War, war never changes.

In which history repeats itself for the upteenth time.

WoD launch was staggered, as usual, where the EU got first dibs.  Well, more like they are the guinea pigs for the west.  To get access to the new content, you’re sent to the Blasted Lands and then to meet Khadgar.  This NPC is a bottleneck as you need to click on him to proceed.  Blizz, in their wisdom, put a buffer around him so that you can’t stand on him and a larger buffer than auto-dismounts you.  What you end up with is a few hundred people in orbit around an NPC.  Still…. issues.

End result is that he’s cast mirror image and has multiple clones.  Yay?

And this is before even logging into the game.  I’ve mentioned that Stormrage is an old server (launch) and that it’s heavy on alliance (something like 90%), which causes tons of fun.  Stormrage has been brought down multiple times, queues are massive (over 1200 at 9EST), disconnects are all over the place (which compounds the queue issues) and just zoning through the portal seems to be an event in itself.

But hey, wait a couple days.  There are going to be hotfixes and realm restarts for the next 48 hours, that’s the way with every WoW expansion.  It’s a 10 year old game after all.  And even though there are already a bunch of level 100s before the day is up, they really don’t have anything to do once there.  Raids won’t open for a while.  Dungeons are horrible experiences when the server is laggy/crashing. Even realm first achievements are gone.   Waiting a few days will let stuff sort out, reduce the queue times (well, not on Stormrage at least!), and provide for more open leveling space.

Launches are fun.

So I bit the bullet yesterday and bought WoD, which includes the boost to 90.  Funny story, I did this while I was stuck on a loading screen in Stratholme trying to get the Baron’s Mount.  My Rogue can clear the entire zone in under 4 minutes, which is decent enough speed.  Proper talent selection gives me a permanent 70% boost to movement speed, which is miraculous.  I used to run it a lot and never got lucky.  I ran maybe 30 runs last night, no drops.

Anyways, back to the boost.  Simple enough, log in, character select has to pick a player to apply it to and pick a spec, to ensure the gear you get makes sense.  I put it on my level 30 worgen druid.  I’ve been using him as a fun alt but to be honest, I find the druid slower than all the other classes.  Rogues are turbo stabbing machines and my mage and shammy seem to just light things up with chains.  Druid … not so much.  But they are versatile as all heck.  I selected a Monk for the 3 roles they can fill and a Druid can do 4 (melee and ranged DPS).  The only 2 classes that can do an “all one class” raid.  I’m a practical guy.  Plus travel form is OP (*instant cast flight grumble grumble*).

It took about 30 seconds for the changes to apply.  I logged in and my druid was sitting in the Blasted Lands, ready to start the intro quest to WoD.  Stacked in full ilvl 483 gear (which is a single notch down from Timeless Isle gear).  He was better off than my Rogue, Hunter and Shaman.  There are about 20 quests to go through in this zone and every 4^th or so, you unlock something for the class.  Oh, and my bags were empty but I was given a bunch of 20 slotters and kept the gold I had.  Oh, and I gryphon mount with no training other than ground.  Blasted Lands on a ground mount is a much different experience than with.  Training for WoD no doubt.

I started with Prowl and 2 attacks.  Let me tell you that those 2 attacks didn’t do much.  No talents, no other skills, no glyphs…thank goodness for the gear I had.  Each fight cost me about 20% of my hp.  A few quests in and I unlocked a self-heal.  Then I unlocked some more damage abilities.  The final unlock gave me my talents/glyphs and all attacks.

And the penultimate flying skill, with all “zones” unlocked – including MoP flight.  I was running the math but that’s ~10,000g or so that was saved.  I have a few characters that don’t even have MoP flying since it’s not of any use in 3 weeks.  So, pleasantly surprised let’s say.

Also, since my character wasn’t a “veteran”, I didn’t get any profession boosts, they stayed at abysmal levels.  Though again, WoD is apply the same model as MoP cooking/gathering.  Gathering will work regardless of skill level, you just get broken pieces that you need to put together.  Cooking (actually all crafting now) will provide you with a training path using WoD materials to get to ~600 skill.  Boost really isn’t needed in this respect.  I will say that this model, while clearly practical for the players, completely removes any need whatsoever to visit older content outside of pet/achievement hunting.  You could just as easily live in Ogrimmar/Stormwind, travel to Blasted Lands and WoD content and erase the rest of the game with barely anyone noticing.  Wave goodbye to 10 years of work I guess.

To sum, I am incredibly surprised at what you get for a level 90 boost.  All the skills, a bunch of starter glyphs (only needed to buy 1), all flying skills (except the 310%), all flight points and a ton of good gear (including bags!).  In one fell swoop, my druid went to a bottom feeder to 2^nd in power in my squad.

All of this can be bought again for $60.  Now, once WoD launches, starter quest gear will evidently be better so that’s not up for debate.  What the value is against is everything else.  How much time does it take to get to 90?  For a veteran, this is likely under 3 days played, for a new player this can be much longer but the experience of doing so is key.  How long does it take to get 10,000g to get the flying stuff and mounts?  Honestly, if you’re leveling manually to 90, you’ll get more than this in the process, so you’re actually coming out with less money.  The rest is all natural.  So it boils down to a question of the time required to level.  You would normally pay $15 for a month’s play.  Would you be able to get someone to 90 in that time?  Would it take you 4 months to get to 90, where the price point is a wash?  Depends on how you value time.   It does make for a very high price point for new players. $30 (base) + $40 (WoD) + $60 (extra boost), assuming that the character you initially boosted isn’t the type that actually is fun to play at end game (*cough*warrior*cough*).  I know I see no value in it but someone else might.

Continuing on the theme from the previous post, relating to the quality and quantity of content in a themepark, I decided last night to take a stab at some achievements.

As before, Raiding With Leashes is still on the table and I was able to pick up 2 more pets. I think I’m down to 5 left, which isn’t too bad.  At 90, even a fresh 90, my characters are more than strong enough to take on any particular event in those raids.  Well, except the first boss in BWL, which requires some practice to avoid a wipe, given that you need to keep the boss alive while he’s being attacked.   Of interest, given that MC and BWL are next to each other, it’s easy to compare.  I can get both MC/BWL done before I can get Naxx or AQ done – simply because I use a Rogue with stealth.  This is really pushing me to boost my Druid to 90 with the WoD package.

After I ran all 4 raids, which was a bit less than an hour of work, I decided to knock off the Hallowe’en achievements for candy buckets.  First lesson learned is that the individual steps in an achievement are not seen across the account, only the completed achievement.  More specifically, if an achievement requires me to visit 50 inns, those inns are not shared across all characters.  I had 2 left on one character and knew that I had another one logged into those actual inns.  I swapped over and blank achievements.  Once I went back to the first character, completed those 2 inns, it unlocked the achievement for everyone.

Second lesson.  On Stormrage, it is next to impossible to find anyone from the Horde, making some achievements really quite hard to complete outside of PvP.  It’s like a 99:1 ratio.  CRZ sort of helps and it was merged with another one (no idea why, it’s been high pop for 10 years) but it’s still a pain.

Third lesson.   I don’t like PvP achievements.   Children’s Week is the worst offender but they all stink.  They make people play PvP for the sole purpose of achievements and not actually for PvP.  These are often people who would never even set foot in PvP in the first place.  It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have meta achievement, aimed at a more casual though OCD crowd, mixed up with additional content.  I mean, are we looking to add event-based  achievements to LFR too?

Frustrations aside, I am realizing that I have a slightly different perspective on expansions than most.  Rather than see it as a bunch of new content moving forward, I see it also as opening up a bunch of previous content I never had a chance to see.  It’s been a solid 7 years since I was in Desolace, for the XC attunement quest.  Yet I was there last night and was impressed by the progress.  Burning Steppes, Stonetalon, Bloodmyst, Netherstorm, Sholazar, Twilight Highlands… all zones I had spent a ton of time in previously and simply forgot they existed outside of some words on a map.  Hunter pets, battle pets, achievements and archeology are all great ways to get me to go back.

It’s certainly a different set of eyes looking back on where you came from.

Another interesting update on the leveling path in WoW since 6.0.2.  I have quite a few characters it seems, now more than ever at 90.  It’s raining 90s.  And without the boost.

The Hallowe’en event has 2 particular rewards that greatly facilitate leveling.  First is a daily quest in the first town hub (Goldshire is one) that has the headless horseman come by, die in 2 hits then drop his head.  Turn in the head, get a very large chance at a broom mount.  This mount is great for leveling for 2 reasons. First, it counts as a flying mount that scales to all other mounts.  Second, it’s instant use.  That last one means you can use it when you’re falling or moving, so I bound it to my mouse.  It’s a massive increase to travel speed, at any level.

The second reward is a daily quest that gives you a 10% buff to experience for 2 hours.  Which is pretty much what a single heirloom piece gives.  Remember, heirloom doesn’t work at 85+ but this buff does.

I decided to run another test.  My Hunter was able to do Jade Forest and come out near level 88.  Some rested, no buff.  My Rogue however, who has a naturally faster TTK (time to kill) speed was fully rested and only played with the buff.  I finished Jade Forest at 88.9 and hit 90 before I ended up in Halfhill.  It took less than 2 of those buffs (2 nights) to get there and I never saw the tail end of my rested exp bar.  I think it’s more than feasible to hit 90 in under 1 day played for an average player, stacking heirlooms and rested experience.  Makes you wonder what the 90 boost is worth…

The good side is that it takes less than 1 hour per level from 85-90.  So getting people ready for the expansion is cake.  The bad side is that I miss out on a ton of gold.  See, when I ran my Monk through at the launch of MoP, I gave him 100g to start off, heirlooms and some bags.  When he hit 90, he had all the flying skills unlocked and ~8,000g left over.  So 1-90, just buckets of gold.  I was smart during the leveling and got a UI mod that auto-posted items to the AH.  More than half my gold came from that.  My Hunter in contrast made about 2,000g from 80-90.  My Rogue barely made 1,000g and that’s with pickpocket on a macro (but everything is either a beast or has no pockets for Jade Forest/Valley of the Four Winds).  Now, I am far from needing cash, I have over 200,000g from a past farm the AH for a month test.  For other players, getting an alt to top level means you’re going to be short on cash.  The good news is that flying mounts, the only real money sink the game has to offer today that all players should invest in, means squat in WoD since there are no plans to allow flying.  You’re saving ~10,000g per alt.

Related, and depressing, is that any MoP top-tier content is going to be irrelevant in 2 weeks.  I have no idea why people are farming frogs in Timeless Isle when the best item you can get is going to be replaced by your first quest reward in WoD (ok, maybe the 2nd).  My Monk, geared for 5.4 (ilvl 525 I think), is clearly the strongest character I have, killing elites in little trouble.  But my super-undergeared Rogue (under 400 ilvl) is able to compete on the same content, just needs to play smarter.  The gear gap today, after squish, is fairly small.  Small if you understand your player mechanics.

Rohan beat me to it but I share similar points.

First off, and I think I mentioned this in the past, I sub to WoW for a month or two every 2 major patches, including expansions.  So I saw the start of MoP and then I saw 5.2 (Thunder Isle) and then 5.4 (Siege of Ogrimmar).  I think it was less than a month for both of the patches but a solid 2 for the MoP launch.  Value for money and all that.  Plus, I have little intention on raiding, due to time constraints and 2 kids.  (Kind of the reason I am not subbed to Wildstar atm…, what with 2 50s and 2 others in their 30s).

Pre-amble.  I have a 90 Monk, 90 Shaman, 86 DK, 86 Rogue, 80 Mage, 86 Hunter, 60 Paladin (through RAF boosting no less), 30 Druid, 5 Priest (bank alt) and zero Warriors (because they suck).  Also, I really miss the ability to sprint and double jump.  You don’t realize it until it’s gone but it makes travel on foot that much more fun.

Heirlooms

Back to WoW.  Last post I mentioned a lack of changes to heirlooms.  Well in actual fact it’s a little worse than I had thought.  Heirlooms are bought through 3 methods.  Justice Points (now gone), Darkmoon Faire tickets (1 week a month) and Trial of the Crusader (which if my math is correct, 7 days of dailies for 1 piece of gear).  JP vendors are gone, so not quite sure how that’s going to work out.  The reason given was “due to unsure prices and to avoid buyers remorse”.  Let me break that particular point down for you.

Justice Points were dungeon currency.  It was maybe 2-3 hours of dungeon runs, very easy to do in order to get an item.  I would hazard to call it cheap even, at least the easiest of the 3 methods.  So even if it were to be some nominal amount, say 500 gold per item (guild heirlooms are 2500 IIRC), then it begs the question what they expect the new value to be.  It’s hard to imagine them being cheaper than current.  So you get into conspiracy theories of Blizz pushing their “buy a level 90 boost”.  I dunno, the entire thread just seems like really bad PR on a core part of their community (the one who actually bothers with alts).

On the flipside, experience was drastically normalized.  I had an 84.5 Hunter on logoff, and on logon, had an 84.99999 Hunter waiting.  MoP experience gain is ~50% higher than previous, if not more.  Cataclysm should be around the same path, making heirlooms a very quirky item.  I think I might be able to do 80-85 in 1 zone now.  Will have to try with my Mage at some point.

Combat

Ability pruning was a pretty frigging big deal for a Hunter.  I’d guess 25% of all skills are gone.  As a BM, that leaves 2 buttons for main rotation (Cobra Shot and Arcane Shot) and then some pet cooldowns.  It is quite strange.  Good strange mind you, as I had hotbars within hotbars.  It was an episode of Pimp my Hunter.  The UI is much cleaner.  Plus with 6.0, every mod broke something, so I’m playing vanilla.

The stat squish is massive, I think my ring is like +15 or some such.  I will say that a stat boost itself is less noticeable, as the scale from base is flatter.  Hmm, let me try that again.  Before this patch, your base damage was a factor of your level and base stats.  Base stats at 90 were nothing really, so each piece of gear you added was a tremendous boost to power.  A decent ring might give you 10% more.  Now it seems that the base value is higher and that gear provides less benefit, let’s say only a 7% boost from the same ring.  What this means is balancing is much easier for Blizzard as the player power variance is smaller.  It also means that player skill is more important than before as you will have trouble “out gearing” a situation.  That’s a paradigm used in Cataclysm, to disastrous effect on subscriptions… so time will tell.

Reforging is gone.  Enchanting is barely there.  Jewelcrafting took a hit.  None of the Professions provide any combat benefits.  Haste windows are gone.  Snapshotting is gone.  It seems like every corner of customization was cut pretty deep.  Ask Mr Robot is going to need a new job I’m thinking as the game is currently heavily simplified in terms of stats and rotation.  The complications added are now mainly around player skill.

But do I have the same amount of power as before?  I’ll say yes for the time being.  The leveling power curve was well-adjusted.  There’s no more “in between expansions” power gap either, so that’s nice.

Art

New player models, which by consequence also means no character models in some scenes as they weren’t programmed?  I dunno if it’s a bug or not but me + parachute = no character.

Bunch of UI changes too.  Items you can click are highlighted with an outline, harvesting and quest nodes.  Quest overlays are more informative.  Hunter stables can take 50 pets (up from 10 last I checked).  Aura alerts are still there.  Some icon changes.  Icons in bags are different, in particular when you are at a vendor.  Junk is clearly tagged, though there still isn’t a junk button.  Overall a solid improvement (based entirely on the mod community I might add).  I’ll still mod the UI though – if only to control the button size ratio.

The models are a bit more fluid in their movement and the style is somewhat consistent with before.  The eyes though, they are hollow.  It’s like uncanny valley over here but then again, how often do you look at someone’s eyes in WoW?

Also, they are 10 year old models.  The game looks like it was made 10 years ago, in particular due to the fact that MoP had no new capital city.  If WoD has as new Shatt to play around in, maybe it won’t be as noticeable.

Crowd Control

This is an odd one for me since I played 8 years of a Rogue and was stun-locking when you were still in diapers.  Pretty much any stun effect that disables you and still allows an enemy to attack you is gone.  The ones that get you out of combat but break on damage are still in.  Interrupts are still there with their original cooldowns as are root/slow effects. For combat, I have half the damage control tools I had previous, which means I am taking more damage and need to time my skills to be at the tail end of a cast.  It’s balanced by the fact that many “casters” require to stand still now to get a spell off, so there’s some delay in damage output.  Still, it’s a new way to play and I’m curious as to how the crowds will adapt.

Overall Impressions

I will be honest here and say that I expected more rather than less.  There are massive systematic cuts to combat and player customization, which is like 90% of the game content (excepting Pet Battles).  I used to write guides for games and this expansion would have me cut at least a quarter of it.  Players have only a fraction of the tools they had before, which is quite jarring.  It’s a real “back to basics” push and I can commend it as it’s something I try to do in my own job.  The game feels familiar and different at the same time, which is what you want in an expansion.  Now let’s open this red door…

In somewhat interesting news, it appears that Jay Wilson, mr Diablo 3 lead , is listed in the credits for WoW’s next expansion.  I posted a bit about this gentleman in the past.  He left D3 for an unknown Blizz project, though any executive that leaves that type of position, usually doesn’t do it in the middle of sweeping changes, at least voluntarily.

I’ve been more than vocal on D3’s original implementation.  The AH was a good idea with a horrible implementation.  It impacted the rest of the design.  Itemization was broken until D3 launched on consoles.  “End game” didn’t really exist until a year after launch.  So yeah, I think the game is Blizzard’s worst received game at launch ever but that they stuck with it and today’s game is really quite good.  It’s telling that the company still takes value in the brand and one of the reasons they are still on my “must buy” list of developers.  It takes FOREVER for change, but changes happen.

Oddly, this reminds me of Hellgate:London.  Flagship launched a decent ARPG but made some missteps in terms of end game, or at least long term appeal.  Plus the dev cycle for patches didn’t really work.  The meat here is that Bill Roper, then lead of Flagship, got a bunch of ex-Blizzard folk to help out.  That didn’t really work mind you and Bill became a game albatross.  He showed up at Cryptic during the Champion Online and STO days and hoo-boy did that go over like a lead balloon.  He’s working at the cash cow Disney Infinity now though, so good on him.  Bill took full blame of Flagship and honestly, he did try hard to get it going.  I think this has more to do with fan investment in the product and just sheer disappointment that it could not succeed.

Jay though, he’s a slightly different beast.  Maybe it’s more along the lines of an open-mic issue where he was simply ill-equipped to handle the issues or that the ship was simply to big to correct after launch.  Some may be aware, but D3 underwent a rather massive design shift in combat mechanics about 6 months before live.  I would easily argue for the better as everyone has always been positive about the gameplay experience.  The other stuff though, maybe it was a lack of experience or understanding, but in the end nearly all the other systems were removed/replaced/updated.  AH is gone.  Smart loot replaces the insane RNG of strength on wands.  Stat balance changes itemization.  Lengendaries are actually legendary.  Multiple end-game options. Social tools.  Ladders and seasons.  Tons of stuff.  And I pin this on him as he was the lead.  You want the title, it comes with the ups and downs.

So maybe Jay just went back to what he does well, building core systems and not the overall architecture.  It’s certainly behind closed doors, without a need to interact with the playerbase.  There are very few good jacks-of-all-trades, maybe a few dozen in the entire industry.  I know in mine you could fit them all into a bar.  It would certainly be interesting to see where he’s at now and how he feel the transition has been.