Are our actions in WoW meaningless?

As those of you who found my blog through wow.com know, I am currently reading World of Warcraft and Philosophy. Though the book as a whole is very interesting, there is one point in it that has stuck with me ever since I read it: we give our lives meaning based on how we change the world, and because the world of WoW is almost impossible to change in any meaningful way by player action, everything we do in WoW is meaningless.

I think the most poignant example of this point is the Argent Tournament daily quest You've Really Done It This Time, Kul. For those of you who do not have access to this daily, it involves killing members of the Cult of the Damned for keys to unlock the cages holding Kul the Reckless and four other crusaders whom he has taken with him to fight the Cult of the Damned. Unlike the other Silver Covenant Argent Tournament dailies, this one is not on a rotation with any others, meaning you do it every day. Every day, you go free Kul from his cage, and sometimes he says, "Thank the Light. I'll never do anything this foolish again." And then, the next day, he is back in that cage, and you need to rescue him again.

Many dailies are the same way. No matter how many times you do Taking Battle To The Enemy, the number of cultists in Icecrown is never reduced. No matter how many times you do The Ghostfish, Marcia will never discover the secret of that Phantom Ghostfish, as evidenced by the fact that she will likely send you out to do the daily again. No matter how many times you do Vile Like Fire!, those buildings will never actually burn down. Dailies pretty much involve players doing things over and over again with no perceivable impact on the game. Not one. The Argent Colosseum was built in spite of the fact that I'm pretty sure no one did the dailies that involved collecting materials for their construction. The obvious exception is how the Sunwell Plateau dailies unlocked the next round of dailies as people completed them, but this is the only exception I can think of.

Think, also, about quests that send you out to kill an enemy that is threaten the town. I am sure many players will be familiar with the quest Wanted: "Hogger", in which you set of to kill a gnoll who... well, the quest never exactly makes it clear why he is a threat to Stormwind, but he must be. He is an elite, after all. Anyways, you get together with your friends, you kill this guy, and you go to get your reward. And yet, if you go back to that area, who do you find? Hogger! Yep, he has respawned, and your efforts to do Stormwind a favor have yielded nothing. Look at the first quest human receive when they start out: Kobold Camp Cleanup. You go kill those kobolds as Marshal McBride requested, and yet they are still there when you return for the next quest. I could go on and on, but any quest you do will have no real effect on the world around you, save the Wrathgate questline in Northrend and the series of quests in the Death Knight starting zone. (Both of which, you may notice, are often considered the best questlines in the game. Coincidence? I think not.)

Instances are almost identical in this regard. Suppose you and four of your friends go through Deadmines. After much trial and tribulation, you kill Vancleef. It was hard work, but you now have the satisfaction of removing that threat to Stormwind. Or do you? The next day, you see some people talking about how they are looking for more adventurers to help them go into the Deadmines and take down Vancleef. But I already killed him, you may say to yourself. Curious as to what they mean, you decide to follow them into the instance. The reappearance of the henchmen you killed before him gives you the impression that something is amiss, and lo and behold, there he is. The man himself, standing as if you have never killed him. Substitute any boss in any raid and it is the same case.

In short, almost nothing we do in WoW actually impacts the world itself, and thus, it is meaningless. We do get gear and experience for what we do, but that only affects our characters, not the world around us. Keep in mind that meaningless doesn't mean pointless. Our actions in World of Warcraft are fun and enjoyable, and for that reason, they have a point. I am only arguing that within the world of WoW itself, they are meaningless.

Is that a bad thing, though? If it weren't for all of the mechanics discussed above, WoW could not exist as a game. Dailies need to be repeatable by their nature. Enemies killed for quests need to respawn so that other people can kill them and complete the quest. Instances need to reset for the same reason. If instances were one-time things only, then it would be more and more difficult to find groups for them as the years went on. How many alliance players do you know that haven't run Deadmines? In other words, our actions in WoW need to be mostly meaningless, or else WoW couldn't exist as a game.

But is WoW doomed to meaninglessness? I think not. There are certainly things Blizzard can do to make our actions feel like they are having some effect on the world. Having more questlines like Wrathgate would be a start. Then we would feel like our efforts are actually changing Azeroth in some way. As for dailies, perhaps the number of enemies we need to kill or the number of objects we need to collect could go down as we do the daily. Imagine, for example, you go into the Argent Tournament area, and you pick up Taking the Battle to the Enemy. After you do it for five days, you notice that the number of cultists you need to kill has gone down to fourteen. After five more days, it goes down to thirteen, etc. Heartened by this fact, you keep doing the daily until, after twenty five days, you only need to kill ten. When you reach this point, the quest text itself changes. When you first started, the quest text read like this:

The coliseum is perched in the most dangerous part of the world, adventurer. The territory we've taken from the Scourge has been paid for in blood and misery, yet the enemy continues to strike back with a seemingly limitless army. To make matters worse, this undead army is supported and assisted by mortal sympathizers, the Cult of the Damned.

Go forth into Icecrown and slay any cultists you encounter.

Instead, it now reads like this:

When we first came here, adventurer, we were under constant threat from the Scourge and its mortal sympathizers. Thanks to your efforts, however, we have managed to reduce the threat they pose. Our work is still not done, though; go forth into Icecrown and keep killing those cultists.

Once again, you are further motivated to keep doing the daily. After fifty days, you now only need to kill five cultists to complete the daily (it wouldn't go any lower than that). Now the quest text has changed again.

We can't thank you enough, adventurer. Thanks to your tireless efforts, the Cult of the Damned is hardly a threat to us anymore. Still, we cannot rest, for if we stop our efforts now, they will only regain strength. You know what to do.

So you keep doing this daily, but you soon grow bored with it. You stop doing it each day, and upon going back to do it after thirteen days, you are horrified to discover that the number has gone back up to seven. After all, if you aren't keeping those cultists in line, who will?

To make this more general, I think it would give our actions some meaning if dailies rewarded you for doing them by becoming easier as you do so. However, to keep things fair, they would become more difficult if you neglected them. They would never go over their original amounts, though, which would never be made unreasonably high to account for the fact that it would eventually be reduced.

What about raids? Can anything be done with raids to make them feel meaningful? I doubt it, unless you are ok with running a raid only once. Perhaps a boss could say things like, "This time, I will not fall!" before you fight him, but there is no way to give raiding meaning without changing it in some fundamental way. If you make the bosses easier after they are defeated (this makes sense, since being defeated would, in fact, make them weaker if they needed to use all of their resources to come back to life), then players would complain about not being able to face the "real" boss more than once. It's a shame Blizzard nixed the old model of unlocking new dungeons by completing old ones, since that would give your character's actions in raids some sort of meaning. Perhaps they could make the final bosses in each raid drop an item that starts a quest to become attuned to the next dungeon, and it would be lootable by everyone. I would consider that a happy medium between the old system of attunement and the new system of accessibility.

Before ending this post, I want to bring up again that just because our actions are meaningless within the world of WoW doesn't mean that they are meaningless in our own lives. They bring up happiness, they allow us to socialize with people while playing a fantastic MMO, they provide a diversion from life's drudgery, and they allow the creation of a greater community of WoW players. Any time spent playing WoW is only meaningless from your character's perspective; it is not meaningless from your own.

What I would like to see in Cataclysm. Part 2: Quests

If you read my post on the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content, you'll know I am not a fan of the way Blizzard does solo content right now. Quests, an intrinsic part of solo-ing, have become repetitive, trite, and boring. Although I frequently do the Argent Tournament dailies, the only thing that keeps me doing them are the pets. Although I think Blizzard had an interesting idea with the jousting mini-game, it isn't that great. The rest is basically kill stuff or collect stuff. Like the profession design, the current quest design in boring, lazy, and unenjoyable. This needs to change.

Now I personally have nothing against dailies; I just think that Blizzard needs to put a bit of effort into inventing creative ones. I have fond memories of Bomb Them Again!, Disrupt the Greengill Coast, and The Booterang: A Cure For The Common Worthless Peon, specifically. I looked forward to doing these dailies, since they were fun, really and truly fun. I think Blizzard can take some valuable lessons away form these dailies.

I may be looking back on the past through rose-tinted glasses when I look at Bomb Them Again!, since it made extensive use of flying mounts, something that was very exciting in the Burning Crusade, but I think there is something to be said for quests involving flying. They were exhilarating, and they actually took skill. The closest thing we have right now is Get Kraken!, and it's a horrible replacement. Flight-path-based quests will never be as fun as genuine flying quests since they take away the element that makes the quests fun: control. They also sometimes force the player to take the flight path multiple times if they don't complete the quest the first time around, which can be really inconvenient if the area of the quest is far away from the spot where you mount (Distraction at the Dead Scar, I am looking at you).

That said, even Distraction at the Dead Scar had something that made it redeemable, something that Disrupt the Greengill Coast especially displayed: skill made the quest easier. The quests these days hardly reward skillful playing. There is little dexterity required, and little motivation to put in any sort of effort to doing the quest well. Why did this not apply to Disrupt the Greengill Coast? Because you needed to use fewer Orbs of Murloc Control if you could get more murlocs in the area of effect of your orb. Thus you needed to kill fewer Darkspine Sirens, since you needed fewer orbs. Most people probably needed four orbs their first time around, but with a bit of practice, you could free ten Murlocs with three orbs easily. Distraction at the Dead Scar was especially like this, since you needed to be quick with the bombs to kills all of the enemies you needed on the first trip. Most people needed two trips when they first did that quest, and it was a very long trip. With practice, though, we could get all of our enemies in one trip. That was the key, though: we needed practice in order to get to that level of skill. These dailies directly rewarded skilled playing, something that is lacking in today's dailies.

So what can be learned from The Booterang? Mainly, quests don't need to involve killing or collecting. Slaves to Saranite is one quest that comes to mind that breaks out of this mold, but its still a far cry from the fun that was Booterang. The Booterang was a great example of creative quest design because it involved no collection and next to no chance of engaging in combat. It could also be macro'd, making the whole experience very simple and enjoyable. Still, the creativity is the most important part, and I wish we could have some more creativity in daily design.

What do I want to see in the future? I was to see quests that involve us flying into areas on our own mounts to do them, quests that actually provide a challenge. I'd also like to see these quests be more challenging for people with epic flying, since an epic flying mount made Bomb Them Again! a joke. I want to see more quests that take less time if you actually think about what you are doing, like trying to aim a bomb strategically. I want to see quests that don't involve killing or collecting. Perhaps these quests could involve giving aid to people in distress or rescuing people, or just throwing things at them. Truth be told, the current quest design is quite lacking, and anything short of a complete reversion to quests that only involve killing will be an improvement.

Finally, as a personal note, I really wish Blizzard would change the cooking quests to what they were like in the days of Burning Crusade, when each one required different meat that needed to be farmed on the day of the quest and cooked close by where they were farmed, and also rewards meat and fish, not just spices and recipes or tokens for them. The way cooking quests are now, the challenge is in collecting the non-meat ingredients, not the meat itself. This is fine if they ingredients are collected by a spot where meat can be farmed, but they aren't. Please, Blizzard, make the cooking dailies like they were before.

How to level Northrend reputations without championing

As I mentioned in my last advice post, it is possible to get exalted with all of the Northrend factions without entering an instance. The easiest way to gain reputation with many of these factions is championing, wherein you where the tabard of the faction you are championing in a level-80 5-man instance and gain reputation with them as a result. However, this approach requires to you have good gear (the main purpose of raising your reputations) and be subjected to PUGs, which are really hit and miss. This guide is concerned with getting exalted with each of the Northrend reputations, including the ones that can be championed, without resorting to championing. Some are harder than others, but it is possible to get exalted with all of these factions without entering an instance, and that's what this post concerns.

Alliance Vanguard/Horde Expedition
These two are pretty easy. The Silver Covenant/Sunreavers dailies that you get from the Argent Tournament are one way to raise your rep. You can also do the dailies on your faction's floating ship in Icecrown, The Skybreaker and Orgrim's Hammer, respectively. That should be enough for you to get exalted in a timely manor.

Argent Crusade
This faction used to be much harder to reach exalted with without championing, but it's easier now. Before, the only repeatable way to get Argent Crusade rep was the daily Troll Patrol, but now the Argent Tournament quests also give Argent Crusade rep, making this grind much easier. If you are a Death Knight, however, then the Argent Tournament quests with give you rep with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, leaving Troll Patrol as your only option.

Frenzyheart Tribe/The Oracles
Nothing special here; just do the dailies.

Kirin Tor
Whoo-boy! This is not an easy faction to get exalted with without championing. Make sure you use wowhead to find all of their one-time quests so you can make this grind as short as possible. Once you have exhausted that option, you have only three left to you:
1. Fishing dailies (given by the Dalaran fishing trainer)
2. Cooking dailies (given by the Dalaran cooking trainers)
3. Jewelcrafting dailies (given by the Dalaran jewelcrafting trainer)
If you ever needed an excuse to level your cooking and fishing, here it is. You can also watch the auction house for a Sealed Vial of Poison, which can be turned in for 250 rep, but it is really expensive (at least on my server) and uncommon, so don't count on buying a lot of these for easy rep.

Knights of the Ebon Blade
Once you complete their Icecrown questlines, the Knights of the Ebon Blade will have two areas with dailies for them. Three dailies can be found in the Shadow Vault in northern Icecrown. Three more can be found on Death's Rise, a little ledge part-way down the cliff southwest of Jotunheim. Doing all of them will net you 1500 rep a day. If you are a Death Knight, then the Argent Tournament quests will also net you Ebon Blade rep, making this grind much faster.

The Kalu'ak
This little faction does have some nice goodies to reward those who get exalted with it. They have quests in Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, and Dragonblight, and each area has a Kalu'ak daily quest, each of which gives you 500 rep. The daily quests are unlocked as you complete the questline in each area. You can use the turtle boats to shuttle between the three areas if you don't want to spend the money to fly there.

The Sons of Hodir
In order to even start gaining rep with these guys, you need to do a long quest chain starting with They Took Our Men! Once you finish the quest chain, you can do dailies to get rep with the Sons of Hodir, and you unlock more as your rep gets higher. Individual quests will unlock similar dailies, so make sure you do all of the one-time quests they offer. You can also look for Everfrost Chips in The Storm Peaks, which can be turned in for Sons of Hodir rep, as can Relics of Ulduar, which can be bought on the Auction House.

The Wyrmrest Accord
Aside from their one-time quests, these guys have three dailies you can do. Two are in Coldarra in Borean Tundra, and one is in Dragonblight. The two low-level ones are unlocked after quests, but the level-80 one can be started almost immediately. They are Drake Hunt, Defending Wyrmrest Temple, and Aces High!
Note: Aces High! starts with the quest Corastrasza, which is started in the Transitus Shield, the same area where you start Drake Hunt.

There you have it! Some factions are easier than others to gain rep with without championing, but only the Kirin Tor is really difficult. Good luck!

What I am doing in-game

Since I am at a loss for something miscellaneous to write about and I recently went through a sort of revelation when it comes to my way of thinking about the game, I decided to detail what I am currently doing in-game.

I recently went through a phase where I was seriously considering why I was playing WoW. The only thing I ever did with any consistency was the fishing dailies. I found (and still find) the Argent Tournament dailies incredibly boring, and I have done the other dailies (at least the ones that give good money) to death, so I no longer enjoy them, either. I went over my general disapproval of Blizzard's dependence on dailies for Wrath solo content in this post, so read that if you want to know why I am so jaded toward daily quests. Anyways, because of my reluctance to do most dailies, especially the Argent Tournament ones, I have pretty much exhausted the Wrath solo content.

For some reason, the possibility of doing group content more rigorously never occurred to me, but when I thought about it, I realized that that was what I enjoyed most about WoW. Helping other people succeed, seeing new content, and experiencing new battles was what I enjoyed most about the game, and my comfort and aptitude with being a healer can certainly help me do that. As such, I am currently focused on getting better healing gear so that I can eventually move past Naxxramas and see Ulduar. There is really one thing about my healing set that I need to address more than the rest: my trinkets.

Currently, the two trinkets I am using in my healing set are both low-level green trinkets I got from some of my first quests: Futuresight Rune and Infused Coldstone Rune. They may be bad, but what I like about them is that they are both on-use trinkets, rather than random proc trinkets. This allows me to use them when I really need them. Still, I really need to replace them, and frequently running Trial of the Champion on normal mode has allowed me to obtain Tears of the Vanquished. It might not be an on-use trinket, but the fact that I don't need to worry about activating it probably makes it more useful. The other trinket I would like to get is the Winged Talisman from Heroic Halls of Lightning, but because of the lack of popularity of that instance, I'm not holding out hope of getting it any time soon.

The rest of the items that I want are all available through emblems, so I plan on running a lot of heorics, especially the daily heroics, since I will need 110 emblems of triumph to buy every piece of EoT gear I want. That's 55 daily heroic quest, and I have only done two since Blizzard added EoTs to them. Anyways, here's the gear I want, arranged by what emblems they take and how much I want them.

Emblems of Triumph:
Idol of Flaring Growth (25)
Band of the Invoker (35)
Talisman of Resurgence (50, this is my backup in case I can't get the Winged Talisman)

Emblems of Conquest:
Evoker's Charm (19)

Emblems of Valor:
Band of Channeled Magic (25)
Disguise of the Kumiho (25)

Once I have gotten all the items I want that I can buy with a certain emblem, I'll use any more I get to upgrade my armor, which is pretty good currently and doesn't warrant immediate replacement.

So, those are my plans for upgrading my gear. They originally included running normal Trial of the Champion a lot (the heroic version has nothing I can use aside from a marginal upgrade to my chest armor), but I have already gotten everything I want from that instance, so it's on to getting badges for me. The nice thing about doing the daily heroics is that I'll be able to see all the work Blizzard put into making those dungeons, which is, in my opinion, one of the best reasons to run instances. This was especially true when I ran Halls of Stone today, and I have to say, though we did rush through it (that DK tank was really impatient), I'm glad I got to see the work Blizzard's art department put into that dungeon.

How to avoid those "What do I do now?" moments

When I started playing WoW, I had one goal: to get to the level cap. I didn't think about why that was my goal or what I would do when I got there; all I knew was that was what I had to do. When I did get there, I had a moment I dreaded having: I thought to myself, "What do I do now?" After messing around in Outland for a while, I decided to make getting epic flight skill my next goal. Getting the Ogri'la dailies made that significantly easier, and though it took a while, I saved up that 5,000 gold. I knew I was going to have another WDIDN moment if I didn't think of something else to do after getting my epic flying skill, so I decided to go for exalted with Netherwing. I thought their mounts were really cool, and I had always heard people talking about how much money one could make with their dailies, so I figured it was a good goal. Well, when I did finally get my Netherwing drake, I had another WDIDN moment. I won't bore you with the continuation of my story. To sum it up, I've had quite a few of those moments where you complete a goal and realize you don't know what to do next. This post is about avoiding them.

The key to preventing a WDIDN moment is rather simple: always have a goal. It helps to have both short term and long term goals, since you may not have enough patience to see your long-term goals to the end if you don't try other things. You could make your long term goal making enough money to buy epic flight or getting one of the meta achievements. With the advent of achievements, nearly everything that you do in the game has a reward. Pet and mount collecters have their own achievements, cooks and fishers get their own titles, and even raiders and PvP'ers can get in on the action. These meta achievements often have their own rewards that make them worth doing, but just doing them is really what makes the game fun.

So, once you have decided on a long-term goal, you need a short-term goal to keep you entertained while trying to achieve that long-term one. These goals could be getting exalted with a certain faction or grinding the materials for a certain item or just doing dailies for money. It helps if your short-term goals help your long term goals. For example, if your goal is to save up enough money for epic flight, you could make a short term goal out of getting exalted with Ebon Blade or the Alliance Vanguard, both of which have dailies that reward a good amount of money. You could also make your short-term goals completely unrelated to your long-term goals if you just need a break. If you are tired of grinding reputation for 40 Exalted Reputations, you could try running a heroic instance for a specific item or doing the daily instance for extra emblems to buy something with those.

Raids and PvP are also good options for things to do. They both give you cooperative experiences that are rarely the same and give good gear to boot, although the gear is really just a side reward. In fact, if you are raiding or PvP'ing on a regular basis, you are much less likely to have a WDIDN moment, so you probably don't need to worry about it. People who mostly do solo content are the ones who are likely to have those moments, so it's them that need to keep goals in mind.

To give you an example of the goal mindset, I'll give you my current goals. I want to eventually save up enough money for the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth. My main method of doing this is dailies, but just to keep me from being bored as I do those dailies, I'm also saving up Champion's Seals. I was collecting them for the pets at first (I did use them to upgrade my weapons, so the pets were my secondary goal), since I am an avid pet collector, but with the promise of new items for people with the crusader rank in patch 3.2, I decided to save them up instead. I'm also doing the fishing dailies in hopes of getting the Weather-Beaten Fishing Hat. I enjoy fishing a lot, especially now that it is a great source of raid food, so the hat would be a big help.

As you can see, for some, goals are really about biding your time between raids or battleground or arena battles. They give you something to do when you aren't working toward a common goal with other people. And if you don't enjoy any of the above activities, then goals are really what it's all about for you. After all, if you aren't helping others succeed, you'll only find satisfaction in your own success, so you need to create that feeling of success.

On the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content

If Burning Crusade was Blizzard's attempt to homogenize World of Warcraft in some way, Wrath of the Lich King was their success. We could see the beginnings of homogenization in BC: all elemental items were now primal [element], which were obtained by combining motes; starter gear could be obtained from badges of justice, gotten from any heroic instance; and many reputation grinds were done in instances, not by grinding various mobs. (There were exceptions, of course.) We also saw the advent of dailies, a reliable, albeit repetitive way to make money. Class balance was brought into sharper focus and actually attempted by Blizzard, and most classes had something unique to bring to the raid. Profession balance also become a concern, and Blizzard tried to give every profession something special to make it different from the rest and worth taking.

The problem with Blizzard's design philosophy during BC was that it was near impossible to keep all these things balanced. Some reputation grinds were immensely harder than others with worse rewards, some classes were more useless than others in raids (although, as I discussed here, I think that was a mistaken assumption), and some professions were much more useful to the crafter than others. Despite their best intentions, Blizzard wasn't able to balance everything in BC, but it was certainly a start.

Wrath of the Lich King changed all that. "Bring the player, not the class" became Blizzard's new design philosophy. Their goal was to make each class equally viable so that raids would choose to bring people based on the player's skills, not their class and spec. It was a noble pursuit, and for the most part, it was successful. Frost mages still fall behind in DPS and ret paladins were overpowered for some time, but most classes were on equal footing. Not only were the classes now performing more or less equally, but they were also given new abilities that had been exclusive to other classes for the longest time. For example, Leader of the Pack was one of the main draws of bringing a feral druid to raids. With the release of Wrath, however, warriors were given the same ability. This was one of many examples of class exclusive buffs being given to other classes. With these new buffs was added a new buff mechanic: identical buffs no longer stack. If you bring a feral druid with LotP and a fury warrior with Rampage, your raid members will only get a 5% bonus to their melee crit chance, not a 10% chance. Since buffs like these were also made raid-wide, there was no longer a benefit to bring multiple members of the same class to give the same buffs to different groups in your raid. Thus many classes lost the unique things they had previously brought to raids, and these buffs became viewed as mandatory, rather than a nice bonus to bringing along an atypical DPS'er to your raids.

Blizzard wasn't done there, though. They made reputation grinds more similar as well. Most factions now have their own dailies which grant rep, and for some you can also don their tabard and gain rep from any heroic or level 80 instances you enter. Compared to the old days where only certain instances gave rep with certain factions, this gives players much more flexibility in how they gain rep. I have bad memories of grinding Steamvaults to get rep for my Earthwarden. It was not a fun instance, and the only thing that kept in bearable was the fact that it dropped two pieces of the hunter dungeon set, as well as two pieces of the mage set, so I had a constant supply of DPS. With the advent of Warth, you can now run any instance you like and gain rep, allowing you to choose to run easy ones or ones which drop gear you want. All these changes makes grinding reputation easier, and as a result, the rewards from reputation grinds are less remarkable. Still pretty good, but not as remarkable.

It was worth it, though.

Speaking of dailies, they became a lot more prevalent in Wrath. Once the exclusive right of those with flying mounts, these repeatable quests were revered for the amount of money you could make with them. (120g was a lot back in those days) With patch 2.4, new dailies were added with the Isle of Quel'Danas, as well as the cooking, fishing, and PvP dailies, all of which did not require a flying mount. There were now dailies for everyone, but they were still a distinct, separate part of the game.

Nowadays, dailies are everywhere. Almost every faction has daily quests now, and most of what you do at level 80 that doesn't involve a group involves daily quests. Trouble is, there are only really two rewards from daily quests: rep and money. Once you have gotten your rep as high as you can with the various factions, the only reason to do dailies is for the money. (With the exception of the Argent Tournament dailies, that is, which also reward Champion's Seals, but those are incredibly boring. Patch 3.2 can't come soon enough.) The problem with this is that the different sets of dailies award vastly different amounts of money, so unless you have a lot of time to spend on them, you're only going to spend your time doing the ones that reward the most money. Thus you spend your time doing the same dailies over and over and over again, and unfortunately, they haven't got any more fun since Burning Crusade. Since there weren't as many dailies in Burning Crusade, they didn't need to be as fun and varied, and yet Blizzard still put in the effort to make them interesting. Now we have more dailies than we could ever have dreamed of, and yet Blizzard hasn't tried too many new things with them. I'd even go as far as saying they are less fun than they were before. Perhaps I just have rose-tinted glasses, but I miss the days of Bomb Them Again! and Disrupt the Greengill Coast. The only daily that really compares is Thrusting Hodir's Spear, though it is a pretty awesome quest.

Yes, that dwarf is in the dragon's mouth. This quest is a far better reward for getting honored with the Sons of Hodir than those shoulder enchantments are.

Burning Crusade also brought a lot of changes to professions that made them more viable and useful. However, this caused a lot of players to take professions only for their own self benefit and drop them when they were no longer useful. (Case in point: tailoring and leatherwoking had good starter armor for raiding that only the crafter could equip, but this armor was quickly made obsolete by raid drops.) When Wrath was released, the crafter only benefits were radically changed. There was no more starter-set BoP crafter armor and many of the old exclusive benefits were removed or made less useful (Example: with the advent of potion sickness, which prevents people from using more than one potion per battle, the Alchemist's Stone and its upgrades lost much of their appeal.) New items were added to most of the professions that gave stat bonuses that were exclusive to the crafter. They weren't that exclusive, though, in that with the exception of tailoring and engineering, they all give more or less the same stat benefits. The only thing that differs is how those benefits are conferred; enchanters get exclusive ring enchantments, leatherworkers get bracer enchantments that are better than the equivalent enchantments, jewelcrafters get gems which are better than the gems they can give to everyone else, alchemists gain improved effects from their elixirs and flasks, blacksmiths get to add extra gems to their gear, and inscribers get shoulder enchantments that are better than their Sons of Hodir counterparts. And unlike in the days of BC, these effects no longer apply to you if you drop the profession, so you can't level up each profession and then drop them to get all of their buffs on your gear, which most min-max'ers did back in the day.

What this means is that, with the exception of tailoring's cloak enchants and all of the engineering benefits being added in 3.2, professions are now less about what they give you and more about what you can give others. The unfortunate part of this is that some professions just aren't as useful as others. Alchemy sees a lot more use than leatherworking, and ditto for enchanting compared with tailoring. More importantly, the professions are all much more similar now. That's really the point I am getting at with this post: everything is much more similar in Wrath of the Lich King. Everything has been streamlined, simplified, and almost dumbed down.

How you acquire your profession's recipes is a perfect example of this change. With rare exception, all recipes for all of the professions are either obtained from a trainer or obtained from another NPC by trading for them with some sort of token or material you usually use. New research mechanics have also been added, but these are guaranteed to give you a new recipe, unlike the days of BC when you could discover a new recipe every time you made something. Gone are the days of checking wowhead to see which vendors strewn over the land sell recipes or plans that you need to buy. Factions also play less of a role in our professions. Maybe I feel that more than others because I am an enchanter and we get no recipes from faction quartermasters, but I find it a bit disappointing that getting all of our recipes is so simple and... well, boring.

That's really my main problem with the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King. Everything is more boring now. I still find raiding and instances to be fun, but all of the nuances of solo-ing have been lost. I find this especially ironic since this expansion was supposed to be the one for the casuals. From all of the changes made, I'd wager that Blizzard's intention was really to get casuals into instances as soon as possible, rather than improve their old stomping grounds. After all, the sooner we start raiding, the less time we spend on our own, and the less time Bizzard needs to spend on developing solo content.

In fact, all of these changes can really be traced back to Blizzard trying to get people to raid more. All classes were made raid viable, so no players can blame their class for not raiding. Reputations were made easier to get exalted with, so players can spend less time getting their raid starter gear and get into raids sooner. Dailies became more prevalent so that we would always have something to do to make a bit of money for the repair bills. Professions were homogenized so that players could pick a profession they liked rather than one that would have a positive impact on their raiding. It seems to me that all of these changes were made for the raiders, and not us solo-ers.

I see a parallel between these changes and the arena fiasco. When arenas were released, they brought class balance into sharper focus. Previously, the classes' individual strengths and weaknesses in PvP were glossed over by the fact that battlegrounds were so huge that players' individual contribution or lack thereof weren't easily perceivable. With arenas, however, classes were pitted against each other in a very direct way, and the sad state of class balance was brought into sharp focus. Because of this, Blizzard began to balance classes around their performance in arenas. This became a problem as classes that were perfectly balanced for raids were nerfed because they were doing too well in arenas (such as resto druids). This also applied to battlegrounds, where the battles are more objective based and longer, and thus emphasize survival rather than rapid killing. Because of this difference, some classes lost effectiveness in battlegrounds because they were too good in arenas.

This kind of thing still goes on, and what makes the situation ironic is that arenas are the part of the game with lowest player participation. There are even many die-hard battleground fans who hate them. Arenas used to be more popular when they were a source of easy epics, but now that all arena gear requires good ratings, those days are gone.

In the same way that PvP was balanced around arenas, I think that PvE content has been balanced around raiders. While this could be seen as a good thing for players who want to get into raids as soon as possible, those of us who don't are left more or less in the dust. Don't get me wrong; I do enjoy raiding, but some people just don't have the time for it, and it is those people who suffer the most from these changes to PvE. Solo end-game is dying. I would like to think that the new Argent Tournament dailies we are getting in patch 3.2 will change that, but even if they do, it's such a shame that they will only be available to people with the Crusader title, which will force players to play inferior content in order to get to good content. If these new dailies disappoint like the last ones did, we solo players will just have to go back to levelling alts; there's just nothing fun left to do.

Edit: Patch 3.2 has been released, and I have to say, I am pretty disappointed with the new dailies. With the exception of Get Kraken!, they are all typical, predictable, and boring. Come on, Blizz! Challenge your quest designers. Give us something new!

How to pick an item to grind for money

I'd just like to state off the bat that this post will mostly apply to people already at the level cap, although you may be able to use this advice bellow level 80. So, suppose you are tired of the grind of dailies and you want to try to make some money some other way. How can you do it? To give you a hint, the answer was in the second sentence of this post. Yes, grinding. It may not be very appealing to you, but it's really your other option aside from playing the auction house, and I know that that method does not work for me. I'll warn you know that this post won't cover the act of grinding itself; just how to choose where to grind.

Before you start, you may want to get a base line of how much money you wish to make per hour. To get that base line for myself, I did all of the Ebon Blade dailies excluding Intelligence Gathering (it takes too damn long) and all of the solo Alliance dailies in Icecrown on the Bombardment excluding That's Abominable! (again, takes too damn long), since those sets of dailies have the highest amount of gold per hour. I then recorded how much gold I made and how much I made per hour.

Ebon Blade:
75 gold (+15 gold in herbs), 17 minutes, 270 (318 with herbs) gold/hour
Bombardment:
110 gold (+10 gold in herbs and cloth), 30 minutes, 220 (240 with herbs and cloth) gold/hour

This means that my baseline is 250-300 gold per hour for my farming. The reason I picked that base line for myself is that, if I'm not making more than that, then I'll make more with dailies than by farming. Of course, if you want to use farming to break up the monotony of dailies, then you don't really need to worry about a baseline based on dailies. In fact, most of you probably won't want to worry about a baseline at all, so if you don't want to, then don't.

Now for the instructions. One big mistake people make with farming or with any kind of money-making method is not being flexible. They pick one item to farm (or one method for making money) and farm that every time. However, if you want to make the big bucks, you need to be a bit more flexible then that. Start by seeing what sells well on your server. Auctioneer can help with this, but it isn't necessary. Don't dismiss anything in your search for a good thing to farm. Meat may not seem like a worth-while thing to farm, but there may be a dearth of Chunk o' Mammoth on your realm's AH that you could take advantage of. If you need a place to start, Eternal Air and Fire usually sell well. Fishing can also make you a good bit of money. In my experience, the only high-end fish worth fishing for money are Musselback Sculpin, Glacial Salmon, and Dragonfin Angelfish, and it's infinitely better to fish in pools than in open water. You should also look into using your gathering professions to make money. Ore and herbs usually sell well. I can't speak for miners, but as an herbalist, I know that Adder's Tongue, Lichbloom, and Icethorn are my best sellers.

As a note about Adder's Tongue, the reason it sells well is that it is fairly low level for a high-end herb, and thus doesn't get picked a lot. What this means for you is that you can look into low level markets with low supply but high demand and take advantage of them. Low level enchanting supplies can make you money in this way, as can low level ores and herbs. I haven't tried this kind of venture myself, so all I can say is keep your eyes open for opportunities.

The other key to making money with farming is knowing how many of a particular item you can farm in a certain amount of time. If item A is selling for 10 gold and item B is selling for 20 gold, but you can get 30 of item A in an hour and 10 of item B, you'll want to go for item A. It's also a good idea to see if you can farm for different things at the same time. At the lake in Borean Tundra, I can farm Tiger Lily and fish for Musselback Sculpin at the same time. Depending on the market, I can make quite a bit of money there by farming both things at once. If you need a macro to switch between your various tracking skills, here's the one I use.

#showtooltip
/castsequence [nocombat] find fish, find herbs

This allows me to see both schools and herbs by switching between the two. You can switch what I put in there with your own tracking skills or add more if you wish too.

Now for the money making part. This is where Auctioneer will really come in handy. Before you start farming, check the AH to see what is selling for high prices that night. (Having a dedicated auction alt also helps for this part) I once checked the AH and saw that Glacial Salmon was selling for 150% of it's usual price. I pounced that opportunity and starting flying over the rivers of Grizzly Hills. Within a half hour, I had four stacks of Salmon, which I sold at 40 gold each. All four sold quickly, and I ended up making 160 gold. That's 320 gold and hour. It may not seem like much, but it's more than I could make with dailies.

Don't expect to see too many opportunities like this, though. Most items that sell for high prices have a lot of people farming them, meaning their supply is fairly stable, so the price is too. Of course, the market place is just as unpredictable as the real one, so you never know. Just look for markets that reliably sell well and you will be all set.

To summarize all that, watch for markets that typically sell high, know how many items you can typically get in a certain amount of time, and use that to make money. With a tad bit of luck, you could become quite rich, and the fact that you won't be doing the same thing every day (*cough* dailies *cough*) means you won't get bored as quickly.

Why you should not rush to the level cap

This is an issue that is close to my heart. When I first started playing, I rarely did quests since I didn't want to move around from area to area until I had leveled past the area I was in. Thus I did a lot of grinding, since vanilla WoW was not made for efficient leveling. Grinding gets boring when you do it that much, so I found leveling to be a chore. That was until I bought a leveling guide that showed me how to level quickly by moving between areas and always doing quests, and leveling became fun again, since the levels were coming in faster than they ever had before. I realize now, however, that I was really misguided in trying to level quickly, because once I got to 70, I had one of those horrible "What do I do now?" moments. I realize now it would have been more enjoyable if I had tried to see more while I was leveling, rather than rushing to the top.

Though Ghostcrawler (the lead system designer for WoW) has gone on the record as saying that the level cap is where it's at, I disagree. I have nothing against high end content per se, but I feel it's wrong to assume that end-game is better than leveling and that one should get there as fast as he can. There is a lot of joy to be found in leveling, and since it is a necessity anyways, you may as well savor it rather than viewing it as a necessary evil.

There are a few things in my mind that stand out as making leveling enjoyable. One is simply learning new moves and adjusting your playing habits to incorporate them into your gameplay. Though some of the abilities you will learn are somewhat useless, most of them add a unique facet to your combat, and this makes learning each new ability a unique joy.

More important, though, is the sheer amount of content to be found during the leveling process, especially in vanilla WoW. Once you reach the level cap, there are some more quests that you can do in Icecrown and Storm Peak, but everything after that is just running instances and raids while doing the same daily quests over and over and over again and waiting for Blizzard to add more content. While you are leveling, however, the content is already there for you, and there is plenty of it. Some of my best memories of leveling are quests I did in my trek from 1 to 60, including the Nesingwary series of quests in Stranglethorn.

Some of you may view questing just a way to speed up the leveling process, helping you gain more experience points and thus making leveling easier, but it is so much more than than. When you start the game, the intro cinematic gives you your general motivation. For me as a Night Elf, it was to defend Teldrassil. However, once you leave your starting zone, that initial motivation no longer applies. The question is, then, why do you fight? The answer can be found in your quests. From helping random civilians to doing a job for the King of Ironforge, quests keep you motivated to continue fighting, and thus continue playing.

More importantly, quests also provide a lot of back story for the game. If you never complete the Defias Brotherhood quest series, you'll never know what your motivation is for entering the Deadmines and killing Van Cleef, or why he rebelled against Stormwind in the first place. If you don't complete the quest that starts at the end of Uldaman, you'll never learn the origin of the Dwarves. And if you don't complete Big Game Hunter and the quests that lead up to it, you won't get the reference when you do their equivalent quests in Outland and Northrend.

What I'm trying to say is that questing is fun, and it's one of the main reasons to play that game. Once you reach end-game, you get one or two zones of level 80 quests, and then you are limited to the repeatable daily quests. The same ones. Over and over again. And while killing ten Defias thugs for one quest isn't that different from killing ten scourge zombies for another quest, doing it over and over again on the same enemies gets repetitive.

So when you do reach end-game, you have three choices of things to do: solo-ing, PvP, and raiding. Because Wrath of the Lich King homogenized the process of reputation gains and making money through dailies (more on this in another post; edit: this post can be found here), solo-ing in Wrath is pretty boring. Gone is the variety found in Vanilla and BC. All of your recipes for professions come from one or two sources; all of your reputations are increases through dailies and/or instance runs; all of your income comes from dailies now, since farming isn't as lucrative as it used to be. Along with their other forms of homogenization, Blizzard reduced the number of items used by high-level characters by a great deal, meaning there isn't much of a fortune to be made in farming. After all, with few items to farm, more people are farming the same items. High supply = low price.

Contrast end-game solo-ing with leveling and the choice of which is better is pretty clear. While leveling, you rarely do the same quest twice, and never over and over again, which keeps them interesting. And since not a lot of people are leveling characters these days, you'll find items which people still need, for leveling their professions and such, that aren't in constant supply. Admittedly, the demand isn't consistent either, but that's what keeps it interesting. You also always have a reason to fight, whereas solo-ers who reach end-game will finish their quests and have little reason left to keep fighting.

As for PvP, there is nothing to prevent you from PvP'ing as a low level character. You may not be in fair level brackets, but like I said, that's what keeps it interesting. Besides, those unfair deaths at level 21 fuel the anger which lets you kill lowbies at level 28. Good times, eh? I'll admit that I don't know much about PvP, but I know a lot of PvP'ers who says that resilience ruined PvP. Well, guess what? Up to level 60, you will find no resilience on your gear. There is arena, which you can't really do unless you are at the maximum level, but if you play WoW mainly for arena, you are better off rolling a character on an arena realm anyways.

The only remaining facet of end-game content that I have not touched upon is raiding. I will admit, this is the only case where end-game has leveling beat. Instances up to end-game (at least the ones worth doing) are limited to five people. If you seek more of a challenge and more of a social experience than that, then end-game is your only option. If you also raid in order to overcome the challenges of it, then you won't find much satisfaction in low level instances. "Progression" no longer exists anywhere other than level 80, so if you enjoy the progressively difficulty of raids, you will find little satisfaction is the dungeons of yore.

If, however, you run raids just for the phat loot, then I can't tell you that you will have more fun at 80 than on the way there. Instances are the best source of loot from PvE no matter what your level, and though you may use the argument "Oh, you'll just outgrow any instance gear you get while leveling," the same can be applied to the gear you get at level 80. Even if you deck yourself out in best-in-slot gear, another raid instance will be released a few months later, and your gear will become obsolete again. It's the same cycle either way:

run instances -> get good gear -> new content is released/becomse available -> gear becomes obsolete -> run new instances -> repeat ad infinitum

So what makes that cycle more enjoyable during leveling than raiding? Nothing really; it's just less work. You may think that you'll get less satisfaction out of your phat loot if it's easier to get, but really, how much satisfaction do you actually get out of your purples? In the end, gear itself is a bad reason to run instances. At least while you are leveling, you can use the excuse that it makes your leveling easier. Conversely, any gear you get while raiding only go towards making raiding easier; you are basically raiding so that you can raid more. The only excuse to do this is if you enjoy raids for themselves, and if you do, then gear is really a non-issue.

Thus concludes my thoughts on leveling. When you role your first character, take it slow, breath it all it, try some instances, and keep questing! That's how you keep the game interesting. If you already have a level 80 character and you steam-rolled your way there, try rolling an alt to see all the content you missed; there's a lot of it in this game, and it would be a shame to not see it; it was designed for you, after all.