How the new emblem system ruined heroics (and what could be done to save them)

I am a busy player. I don't have the time to raid or the reflexes to PvP, so I run heroics instead. I still get to play in groups, but I don't have to dedicate a large portion of my time to the game; I can simply plop down for a half-hour or hour when I have one to spare. With the death of solo content in Wrath, heroics were really all I had left, and now my last little sanctuary has been perverted by the very thing that were supposed to save it: the new emblem system.

I'm talking about the system by which heroics offer the second best emblem in the game, while the first random heroic you do each day (previously, it was the daily heroic-quest) gives you two of the best emblems in the game. There was a time when heroics only gave you emblems of heroism, the worst emblem in the game. These emblems were used to obtain gear that was good for heroics, but would never let you out-gear them. With the new emblem system, amazing gear is obtainable by people who have never stepped foot in a raid. Now, certainly, this system has benefits. People can gear up their alts rather quickly and get them into the highest tier of raiding without forcing their guild to drag them through the previous raids. Through heroics alone, I have decked out my druid in tank gear good enough that I could run Icecrown Citadel 10-man if I wanted to. The issue is, I can't, so for me, and players like me, heroics allow us to obtain amazing gear that we will never put to use. You could say that the new ICC 5-mans, the Frozen Halls, are the place to go to use that gear, but in the gear I'm in, only Halls of Reflection is a challenge, and I'm not going to run that one over and over again just because it's the only place that is difficult.

And so we see the issue. For people who only run heroics, the new emblem system allows us to get gear that only serves to make the content we are running easier. These same heroics that once provided some level of satisfaction are now hollow shells of what they once were. They are not challenging, they are not interesting, and they are not enjoyable. To pour salt in the wound, the ridiculously inflated cost of emblem of frost gear forces raiders, most of which ran heroics nauseam in order to gear up for Naxx, to run heroics each day so that they can get their gear in a timely manor. Many of them hate the heroics with a passion, and their animosity makes heroics less enjoyable to run when it rubs off on those of us who still enjoy them to some degree.

The dungeon finder only exacerbates this situation. It allows people to chain run heroics, bringing them to the point where heroics provide no challenge even faster than players would get there on their own, and it makes the groups inconsequential, promoting the kind of dickish behavior we see in heroics today. After all, when the only repercussions for your actions are being put on someone's ignore list (a punishment that is completely intangible), what motivation is there for the common man to not be a jerk? He wants his emblems, he wants them quickly, and he doesn't want to bother with the niceties that were once required to successfully complete a heroic.

Where does the solution lie? The benefits of the new emblem system are that it allows raiders to gear up their alts quickly and allows people who are only now reaching the level cap to quickly gear up for the most recent raid content. If Blizzard were to scrap the emblem system, the new solution would need to address these two problems.

The first one could be addressed by making emblems bind-to-account, thus allowing raiders to send their excess emblems to their alts. Some may object to that idea, since heroics are supposed to give people practice with their characters, practice they need to perform well in a raid. However, the kind of heroic runs that have become prominent since patch 3.3 (the "silent but deadly" speed runs) are hardly good places to train oneself for raiding. Overgeared healers can heal the tank and DPS through their mistakes, and overgeared tanks make threat a non-issue for DPS, while overgeared DPS make the bosses die so quickly that the encounters are nothing more than tank-and-spanks. This particular issue could be solved if the dungeon finder only put people with similar gear together in groups. That would mean the people who need to do the heroics slowly and need the practice would be put with people like themselves, while the impatient people who outgear the heroics would be put with people like themselves and could burst through the content. While this might be a good short-term solution, it doesn't address the larger issues of the emblem system.

However, if all Blizzard does is scrap the emblem system while making emblems BoA, that wouldn't address the fact that the new emblem system helps people who have only recently hit 80 get into the current tier of raiding, saving them the trouble of finding people who will run them through the previous tiers. If heroics only dropped the worst emblems, there would need to be a way for people to still get good gear without going through the old raids. I propose that, when Cataclysm hits, with each patch that Blizzard releases a raid, they also release a 5-man dungeon or two, like how with the release of Icecrown Citadel, they added The Frozen Halls. These new dungeons would be harder than other heroics, obviously, but to compensate, they would drop the emblems and gear that are better than the last tier of heroics. To use the current heroics as an example, some Ulduar-based 5-man would have been released with patch 3.1, and it would have dropped emblems of valor. Trial of the Champion would have dropped emblems of conquest, and the Frozen Halls would have dropped emblems of triumph (perhaps the Halls of Reflection could have dropped emblems of frost, considering how hard it is).

Yes, this would mean that heroics would become a new kind of progression, but is that such a bad thing? They are very popular now, so it wouldn't be a bad idea for Blizzard to cater to the part of their fanbase that likes heroics more than raids. This system would also mean that people could gear up for the current tier of content through heroics, which are quick and don't require a lot of preparation, rather than by running old raids, which takes a long time and requires more preparation and people.

So, to summarize the changes I propose:
1. When Cataclysm is released, the heroics that are available upon the launch date with drop the same emblem as the starter 10-man raids, while the 25-man versions will drop the next tier of emblems. As patches are released, the new raids will give better emblems, but the base emblems in old heroics will not change.
2. Emblems will become bind-on-account so that raiders can use their extra emblems to gear up their alts.
3. With each raid that is released, one, two, or three new 5-mans will be released, the heroic versions of which will drop the same emblem as the 10-man version of their corresponding raid. This will allow people to gear themselves up for the current raid content without running old content.

Edit: I would just like to add that these are preliminary ideas to inspire others to come up with truly great solutions; they are not meant to be end-all-be-all fixes.

Signs you are approaching burnout

I am currently suffering from WoW burnout, severe WoW burnout. It came as the result of chain-running heroics with the Dungeon Finder and thinking more about the loot than the heroics themselves. It was easily avoidable, but I missed the warning signs that let me know I was going down this path. While there are many posts out there on WoW sites that let you know what to do when you have burnout, I have seen fewer posts about how to avoid burnout, so I thought I'd discuss the warning signs here. If any of these are happening to you, be proactive and do something to prevent your burnout. Try another part of the game, level an alt, or just cut down on your WoW time.

You start thinking more about the results than the experience
There are many rewards in WoW. They come in the form of loot, achievements, mounts, pets, and other such items, but they all have one thing in common: if you make acquiring them your reason for playing, you will suffer burnout. Focusing on loot, titles, etc. distracts you from the main reason you should be playing WoW: to enjoy yourself. This allows you to easily fall into playing habits that lead you to burnout, like playing more often than you would otherwise or getting overly worked up about a wipe. As I said in my post on my issue with speed runners in random heroics, if you focus more on the results then the process, you need to re-examine your priorities.

You do things out of habit rather than out of choice
Like prioritizing results before the process, doing things out of habit rather than because you consider them fun (like running a heroic each day just for the badges or doing dailies just for the money) is a recipe for disaster. If you aren't thinking about why you are doing what you are doing in game, you probably won't cut back or stop when it starts to annoy you. By the time you ask yourself why you are doing that random heroic each day when you don't even like any of the heroics any more or why you are doing the Argent Tournament dailies each day when they really aren't that fun, the damage is already done.

You start resenting the parts of the game you "need" to play in order to play the parts you enjoy
If you are a raider and you hate doing a random heroic each day, but you do it anyway for the emblems of frost, you need to really think about why you are running heroics. If you do any sort of group content (raids or heroics) and you hate doing dailies to pay for the repair bills, why are you doing them? You may think of me as idealistic for saying that you shouldn't do anything in this game that you can't make yourself enjoy, but as someone who has suffered the latter problem, I can tell you that those kinds of thoughts are not unconquerable. If you still "need" to run that content, try changing your mindset to one that allows you to enjoy it.

You start doing things you once resented other people for doing
This was the final sign for me that I was playing too much. I can't stand when anyone other than the tank pull enemies. However, during an Ahn'kahet run that I was healing, the tank only pulled one enemy out of a pack of four. He had Death and Decay down, so I body-pulled the other three to bring them into his D&D, just to speed things up. When I realized what I had done, I knew it was time for a break. Becoming what you once despised is a sure sign of burnout, and also a sign that your pre-burnout self what not have approved of what you are doing.

If you recognize any of those signs in yourself, you are likely on the path to burnout, if you aren't already there. If there are any signs that I missed, let me know in the comments section.

Druids, remember when...?

This mostly applies to feral druids, since that is what I leveled as during the days of vanilla WoW. Anyways, players like to complain about how their class is falling behind on the damage meters or some other class is getting ahead of them, but we often forget just how far we've come. Druids, remember when...

-Bear Form's armor bonus was 65%, and Dire Bear Form's armor bonus was 120%?
-Our feral 31-point talent reduced the cost of our shapeshifting spells by 25%? Incidentally, remember when our talent trees were around half of their current size?
-Innervate was a restoration talent? We ferals couldn't use it to restore mana on the fly.
-Our shapeshifting forms didn't have dances? Where would we be right now were it not for the Bear Form dance?
-We couldn't talk to quest givers or vendors while in Cat or Bear Form? Maybe it wasn't that big of a deal, but it was very annoying.
-We couldn't use items in our shapeshifting forms, and we had to make macros to use healing potions?
-We had separate itemization from rogues? Though we certainly used rogue leather for DPS, our leather was much better for tanking, the only role we could do late in endgame.
-Swipe (Bear) could only hit three targets at a time? This was back in the day when crowd control was actually used and kill orders were actually followed. If you tank wasn't a paladin, you didn't have any other choice.
-Swipe (Cat) didn't exist? Cats had no AoE options other than Hurricane, and that was on a one-minute cooldown.
-Innervate was spirit based and would only restore about 30% of a feral druid's mana? (20% after the spirit nerf)
-All cats and bears looked the same? I needn't remind you that they were also all butt-ugly (except the Night Elf cat form).

We have certainly come a long way, haven't we?

Last edited 2/6/2010, 7:38 PM

Where is the line between "playing your way" and being a burden?

In the constant (supposed) conflict between casual and hardcore players, one argument that frequently comes up from the casual side is, "I play this game to have fun, so let me play it my way!" This reply is used in a wide variety of situations, from suggestions on how the casual could better contribute to the raid to base taunting by hardcore players who think that casuals are somehow inferior to them. The advent of raids that are easy enough that casuals can actually run them has brought these two groups together more frequently than they have ever been together before, so this kind of conflict has begun to arise more and more. Who has more ground to stand on in this debate?

One of the arguments I see frequently cited by those arguing that they are only playing there was is that WoW is "just a game." I have already addressed this argument in a previous post and found it to be untrue. WoW is more like a sport (at least in the group setting): people come together to cooperate towards some competitive goal (even in PvE, the raiders are still competing against the raid bosses) for the sake of recreation. When you look at it that way, it's easy to see why someone who wants to "play their way" could bring the whole team down and make it less fun for the other people to take WoW more seriously. After all, some people find fun in success and measure their success by whether or not that raid boss was downed, so a more casual player could easily make that more difficult if they aren't pulling their weight. In that case, the river flows both ways: casuals often accuse hardcores of ruining their fun by taking the game too seriously, but hardcores can just as easily lob the accusation that casuals ruin their fun by not taking the game seriously enough.

Who's right? We can't say; WoW is a game, and how one plays it is completely up to each individual player. No one has the right to say that one person "should" play one way or another, so it seems the only surefire solution would be for casuals and hardcores to not raid together. However, in the grand scheme of things, this would do nothing to resolve the underlying issues that cause this kind of conflict in the first place. If the real source of the conflict is the idea that one group is preventing the other from enjoying the game, then the only thing that can really resolve this kind of conflict is for both sides to be more accommodating of the other. As they say, treat others as you would like to be treated.

What can you do at 80 without a group? Part II: tangible rewards in Azeroth and Outland

Last week, I wrote a post about what one can do at 80 that doesn't involve grouping, the Argent Tournament, or doing dailies just to make money. Turns out there wasn't a whole lot to do at 80 that didn't fall under those categories, so now I'll be going over things one can do at 80 in Outland or Azeroth to pass the time. I'll be ignoring achievements and reputations grinds without any real rewards, so that leaves out running old 5-mans and raids and getting exalted with superfluous factions. I'll try to stick to things that only have tangible rewards. Sadly, this means the ideas below will mostly concern aesthetic things like mounts and pets, which have timeless value, since pre-Wrath gear isn't very useful now.

Get exalted with Netherwing and get a Netherdrake mount.
If you didn't get epic flying before Wrath hit, you probably never got exalted with Netherwing, which is a shame. Netherwing not only offers some of the coolest mounts in the game, but some of the funnest dailies, too. (Booterang, anyone?) If you have never had the joy of getting exalted with Netherwing, you should start by getting epic flying. Then head to Shadowmoon Valley in Outland and start with the quest Kindness. After finishing that quest chain (and assuming you have epic flying), you'll be able to do the Netherwing dailies. They don't start out that fun, but they get much better as your reputation gets higher.

Farm Baron Rivendare for his mount.
This is one of the classic WoW time-killers. Having never done it myself (I like pets more than mounts), I can't give you much advice, but I'm sure the wowhead comments section will help you there. This will have you heading to Stratholm to farm the final boss over and over and over and over again. One comment seemed particularly important, so I'll reprint it here: "You have to kill the bosses outside those necropolis things and beat-up the acolytes inside to actually open the gate the Baron."

Farm some classic pets.
Here is a small selection to get you started. The four classic whelplings will certainly take you a long time if you wish to farm them yourself, rather than buying them. Their drop rates range from 0.1% to 0.4%. Looking for a more hard core grind? You can also try going for the Disgusting Oozeling, which seems to have a .15% chance of dropping for each ooze you kill. If you are really crazy, you can go for the Hyacinth Macaw, which appear to have a .01% chance of dropping. That's 1 in 10,000. Good effin' luck.

Level your professions and secondary skills.
As I mentioned in my last post, if your professions and secondary skills aren't at 350 or higher, you'll need to head to Azeroth or Outland to do what you need to do to level them (with the exception of fishing). If your cooking is languishing in the double digits, why not bring it up to speed? Believe me, being able to make your own buff food is an amazing thing.

To avoid redundancy, I didn't include things in this post that I already went over in my post on how to pick a side hobby, so look there for more suggestions.

A reflection on moral choices within video games

After looking in vain for a great action-RPG, I finally broke down and started replaying the game that raised my standards for the genre to the heights that had made made my search impossible: The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Now, Oblivion follows a pretty linear plotline, no matter what choices you make in-game. Still, certain side-quests and the decisions you make during those side quests affect whether your character is "good" or "bad," to some extent, so the game is not devoid of choices. For example, there is one quest where a paranoid man is convinced that the town residents are plotting to kill him. You can either try to convince him that he is wrong, or go along with it and take his money. In the end, neither choice is particularly lucrative for its objective rewards, so its up to the player to make the choice for himself. It was in considering that choice that I started asking myself: why do we make the moral choices that we make in video games?

I should let you know right now that I come from a pretty unique position in this issue (or maybe not so unique). Whenever a game presents moral options, I usually pick the good side. Unless doing so hinders the kind of fun I can have in-game, I will always do what is considered moral. Why? Because those are the kind of decisions I would make in real life, so it feels more natural for me to make those kind of decisions in-game. I suppose it comes from my militant adherence to rules and standards that I agree with, a product of my Asperger Syndrome. Anyways, I bring that up because I know many players do the exact opposite; they make evil choices when they play games. I could never fathom making such a choice myself, so I won't try to consider the issue from the perspective of someone who usually sides with evil; I will only speak from my own experiences, and when I make broad statements about morality or life, I will only be saying what is true for me.

When I make a moral decision in a game, I do give some consideration to what the objective consequences will be. Will one choice close some door in terms of what I can do in game? Will one choice make the game more difficult? However, sometimes I go against that kind of rationality and make the good choice, even when the evil choice will benefit me more. Why? Because video games are a part of my life; not an escape from it. Sure, I play games in lieu of doing more serious, consequential things, but they are not an escape from reality; they are part of my reality. As such, when I play video games, I bring the same assumptions to them that I bring to all parts of my life. Sure, I leave some assumptions behind, like the assumption that everything I do cannot be undone and the assumption that the characters within video games are real people whose feelings I could hurt; any reasonable person would leave those assumptions at the metaphorical door.

Still, while I recognize the fantasy worlds I play in as fictional creations, my actions within them are real. I am manipulating a program that creates images when I push buttons, and the images that come up are under my control. When I make a virtual decision, I can see the virtual consequences of that decision. That decision affects my future experiences in that world. I know that I will not need to face those consequences once I turn the console off, but I have still made the decision. If I play again, I'll need to face those consequences again. Sure, I could just load a file from before I made the evil decision, but then the decision wouldn't carry any weight at all and wouldn't be worthy of consideration. In other words, my decisions affect my experience, and that experience is part of my reality. As such, I need to be comfortable with that experience, or else I won't want to make it a part of my reality, and so I need to make decisions that affect the video game's world in a way I am comfortable with.

So, since video games are a part of my reality, I need to be comfortable with the moral decisions I make in them, which is probably why I usually choose to be good. I know that's a lot of reasoning to get to something I probably could have assumed from the start, but I wanted to be at least a bit thorough here. I could generalize this and say that the decisions we make in-game reflect what we are morally comfortable with, but that conclusion would have a lot of scary assumptions when applies to the horrible things people do in games. After all, even I have gone on killing rampages in Grand Theft Auto and then used cheats to make my stars go away. (Although that probably doesn't count, since I didn't kill any characters whose death would be consequential, and the cheat meant the decision to kill was completely without consequence.) If someone were to do the paranoid man's quest in Oblivion and tell the man that he is being spied on, would that mean that the player is comfortable maliciously taking advantage of people to benefit himself? I hope not.

However, this is not the case, and we can see that when we look back at my reasoning. In coming to the conclusion that I make good moral decisions in video games because I need to be comfortable with the consequences of that decision, I assumed that video games are a part of my reality, and this is probably not the case for all video game players. I'm sure there are many players out there who see video games as just games, and thus they have no qualms about doing something in game, the likes of which they could never do in real life without immense guilt. Perhaps the moral decisions we make in games are not a reflection of our own morals; perhaps they are simply a reflection of how we view video games, and more loose your morals are in-game, the more you see the game as "just a game."

Should authenticators be mandatory?

Those of you who have been following WoW.com know that Blizzard is giving serious consideration to the idea of mandatory authenticators. If you don't know what an authenticator is (if you do, skip this paragraph), it's a small device that adds an extra layer of security to your account. When you push the button on your authenticator, it gives you a six-digit number. That number changes every thirty seconds or so (I don't know how frequently it actually changes; that's just a rough guess). After you attach the authenticator to your account, every time you log in to WoW, you will be asked to type in that six-digit number. The net effect is that your account becomes practically unhackable.

To give you a summary of the WoW.com article and what it assumes you know, gold sellers get their gold by hacking other players' accounts and stealing whatever gold and items they can. They do this by stealing your account info (username and password) through keyloggers or phony sites that ask for your account info. Once they have your username and password, they log into your account and take everything you have. Blizzard can restore your account to its former state, but hacking has become such a problem that it now takes days for such restorations to take effect, simply because so many players are being hacked and requesting restorations. This is really bogging down Blizzard's support team, but how to put a stop to it? Well, if everyone had authenticators, hacking players' accounts would be almost impossible. Hence Blizzard giving serious consideration to making authenticators mandatory if you want to play WoW. But should they?

Let's get a few things straight; no matter how much you know about computer security, and no matter how safe you think you are, it is possible for you to be hacked. The number of stories in the WoW.com comment section about people who thought they could never be hacked but were should attest to that. Also, though it is possible to hack an iPhone/iPod Touch authenticator and thus hack the authenticated account (possible, but certainly not easy), having a physical authenticator makes you pretty much immune to hacking. Finally, all of the conclusions I come to below assume that Blizzard is willing and able to ship authenticators to all of its customers, regardless of where they are, which currently isn't the case, but that could always change.

So, should authenticators be mandatory? For starters, I think that if you have already been hacked, then you should be required to have an authenticator before you can log in again. Being hacked shows that, no matter what you may think, you made some mistake that made you vulnerable to being hacked, and thus you are liable to be hacked again, which creates more work for Blizzard. As such, I think Blizzard should make authenticators mandatory for anyone who is hacked. Or failing that, limit players to one account restoration unless they get an authenticator. If they are hacked once, they don't take the proper precautions to prevent it from happening again, and it happens to them again? Tough luck; have a nice day and enjoy starting over.

But what about everyone else? For starters, hackers are only going to target accounts worth hacking, meaning accounts with a lot of money on them. As such, they aren't going to target the accounts of people who haven't even reached 60. If Blizzard were to make authenticators universally mandatory, that would mean that even people trying the game for the first time would need to have one. That would turn a lot of people off from trying WoW, all for the sake of protecting people who wouldn't be targeted. Sure, hackers will go for any gold they can, but would they really go for someone with only one hundred gold, spread between five characters? Considering how cheap gold is these days (on my realm on the first site I got when I googled "buy WoW gold", $1 will get you 200 gold), I doubt they would. While I don't know what they threshold is for what makes an account "hack worthy," there is no point in requiring authenticators for people who fall below that threshold.

Still, we can try to guess where that threshold may be, and if Blizzard wants to responsibly implement a mandatory authenticator policy, they will have to guess. I would guess that no one is worth hacking until they hit sixty, at the very least. Outland is when quests start rewarding significant amounts of gold, but significant is a relative term. My shaman is about to hit 61, and after three levels in Outland, he still only has 156 gold. That wouldn't even go for a dollar on my realm, so if he were my only character, a hacker wouldn't get much out of stealing my account. Still, as players approach the level cap, the amount of gold they have increases significantly, to the point where hacking them may be worth it.

Regardless of what level a person needs to reach before they are generally hack-worthy, the solution Blizzard implements needs to be easy to carry out and elegant in its execution. For that reason, I stand with much of the player base in saying that anyone who wants to upgrade their account to a Cataclysm account should be required to have an authenticator. All Cataclysm boxes could ship with authenticators included in them, and if the authenticator isn't attached to your account, you can install the game, but you won't be able to upgrade your account, which you need to do to actually play the new 80-85 content. By the time a player reaches 80, they will probably have enough gold to make them hack worthy, and requiring an authenticator get the next expansion means that players won't feel as forced to get an authenticator as they would feel if they were simply required to have one by a certain date (like with the battle.net transfer). Players could get authenticators in their own time when they actually needed one.

Still, that leaves one group to consider: guild officers. It's possible for someone to be promoted to an officer position before they get close to the level cap, and if that gives them access to the guild bank, then one hacked account could mean dozens of items stolen from all of the members of the guild. Still, it would be impractical for the game itself to require that all guild officers have authenticators, since some guilds don't have guild banks worth stealing from. This is a more subjective matter than at what level a character becomes hack-worthy, so I think the best option is to allow the guild master (and maybe the officers) to see who has an authenticator attached to their account and who doesn't. It will then be his prerogative to only promote players with authenticators to the officer position, or to only grant bank access to officers with authenticators.

So, for the record, here's a summary of my take on who should be required to have authenticators:
-Anyone who has already been hacked.
-Anyone who wished to upgrade their account to be compatible with Cataclysm.
-At the discretion of the guild leader, any guild members with access to valuable tabs of the guild bank.

What can you do at 80 without a group?

As someone who doesn't have time to raid and who doesn't enjoy PvP, heroics are the only way I can engage in group play at the level cap. However, with the addition of the dungeon finder and the heroic chain-run binge it brought about in me, I have since grown tired of heroics. Having gotten all that I can out of the fishing dailies, cooking dailies, and all that I care to get out of the Argent Tournament (seriously, I really don't like that place), I have been pondering; what is there that is left for me to do? As I said in my post on the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content, most of what there is to do at level 80 is split into five categories: 5-mans, raiding, battlegrounds, arenas, and dailies. I have been growing more and more tired of dailies, but I suppose that is because I am no longer working towards a meaningful goal. I used to do the dailies for the reputation, then I did them for the money in saving up for the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth. Now, when I do them, it is simply as something to do, and they aren't that enjoyable in that way.

So, that brings us to our topic: what can one do at level 80 that doesn't involve groups? In writing this list, I am excluding the Argent Tournament and doing dailies for the sake of making money.

Finish any quests you never did
I am, of course, referring to the one-time quests, not the dailies. I personally hit 80 in Sholazar Basin, so that left two whole zones of quests for me to do. If you haven't finished off the one-time quests in Northrend, do them. They give you gold and are quite fun, as well.

Work on your reputations
There are quite a few factions in Northrend, and you can try to get exalted with them if you need something to do. Sadly, the only way to get exalted with most of them is through dailies and heroics, but if you do dailies while working toward a goal, they aren't so bad. The main benefit of doing this is that eventually you'll be able to talk to anyone when you want to repair your gear and you'll be able to get the repairs at the lowest possible price. If you decide to work on your reputations, see my post on how to level Northrend reputations without championing, which goes over how to get exalted with the Northrend factions without grouping.

Level your professions
There's a chance you didn't get your professions to 450 on the way to 80. I know that as an enchanter, getting to 450 was very difficult and took a lot of time, so your professions may be lying in your spellbook, waiting to reach their full potential. If so, max them out. It will make leveling them easier when Cataclysm hits.

Level your secondary skills
Granted, if you are starting from scratch, cooking and first aid will require doing more than just grinding in Northrend, but you can level fishing anywhere now, so your only concern in that case is overcoming the boredom you will inevitably feel while doing it. Cooking is a no-brainer to level now, and I imagine first aid isn't much more difficult (as a druid, I don't really have any use for first aid, so I haven't leveled it to Northrend levels).

Go out and farm stuff
Collect things with your gathering professions. Go and fish somewhere. Grind some elementals for some motes. Grind some beasts for some meat. Go to Storm Peaks and grind some Relics of Ulduar. Go out and grind the materials for some high end crafted epics, or just sell the stuff you get. Ironically, the monotony of farming can really break up the monotony of chain-running heroics quite well. It may not be the most efficient way to make money, but when you are bored with the best way (dailies), the second best begins to look even better.

Explore
Northrend is an amazing continent. It is really well designed and looks just beautiful. Why not get on your flying mount and just go out and explore? Find some little nook or cranny you missed while leveling up. Fly to the top of a really high mountain. Do something with no mind for the reward. You just might get an achievement for it as well.

Sadly, because of Blizzard's homogenization efforts, there isn't much to do at level 80 that doesn't involve dailies or groups. If you don't like any of the ideas above, your only choice is to go back to old content. Next week, I'll write a post about things you can do in the old world if you are bored with Northrend's end-game.

WoW Philosophized loves the Discovery Channel

(Inspired by this edition of XKCD.)

I love my druid,











I love the bear form dance











I love my shaman,











I love to spec enhance











I love the whole world








and all its mounts and pets










Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada












Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada











I love the channels,




the places to discuss












I love the emblems






and post-nerf Oculus


















I love the whole world;











Cataclysm will rock






Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada











Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada













I love my dual specs,




I love epic flying;










I love heroics








that don't involve trying













I love the whole world,









though Duskwood kind of sucks











Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada








Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada











Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada

The world (of warcraft) is just awesome.

Boom-de-yada boom-de-yada

How much WoW is too much?

This edition of WoW.com's Breakfast Topic got me thinking about a question I struggled with recently due to the awesomeness of 3.3 (especially compared to the disappointment of 3.2) and my surge of free time with finals and Christmas break conspiring to cause me to flirt with WoW addiction again. (I suffered minor addiction when I started playing but have since gotten over it) That question is, how much WoW is too much? The comments section on that particular Breakfast Topic were an interesting look at how the community views that issue, but I still wanted to think about it for myself, and here is what I came up with.

Before we start, you should know that I view WoW as equal to other things people do as hobbies. I don't see things like hiking, biking, reading, writing, painting, etc. as inherently superior to WoW. (Though I may argue in casual conversation that they are superior) After all, a hobby is nothing more than an activity done to fill our free time. Sure, we can say that there are better ways to spend our time then WoW. Exercise is healthy for us and artistic endeavors exercise our creative "muscles" (a.k.a. our brain), but these are all value judgments that say more about us than the hobbies themselves.

So, how much WoW is too much? It's futile to try to pick an objective number of hours per a week that constitutes "too much WoW" since everyone is different, as are their schedules, so it's better to talk in relative terms. Let's start with the obvious: if you are playing WoW is lieu of eating, drinking, or sleeping, the most basic things we need to survive, that is too much WoW. No question. The same goes for if WoW gets in the way of your job or your school work, the latter of which is, among other things¹, preparation for the former. You need to work so that you can afford food, a house to sleep in, the rent/mortgage, your bills, WoW itself, etc. You need to make money to live, the question wage slavery aside², so putting off work for WoW is just as bad as putting off eating for WoW.

So, if you don't let WoW ruin the necessary parts of your life, but it's all you do in your free time, is that too much? I'd say so. Human beings thrive on variety, and though you don't need to try every hobby out there, you shouldn't spend all of your time on any one hobby (WoW or otherwise), no matter how "worthy" that hobby may be of your undivided attention. We need multiple sources of stimulation to stay well rounded as people, for different stimuli exercise different parts of our brain. If we focus too much on one thing, we lose the ability to do other things. In addition, if all you do is play WoW, you will, at some point, get bored. Maybe you'll run out of content to do, or maybe you'll suffer from burnout. Regardless, if WoW is all you know, then you won't have any hobbies to fall back on. You'll have all that free time and nothing to do with it, and then the real boredom will start. If you want a more direct reason for why WoW shouldn't be your only hobby, let me ask you this: if WoW is your only hobby, what will you do on Tuesday mornings during the weekly maintenance?

So, assuming you have other hobbies, but WoW is your chief one, what if your WoW time starts creeping in on your family time or your time spent with friends? This is one of those things where it's not so clear cut. After all, introverts don't feel as much of a need to socialize as extroverts do, so the standard for when WoW is getting in the way of ones socialization would be higher for introverts than extroverts. Like any hobby, I think WoW become a problem when it causes you to either break your promises or break off your commitments with your friends, e.g. you promise to pick up a friend from the airport, but you did one random heroic too many and are now running late, or you miss your best friend's birthday party because your ICC progression raid was scheduled for that night. When it comes to family time, I can't say with much certainty how much is too much since I don't have a family of my own, but if you spend significantly more time playing WoW than your spouse and/or kids spend with their hobbies, that's probably a sign you are playing too much.

So, that covers your basic obligations to yourself and your obligations to those around you. Assuming your play time doesn't cause you any of the aforementioned problems, can you still play too much WoW? Again, the standard of what is "too much" is different for everyone, but if you encounter any of the problems bellow, they I think you are playing too much.

-You no longer consider WoW fun. WoW is a hobby, and as such, it is only worth your time if you get some form of enjoyment out of it. Burnout is a pretty good reason to take a break, or at least cut down on your playing.
-You start playing for the results rather than the process. In other words, you play for the gear, the achievements, the titles, but not because you actually enjoy playing to acquire those things. As I have said before, a game or hobby is a process you enjoy, with the results being secondary. When the results are the most important thing and the enjoyment of the process takes a back seat to them, then your hobby becomes a chore.

There may be other signs of too much WoW that I have forgotten, so feel free to say in the comments what signs you think I have left out.

Because of the nature of the post that inspired this post, I thought I'd leave you with my favorite answers to that Breakfast Topic.

"When you have to justify your playtime to others." -Knob
"Easy as cake: whenever I find myself saying "I have to farm 26 more emblems" instead of "I want to", I force myself to quit the game for a few months." -Sterdoker
"When you have to plan real life around wow you play to much, a video game shouldn't rule your life to the extent that you have trouble watching a TV show you enjoy." -mjb (this touches upon the point of balance in your hobbies, which I discussed earlier)
"There is no 'time' or 'signs', there are simply priorities. When something more important comes up, WoW stops. Kids in school - wow. Kids on break - no wow. Holidays with family - no wow. Weekend off - wow. Having fun - wow. Can't fit though the door anymore - no wow." -John
"You know you've played to much WoW when you go and play a single-player RPG for the first time in a while and it actually makes you uncomfortable that your character actually is a unique snowflake." -Stormscape

¹This is the key part of that sentence. Though preparing students for their working life is a fundamental role of school, school (at all its levels) can and should be much more than that.
²I will say that I give this theory and other parts of Marxism some credit, but that is a much bigger topic, one I don't have the room to address here.

A post-dungoen-finder guide to instance etiquette

When I wrote my first guide to basic instance etiquette, I didn't expect that my work would be done, but I did at least think that it would at least last another patch. However, with the advent of patch 3.3 and the dungeon finder, it has become clear to me that the old rules governing instance etiq0uette have once again become inadequate. New behaviors have come up that are so horrifying that I am afraid to even run random dungeons these days, even though I am a tank and that solves about 25% of my potential problems. But rather than complain about this issue, I will instead compose some guidelines that we should all follow for a smooth instance run. Let's hope this does some good.

As a final word before I start this, if this all seems obvious to you, that is a good thing; it means you are likely not part of the problem.

Everyone:
-The fact that you will likely never see these people again is not an excuse to be a jerk. A little courtesy goes a long way and will make the run smoother for everyone.
-If you haven't run that particular instance before, say so. People will be more forgiving of your mistakes and will likely explain the boss fights to you.
-Do not kick people just because they don't have all ilevel 232 epics. No one needs über gear to run a heroic. Heroics were designed to be run in gear obtained from normals (ilevel 187 blues), reputations (ilevel 187 blues, 200 blues, or 200 epics), and BoE crafted items (ilevel 200 blues or epics). Remember the days when Wrath first came out? Everyone was in that kind of gear, if you were lucky; seeing someone in a heroic with low-level quest greens and blues wasn't uncommon in those days. If one person--or even four people--in your group has that kind of gear, you can still complete the heroic. Ninety nine times out of one hundred, you'll be able to carry the person in "sub-par" (I use the term sarcastically) gear and won't even notice their presence.*
-Likewise, if you are in the minimum gear for heroics, it helps to let your group know. If you are a DPS, this won't matter too much, but if you are a healer, the tank needs to know that he can't chain pull half the instance and the DPS need to know that they will have to avoid damage during the boss fights, and if you are a tank, the DPS need to know that they need to watch their threat and the healer needs to know that he/she may actually need to stay on his/her toes.
-Most items cannot be traded cross-realm, with two exceptions: conjured items and BoP items that dropped during that run. As such, there is no reason to flip out if someone accidentally picks need on an item you wanted and wins it; just ask for him to trade it.
-If you know an upcoming boss drops an item you need that is a lower tier of armor than what you can wear (like if you can wear leather and you need a cloth item the boss drops), let your group know so they know to pass on it and not hit the DE button.
-Don't link damage meters or recount. I have never sen anything good come from doing so. Only link them if one person is doing such bad DPS (as in triple digits) that you want to kick them, and you need to convince the group to do so.

Tanks:
-If someone is low on mana, see whether they are drinking to regenerate that mana. If they are, don't pull.
-Do not pull enemies when the healer doesn't have the mana to heal you, and make sure you give the healer enough time to regenerate that mana.
-Don't pull more enemies than your healer can handle. Pull one pack at first. If you healer has any trouble healing you through that, you'll know you can't chain pull during this run.
-Don't go so quickly that your group can't even loot the corpses. Wait until everyone is next to you before you pull. This is especially true for bosses.
-You should still go pretty quickly, since these days, with everyone in such amazing gear, you can, and most people will be glad you did so. Just go as fast as you can without violating any of the above rules.
-Don't body-pull enemies without causing any threat to them; if you do that, your healer will get aggro and die.
-Don't focus on AoE threat when everyone in your group is attacking one enemy at a time. Don't focus on single-target threat when your group is AoE'ing everything down.

DPS:
-It is not your job to pull enemies. If you don't like the pace the tank is going, tough it out. The only possible exception to this rule is if you are in a place where pulling patrols at opportune times is important in order to avoid pulling more enemies than you can handle. If your tank is about the finish killing the mobs you are fighting now and the patrol is in just the right place to pull it, then it is partially excusable to pull the enemy if you tank doesn't look like he has noticed it. Still, when this happens, it's best to try to bring that enemy to the tank so the tank will pick him up, either actively or accidentally with his AoE. Note that this situation will rarely, if ever, happen for you.
-Just because you and the healer out-gear the instance doesn't give you the excuse to act stupid and pull threat or take easily avoidable damage, such as standing in the fire.
-Turn on Target of Target in your interface menu and use it to attack whatever your tank is attacking. As a tank, there is nothing more annoying than a DPS who attacks enemies that I am not focusing on, even when they are behind me and are thus clearly not whom I am causing the most threat to.

Healers:
-As sad as I am to have to say this, you aren't allowed to pull enemies either (yes, I have seen healers do that).
-You should heal DPS through the occasional mistake, but saving them from their serial stupidity is not your responsibility. Do so if you are bored, but know that they will only learn their lesson when the see their repair bills.

*This rule obviously doesn't apply to the new Frozen Halls instances, and to some extent heroic Trial of the Champion. The gear requirements for those instances are much higher, and someone in all quest blues just won't be able to pull their weight unless their presence is offset by someone in full Trial of the Grand Crusader gear.

5 things every druid should do at some point

There were some similar lists on WoW.com for mages and paladins, so I figured I'd write here about what all druids should do at some point.

Try out as many roles as possible.
Druids are special in that they are the only class in the game that can do every role in a party: tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, and healer. Trying out more than one role will give you the perspective you need to be a better player in whatever role you usually do. It's a shame to level a druid to 80 and only take advantage of one of these options. This flexibility is the druid class's greatest strength. Whereas other people need to take the time to level another character if they want to try another role, as a druid, it's all available to you with just a change of gear and spec. For that reason, you should also use instance drops to build an off-set for whatever roles you may want to try; it's much better than starting from scratch.

Do the Swift Flight Form quest line.
Even if you learned Swift Flight Form from a trainer, this quest line is still worth doing. It's epic, it forces your to take advantage of most of your skills as a druid, (well, it did at level 70, at least), it gives you some insight into what is going on in the Emerald Dream, and it gives you the ability to summon Anzu, allowing you to get the Reins of the Raven Lord. Blizzard has been adverse to put in class-specific quests as of late, so it's worth doing the few they put in for us.

Go into Swift Flight Form, fly up high, dismiss it, cast some spells, and go back into it.
Ah, the simple pleasures of being a druid. You should also try flying up very high or jumping off of a high ledge and using Swift Flight Form right before you hit the ground.

Roll a Shaman.
I know, I know, here I am, a dedicated druid, telling you that you should go level another class. Why? Because Shamans are really fun, that's why. Enhancement, the Shaman's best leveling tree (and their most fun one, in my opinion) is a spec that gets more and more fun as you level, never disappointing you. Their hybrid nature also makes Shamans pretty similar to a Druid, and a while you, as a druid, are locked in one role at a time because of the need to shift into specific forms, Shamans (especially the enhancement ones) don't face such a limitation. Seriously, just try one; you won't regret it.

Go into Deadmines and kill as many enemies as possible at once.
What you do is run through the instance, picking up as many enemies as you can without killing them, then ending the whole thing in ten seconds with Swipe. What follows is the most satisfying sea of numbers flying across the screen and probable lag that you will ever see. Here are some tips to make it an even more satisfying experience.
-Dispel Thorns before doing it, so the enemies attacking you won't die as you are running.
-Get their attention with Demoralizing Roar so you don't damage them and risk killing them. This will also reduce the damage they do to you.
-Spec feral with Improved Leader of the Pack. If you health runs low, auto-attack some of the enemies following you so that you can heal yourself with it.
-There are gates that only open after each boss is defeated. You'll need to go through them with enemies in tow if you want this to be a truly grand experience. To do this, target the boss as you approach them, then use Mangle and Lacerate to bring them down so you don't kill any other enemies. Sneed presents some unique difficulties since you need to kill his shredder, then target and kill him. If you can't see him in the crowd of enemies around you, just use tab until you find him. It works for me.
Yes, this will create a massive repair bill without giving you the money to pay it off. Do it anyways. Why? Because you are a druid, and you can. Do you need any more of a reason?

Should tier 9 gear be the standard in heroics?

This edition of WoW.com's The Queue stated that tier nine has become the new standard of gear in heroics, meaning that if you gear is better, then your are considered over-qualified for heroics, and if it is worse, you are under-qualified. From a purely objective perspective, this is a ludicrous idea. Heroics were designed to be easy enough that a group of people in ilevel 200 blue-quality gear could do them; after all, heroics are the next logical step after normals. Tier nine gear is a large step above blues, so where does this standard come from?

Put simply, we are spoiled. The new emblem system that Blizzard has added (where the second-best emblem is the base emblem that drops from any heroic or raid bosses that don't drop the best emblem, and the best emblem is awarded by your first daily heroic and the weekly raid quests) has made getting raid quality gear possible without stepping into a raid, and as such, even the average Joe can get amazing gear. In the time between patch 3.2 (when the new emblem system was first implemented) and patch 3.3 (when the dungeon finder was released), many people took advantage of that system, which made emblems of conquest the new base emblem, in place of emblems of heroism. Those who took the time to run heroics could get very powerful gear with these new emblems, and Casual Carl (yes, I just made that name up) could get raid-quality gear without dedicating the time to raiding, since heroics were short, and thus he could do them on his own time. As such, everyone and their mother was running around in gear that was much better than what they could get in heroics. In other words, those who ran heroics the most soon out-geared them.

Once patch-3.3 was released, many people started chain running heroics, and if it wasn't clear before, it became obvious that very few people were running heroics for gear these days. After all, emblems of conquest allow access to ilevel 232 gear, the kind available in 10-man Trial of the Crusader. It was as if these people had skipped two tiers of raiding. The ridiculous extent to which people out-geared heroics became obvious, and because so many people fit that standard, it became the norm. The consequence of such a mass over-gearing was that heroics became easy. Very easy. Previously difficult fights became trivial and people stopped using the strategies that were once necessary for success, or at least only used them to make the fights interesting. I've seen fights end so quickly that the bosses weren't even able to use the abilities that made the fight difficult. Everything has become a tank-and-spank. (Except Oculus; thank goodness I have only had to run it once.)

That is, unless, there is someone in your group who doesn't out-gear the heroic, or at least doesn't out-gear it to a ludicrous degree. Then the run goes from ridiculously easy to pretty easy. After all, you are only likely to see one such person in a heroic, and you probably won't notice their presence unless you are used to running heroics with fellow guild-members who are decked out in gear from 25-man TotGC. That's if the under-geared "offender" is a DPS, though. If he is a healer, then all that means is that the tank can't chain pull enemies in the instance like he may be used to doing. If he is a tank, then that means that healer needs to stay on his/her toes and the DPS needs to watch their threat. These are more significant inconveniences than the boss not dying fast enough to not use his main ability.

Back to the main question: should the standard for gear in heroics be tier nine? Since the standard can be defined what most people qualify for, tier nine already is the de jure standard. However, the implication of such a standard is that anyone who queues for a heroic with gear worse than tier nine is a burden to the group and should potentially be kicked. If tier nine were the de facto standard, this would be true. So, should tier nine be the de facto standard for heroics?

God no! Here's why: in case you haven't run heroics recently, they are incredibly boring. Granted, as a tank, it's more fun for me than in is for other people, but I recently tried healing a run with a competent tank, and it was a very uneventful time. I kept Rejuvenation on him and that healed 95% of all the damage he took. Sometimes I threw out a Regrowth of Wild Growth just for the hell of it. Overall, the experience was one I would not care to repeat. Now, if the tank had not been over-geared, the run would have been much more fun. I would have been throwing out Nourishes and it would have been a more interesting experience. Point is, "under-geared" people make heroics interesting because they bring us back to a time when strategy was required and we couldn't blast our way through heroics half-asleep. They make heroics fun again. (If you are still complaining that they make the run slower, you may wish to read my last philosophy post.)

Happy New Years everyone! As a special treat for the new decade, I am posting this post right before I go to bed after staying up until midnight.