citadel. It was a very challenging instance, and the group wasn't terribly cohesive. We wiped many times before the end, with at least four wipes on the end boss alone Killing dragons sure is hard. But it was satisying when he finally went down.
Turning in the quest for that instance brought me to level 62, and also to Honored status with the Honor Hold faction. The goodies I got brought my critical strike rating into the vicinity of 25%! Interestingly, I'm starting to put less value on my Combustion 3alent that gives me a better chance at criticals until I've gotten a few of them -- since I get so many crits on my own, Combustion has much less effect on my damage throughput than it used to. Maybe that means I should start using it whenever it's available, instead of saving it up for just the big fights...
Finished up the night by bringing out Implaq to help
patrissimo on his first RFC run, along with herooftheage and one other guildie. The group was Warrior (me), Paladin, Druid, and Shaman. With practically everyone able to heal, and no clothies, there was no real need to tank. There was only one death, when I pulled a bigger group than I should have, but it went quite smoothly other than that.