I finished part 2 of War of Thorns.  It is much too short.  3 quests, all done within 10 minutes (solely because the last one has a 3 minute timer).

New Warbringers video is part of that quest line.  Spoilers ahoy.

The lore nut in me sees no logic in this.  This feels a tad too much like a rehash of the Garrosh storyline, though that had some decent defense.  This… this has no justification whatsoever.  Of all the opportunities to show the Horde having growth, the lessons learned post-Garrosh, this just throws it all out the window.  Maybe this is a way to bring Thrall back into the picture?  Did we not just do this dance?

A bit more.  In this 2nd act, you can see that Saurfang is acting under the concept of honor and is torn with Sylvanas – there are many orcs that are in this line of thought.  The Tauren are not for this either.  Trolls under Vol’jin were trying a different path, one much different than this.  Goblins… no idea.  They only care about making money.  Blood Elves are a bit of a mystery… they were from here after all.  Finally the forsaken are clearly going to follow their queen.  I dunno, that seems to split the Horde pretty much in the middle, if not 80% against this.  Of course, that’s only if you care about lore at all.

Final bit, in this tiny set piece, there’s no logic in destroying one city when the faction captial still stands.  I will agree it hurt the Alliance, but it’s pretty clear that there’s at least one counterstrike (Lordaeron for starters).

From an in-game lens, this more or less splits both continents into Horde / Alliance.  Given that leveling is scaled throughout, it means that 1-60 you’ll only ever see your faction. BC/WotLK is the first time you’ll see another faction, which is odd.  It does line up with the BfA island being split.

Long-term, we all know this is an Old Gods expansion.  Dollars to donuts, Sylvanas just became a raid boss when that reveal is done.  Maybe there will be some justification of these actions at that point.  Until then, the Horde is painted as the instigators and the bad guys.  There’s no shades of grey here.  I’d like to say that there’s a larger storyline, some redemption arc for Sylvanas.  Time will tell.

I can’t say that I’m disappointed, as my expectations for this entire line were extremely low.  Seems the initial reactions are similar.

In contrast to the previous Warbringers vid (Jaina), this is extremely deflating.

On a tear now ain’t I?

Post brought to you buy a WoW Dev tweet.

We’ve just updated our hotfixes blog post with today’s hotfixes, including the reduction in experience required to level for levels 40-100:https://t.co/0t7nSI6Prh

— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) July 31, 2018

Recall the internet furor that 8.0 brought in terms of leveling speed? No?  Internet furor is hard to measure.  Anyhow, the devs made a booboo when they crunched all the numbers for 8.0 and either monsters had too many hit points, or were hitting too hard.  I found a few of those within 10 minutes on my Warlock and just decided to wait it out.  That aside from the fact that from 60+ I gained no skills, and gear improvements are non-existent.  It’s the same gameplay from 60-100.

Previous to this, Legion made some leveling zone changes as well. The issue was covered in 2 main points.

1. People were outleveling zones in a half dozen quests and unable to complete the story lines.
2. Time to Kill (TTK) was too low.  Anyone with a cast time could barely hit anything before it died, and no one really knew how their class played until level 100+

To address the first item, the applied scaling to all the zones, just like in Legion proper.  I would say that was a successful change.  Similar issues to 8.0, but generally pretty small.  You could level pretty much wherever you wanted.  Neat!

To address the second item, they boosted all enemy HP so that the TTK went from something near 3 seconds to closer to 10.  That in itself is not a bad change, but it was isolated and, in my opinion, short sighted.

Leveling has 1 main goal, and that’s to get to the top.  Measuring that goal is done through two facets – the time it takes to get there (objective) and the fun had along the route (subjective).  Since pretty much Cataclysm, the time to level from 1-X was fairly stable.  Sure, heirlooms had an impact, but general time to level was pretty stable.  The tripling of TTK increases the amount of time to level.  It wasn’t massive, since the majority of experience is from quest completion, but it was certainly noticeable.

The fun along the way measure split a few players.  Some had fun rounding up 10-20 enemies and then AEing them to the ground.  Others wanted to explore more of the zone.  Others wanted to see more of their favorite quest chains.  It is impossible to please everyone under subjective measure.  Still, it’s somewhat fair to say that most people were pleased with the world-scaling changes.

Progress

The above noted XP change reduces the amount required to level by ~14% for 60-80, and a bit less for the other levels.  That covers the BC/WoTLK era (10-13 year old quest design) and is (subjectively) my least favorite part of the leveling experience.  With so many people re-rolling allied races, those who have clearly demonstrated they know how to level, it makes sense to have a leveling normalcy applied.

Maybe I will end up leveling my warlock.

That time of the year again, where we appreciate flying with the understanding that it’s going away in 2 weeks. For at least a year.

I think there’s no better example of what flying does to WoW than leveling a Druid.  The benefits of instant travel, and the fact that you can interact with most world objects while in flight form make it feel like there’s a cheat code active.  Druids without flight form feel like molasses.

I’ve leveled my fair share to 110.  Usually I get a half dozen to max level by the end of an expansion.  Monk, DH, DK, Rogue, Paladin are there now.  Figure Druid can catch up pretty quick.  Aside from the Monk/DH runs, I’ve used ConsLegion to speed up the process.  Basically TomTom + auto-accept quests for super speed.

With the exception of Stormheim and Highmountain, most zones are decent enough on the ground.  Stormheim at least has the hookshot… so I’ve always left Highmountain for last.  Leveling was usually decent enough.  Maybe a level a session or so.  Most of the time is spent travelling between NPCs.  When I unlocked flying a while back, the DK and Paladin shot through levels – nearly twice the speed of before.

Druid though.  That’s another ballgame.  I made 3 levels in 2 hours. I cleared most of Valsharah in 30 minutes.  An I’m not in bear-mode, AEing everything.  This is cat-mode, where it’s stun/bleed/swap, arguably a slower process.

And that my friends, is exactly why Blizzard removes flying on a consistent basis.  Flying negates a supremely large amount of content.  Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the vertical aspects of zones.  Zones that are designed thoughtfully.  Stormheim is a whole lot of fun to move around (minus the large gorge in the middle).  It’s honestly fun to explore the nooks and crannies, and doing it 2 or 3 times isn’t too bad.  It’s when you realize that the content is really just padded with travel… and that you’ve already explored it to the end that it’s time to turn off that mode.

There is a good argument against flying when it comes to hunting rares/gathering.  It is easy as pie to jump from one target to the next without consequence.  Most rares have minimal value for a max level character after a couple weeks.  Nodes… that becomes a farmer’s dream and a money making machine.  I made a shredder to harvest herbs just for that reason alone.  A quick fix for this is to have a counting debuff while flying.  After it caps, nodes only appear while walking until it wears off.  I’m sure there are better ideas.

So here we are, 2 weeks from BFA and 2 weeks until I say goodbye to the skies.  I know it will come back, just not when.  I’ll certainly miss it for the first few weeks, then grow accustomed.  It’s that 2 month marker where I’ll be itching.  So fingers crossed it comes sooner rather than later.

I certainly recall having quests that required 3-5 players to complete way back when.  Nearly everything in EQ required way more people.  WoW was smaller groups.  SWTOR did it for a while too.  The latter 2 never really worked out, while EQ had so few quests and a mandatory grouping requirement, that it sort of did (after hours of waiting).

The quick and dirty answer to that was solved by Rift – quick grouping.  With a single button press you would join nearby players, all attempting the same event.  Was great for group quests, and even better for Rifts.  The system only started to breakdown when there was a lack of players around you (say mid-game when most were top level).  Still, the model made sense.

I loved that system for 3 main reasons.  First, there are practical ones.  Group content isn’t about throwing meat at the problem.  I like healing.  It’s useless to heal solo.  It works wonders in a group, so auto-grouping made it so that I could heal effectively.  I had targets, HP bars, focus, etc…  Second, it allowed for an easy way to meet new people.  I met my guild in Rift with that.  I’ve swapped guilds in WoW with that.  Sure, there are the silent, let’s-get-this-done-and-drop people, but you will find other folks.  Third, it’s stupid easy.  This meant that you could effectively auto-group while leveling, and doing the daily quests.

The LFG tool for custom groups does have use.  Sentinax farming.  Fishing rep building.  Things that are not quest related are done through this, and generally it works.  World bosses was better with an add-on, but it did also have LFG as a backup.  I get that part. The downside to LFG is the overheard of using the tool.  Compared to “press a single button”, LFG seems like a slow lead-eating cousin.  In effect, it meant that LFG was used once a week.

(Side note:  Fishing rep building should only ever be done in a group/raid setting. You go from 12 hours of effort, to 2.  And get to have fishing conversations with the raid.  Win-win.)

For some reason, Blizz decided to block the auto-group feature from addons in BfA and push people to use LFG.  Without actually changing LFG.  I am honestly a bit confused why.  For 95% of the uses the addon provided, that has just been removed.  We’ll go back into the solo-mode for world content, and then LFG for weekly bosses.  This is quite strange.

Aside from Argus quests to defeat champions (that only tanks can really solo effectively) there is no difficulty in daily quests.  Just time sinks due to combat for spawns.  Redoing Tanaan Jungle recently proves how crappy an experience that is to the openness of Legion.  It’s deafening silence as compared to dynamic grouping.

I think that’s my largest gripe with 8.0.  Sure, there are always going to be tweaks to gameplay, but it feels like the fun parts, the dynamic parts, have been removed for a month, if not forever.

At least I still have my fishin’.

It isn’t often that a gaming video has some resonance with me.  This is quite well done, mainly due to the way that the art (image and sound) work so well together.

Not much of a secret that I have been a Blizzard fan for ages.  I am quite familiar with the story lines that pre-date WoW, and the particular tone that Chris Metzen applied for so many years.

Jaina has been part of Warcraft since W3.  She was a well-crafted character up until the start of MoP.  Then she went off the deep-end and became a caricature of the crazy villain.  The focus went to the Wrynn family for 3 expansions.  Or Khadgar for 2.

Recall that everything Jaina has loved or fought for has been destroyed – her family, her lovers, her friends, parts of her nation, even Theramore.  I am struggling to think of another major character that has lost more.  (Sylvanas is a different topic, as most of it is self-inflicted.)

Looks like they are pushing her to be vengeance / remorse driven, which puts her in the anti-hero archetype.  People do not make good decisions when they are emotionally driven.  WoW has a penchant for redemption story-lines, and it will be curious as to how Jaina comes to terms with her past in order to move forward.

At the end though, if this is the first of three shorts… I am really looking forward to the next two.

You don’t have an MMO unless you have fishing.  UO built that into my psyche.

WoW’s fishing had been the definition of a peaceful grind.  It has rarely provided much tangible benefit, except for the fun and some minor cash generation for selling fish on the AH.  Maxing actually fishing skill is a fraction of the effort to get the rest of the neat toys (read less than 1% of the time).

Legion brought a fishing artifact – Underlight Angler.  It takes about ~3 hours to go through the necessary steps.  It is so much easier to do with flying, as it gives quick access to Margoss (for special lures) and extremely fast access to fishing pools.

Once you have it, you leveling through catching more rare fish.  Each one gives 50AP.  I prefer Stormheim for this, as with the proper lure, the pool is 100% stable and you can pull out 20-30 fish.  There are 3 tangible benefits to getting this artifact and filling out the slots.  Walking on water, faster swimming/water breathing, and lower aggro radius while fishing.  These benefits carry through into BfA.

There’s more you can get through if you want.  There’s the friend model from MoP that has 6 people you can grind away.  Further grind away for some more rare drops which allows you to collect material to exchange for toys/cosmetics.  The friend grind really requires some groups to make due – except Margoss.  That one is long.

You can also go back into MoP or WoD and acquire some useful equipment/mounts.  You don’t really need a pole.  Having a Water Strider (water walking) is extremely useful for leveling.  A raft allows you to fish from pools while standing on the water.  Pretty much essential if you really want to do some fishing.

BfA brings in some changes, and more of the original Vanilla format for fishing.  It’s been a long while where there were ocean fish, then zone-based fish.  It’s changing to faction fish (some alliance, some horde), and 2 global fish.  The legion artifact still works, but the “port to nearest pool” won’t work.  Which is really a dumb skill, since it has a 5m cooldown and fishing a pool takes about 2 minutes.  I struggle to see how that ability could be abused.  Anyhow, instead of being on the pole, you need to use a specific fish for this ability.  The same fish is used for feasts – so it’s likely to go for 100g per fish on the AH.  Who wants to pay 100g for a port that could be done in 10 seconds of walking?

Still, I look forward to getting back into the zen of fishing.  It’s a great break from the go-go-go of regular MMOs.  And who knows, maybe someday we’ll actually get to fish up something more fun than fish.

Similar to Isey, I’ve been putting some level of thought into this.

By the end of Legion, I have a Monk, Demon Hunter, Paladin, Rogue and Death Knight all at 110.  Shaman, Druid, Hunter are at least in Legion, but I wasn’t a fan enough of their mechanics to keep going.  I’m sure at some point I mentioned why I don’t play cloth casters, and my general aversion to Warriors.

We’re only a week into the BfA class changes, but I have been keeping tabs with various videos (a lot of Icy Veins truth be told).   I know that the Warlock is rejigged (and I have one in the 70s) to be more fun.  I also know that Shamans and Druids are in an odd spot right now – at least in the fun mechanics department. So in terms of classes I want to play, let’s take a quick peek.

Monk

• All 3 roles, and the only reason for playing  panda.  It feels like playing an alternate version of WoW, as it’s so different from other classes.  I have a soft spot for MoP, and there is no class that is more thematically consistent than the Monk.
• The monk tank and healer roles are technically challenging, which is fun.

Demon Hunter

• The movement of this class is second to none and the best class for exploring any zone by ground.   They fit really well into Legion, but that expansion’s story is over so I have no idea what driver they have now.
• I dislike the look of the class.  It’s very dark and I find that all DKs look identical.

Paladin

• This is the brain dead class that can’t be killed.  I have little interest in it, other than the thematic link to the Alliance.

Rogue

• I’ve had one since the game launched.  They have been neglected more and more every expansion (MoP nearly killed them with Monks), and Legion put in the Roll the Bones (RNG) mechanic that makes them very un-fun in groups.
• I love their theme, and the ability to stealth and pick pocket everything that moves.  I guess I really like the concept but have trouble with the execution (pun!)

Death Knight

• I like the complexity of this plate class, and the themes are getting better so long after the Lich King story stopped.  They have a very high skill ceiling, which is also attractive.
• They are tremendously slow and I find little joy in playing anything but Blood.

Shaman

• On paper these guys should be the best class!  In reality, it feel like a lead-eating chimp is in charge of their design.  It really feels like a squandered opportunity – a mirror image of what the Paladin brings to the table.
• I play them out of pity and hope.

Hunter

• I loved playing hunter when pet management meant something.  Hunting new pets was a lot of fun.  Then pet battles came around and bye bye Hunter.
• The lol-hunter moniker is both real and a turn off.

Druid

• I already play a multi-role class (Monk) so have little need for another.  And Druid is so incredibly slow (Bear vs any other tank, Cat vs Rogue especially).
• The lack of customization (aside from Legion) was very off putting and by this point I don’t want to bother with the Legion content. Maybe later in BfA.

Mage/Priest

• I’ve played both.  I find other classes do a better job in both roles.  I like the look of Shadow Priests – but the squishynes of cloth is a turn off.

Warlock

• Always had a soft spot for these buggers.  Long ago when you needed to quest to get pets, it was a blast to go through.  (Ghostbusters quest was fun!).  Aside from Metamorphosis (which was taken by DH in Legion) was the only good thing to happen to them since Vanilla.
• BfA seems to have rebuilt the Warlock.  I’m playing one now, and it’s some fun.  Problem is getting this guy through the levels for BfA.  I’d expect some catch up event in the next 2 weeks (like Legion) to solve that issue.

Warrior

• I really don’t get why this class still exists.  Every other class does what this one does, but better.  Doesn’t help that I don’t like the look of plate classes in WoW and for the longest time, they were poor at self-healing.  Ah well.

War Mode

• I don’t think the 10% experience gain is worth even a fraction of the hassle of PvP content.  I played on a PvP server for a couple years and it was the least fun I’ve ever had.  I’d be quite surprised how that actually turns out in the end.

I am not enamored with any of the alternative races, for one primary reason : the need to re-level. First, the fact that those I would re-skin have a massive time investment and I don’t want to re-roll and lose access to the rare drops (recipes mostly) and fishing skill.  The Monk and Rogue are never going to be re-rolled for this reason alone.

Second, the changes to have every zone scale makes leveling very un-fun.  The BfA changes are not helping.  It is insanely boring to level from 60 to 100 for a +1 in STR as the only reward, and for it to take hours to get through.  Even with full heirlooms (my Warlock), it just takes too long.  Both in the length of time to kill something, but in the length of time in a given level.  The only incentive right now is heirloom armor – which does look cool – but not enough to spend 20+ hours to get.  Per race.  I’m sure it will be tweaked.

Short Term

The plan right now is simple enough.

• Finally unlock WoD flying.  I’m a week or so away of dailies to close this.
• Hit Exalted with relevant Legion factions.  I think only Argus is left for me, and they are all at Revered now.
• Level the Warlock to 110.  He’s 78 now if I recall.  I’d like to wait a week and see if there’s a catch up mechanic and do it that way instead.
• Close up my fishing achievements for Legion.  I love fishing and thought I had done this already.  I was wrong.

I haven’t even bought BfA yet.  I don’t know if I will until a week after launch.

WoW patched to 8.0 on Tuesday.  It did not go well.

And I mean this from nearly all sides, from developers to consumers.  Pre-patch should be renamed to client testing.  That’s what I call it at work.  We do all the tests we can internally (alpha), stage it in a test environment for clients to poke (beta), then have an initial small release in production (client testing) to a select group of users who know things can still go awry.  Blizzard does the same, they just happen to have a slightly larger scale.

And all developers dread the notorious X.0 patch.  Most people who spend time in IT will wait until at least a full sub release, if not two.  The larger the X gets, the worse the patches get.  Plain and simple, they need to take into consideration years of previous code.  Example – Internet Explorer.  If you ever had the chance to see that source code, you would find stuff from the 90s in there.  They had to dump most of it away, and rewrite Edge from the basics (also why W3 testing seems to finally work).

So, yeah.  Context on the post.  I get what Blizzard was trying to do, I get the challenges.  What I am most curious about is the level of failure this patch brought about, and the optics around that.  From the outside, it seems two things happened.  One, they made some new global variables to put in “big wheels” to adjust numbers across the board to save time.  Second, they don’t have black box testing.  The first one, I can see how it can make things go sideways.  I’ve had that happen.  But the black box testing always found it – especially when it took a larger scale.

What is black box testing?  The general idea is that you apply inputs on one end, and look at the outputs, without knowing how the insides of that box work.  If you look at how the code executes, then you’re too far in to see the larger bugs.  For example.  Enemies that are in the 80-90 range have 2x more hit points than enemies at 110.  Looking at the code won’t show you that, but testing against set use cases and analytics will.  It will not find the specific use case of sub boss X from 3 patches ago, that does the moonwalk instead of normal pathing (at least, it’s not likely).

It also appears that they didn’t stress test their login servers for pre-patch code.  Which again, seems a ridiculous thing after so many years of server meltdowns on every X.0 patch, and every expansion release day.

As for the actual content, I found numerous bugs.  Most in WoD (faction running and Tanaan).  All my characters appear to be 25% weaker at max level, and leveling is like hitting a meat wall.  The numbers need tweaking, and that’s doable in the short term.  Losing artifacts and their bonuses however, that is quite painful.  My monk is so much less fun to play, and has lost nearly all self-sustain ability.  As a tank, he could solo pretty much anything without much trouble – in particular invasion bosses on Argus.  Now, it’s 3-4 deaths per, unless I have someone healing me.

As much empathy as I have for the Blizz developers, considering the sheer amount of money they have, as well as a reputation for quality delivery, this entire event makes it seem that WoW has been delegated to the C team.  It certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in the actual release of the expansion.  I’m sure the large scale items will get fixed (squish related), but the fun aspect of classes we had in Legion is seriously diminished.  Not sure how that will work out.