How did we put up with this for so long?

There are a lot of negative things I could say about patch 4.0.1. I could talk about Warlocks losing the names of pets that they have had since long ago, names they grew attached to, before a bug took them away (but that's going to be fixed, anyways). I could talk about how atrocious I find the new tree of life model, but time and accepting that I'm probably done healing on my druid has turned my abhorrence into utter indifference. I've already talked about the loss of tree of life as a permanent form, so no point in belaboring that point. Of course, the fiasco of post-4.0.1 class balance is a topic rife with discussable points, but I can't be angry about any of these things. I can't be angry about them because of the changes this patch has made to my warrior alt.

You see, I rolled my little warrior (currently residing at level 25; he was level 22 when the patch hit) as a way to enjoy this game before Cataclysm comes out, but leveling him was a very trying process. Heroic strike, the ability we were supposed to use while fighting one-on-one, consumed so much rage that using Thunder Calp, an ability meant for AoE combat, was actually more rage efficient, even against one enemy. Of course, this meant the damage of a low level warrior was incredibly sub-par, for there weren't many other abilities I could use to increase my damage. I could use Rend, a damage over time ability; Overpower, which I could only use after one of my attacks was dodged, i.e. not all that frequently; and Victory rush, which I could only use once per battle, anyways. In short, at low levels, warriors lacked the abilities they needed to be viable in one-on-one combat.

With patch 4.0.1, however, that all changed. My warrior went from level 22 to 25 (granted, I was two bars away from 23 when 4.0.1. hit) probably as quickly as he went from 21 to 22 thanks to the new move set he has. What you might not know if you've only been following the level-cap changes in patch 4.0.1 is that this patch brought with it changes to how and when we learn abilities at low levels. We only need to learn an ability once, after which it scales as we level. Because of this, Blizzard spread out the rate at which we learn new abilities, so that we have more to learn at higher levels than we would if they had kept it the same. In the process, they reevaluated the order in which we learn abilities and shifted it a bit. This was also the patch where they changed the nature of our abilities. What this all adds up to is that, thanks to the new (new for my level, at least) and improved abilities this patch gave my lowly warrior, he is suddenly viable in combat and--dare I say... fun.

Yes, I said it... ok, I really implied it, but I'll say it now: leveling as a warrior was just not fun in the 1 to 22 range before this patch. Having abilities that weren't viable sitting unused on my bar while using abilities that weren't meant for the situation I was in because the abilities that were meant for the situation I was in were practically useless wasn't fun. Now, all of a sudden, leveling as a fury warrior actually feels like playing a berserker. We have a lot more rage now, thanks (I think) to the rage normalization, and we have abilities that we actually want to spend that rage on. Playing as a fury warrior in low levels is now a frenzy of trying to use the abilities available to you as quickly as possible, since you actually have the rage to do so, rather than an exercise in waiting for Thunder Clap to come off its cooldown and hoping you have enough rage to use it when it does.

So why am I gushing about the new playstyle of low-level fury warriors? Well, after playing as my warrior for an hour or two last night; after surviving a battle against seven enemies of my level, all attacking me at once, when four doing the same thing could have easily done me in before the patch; I had to ask myself: why did we put up with the absolutely terribad playstyle of low level warriors for so long? In fact, I'm sure warriors aren't the only class whose low-level play has been vastly improved by this patch, so I have to ask; why did we put up with bad low level playstyles for so long?

Well, part of the answer is that many people didn't. I know quite a few players who hate the leveling process, and the way some classes play at low levels played no small part in their hatred of that part of the game. Of course, alt-aholics like me really had no choice other than putting up with the bad low-level content, hoping it would be worth it with the higher level content. Part of it could be the idea that we are somehow earning our fun, that the bad low-level playstyle is the price we have to pay to get to the more fun playstyle. That idea is reinforced by the idea that any sort of bad experience we go through makes us able to better appreciate the good experiences we go through, a truism I have often heard in real life.

It could also have something to do with a little condition called learned helplessness. The idea of learned helplessness is that if we accept that we have no control over a situation, it causes us to accept the misery that situation brings upon us, even if a way out is presented. There wasn't a lot we could do to improve the playstyle of classes that were not at all fun to play while leveling, other than not leveling those classes, so those of us who wanted to level those classes just had to accept that the early levels were going to be unenjoyable. (And boy were they. Priests? Paladins? Warriors? Druids? I'm looking at you.) So we gritted our way through those early levels, because we had no other choice if we wanted to get to the part where the classes become fun to play (and I can tell you from personal experience that priests and druids got much more fun to play as you approach the later levels).

Could it really be that bad, though? Could us hopeless alt-aholics really be suffering from the same condition that keeps battered spouses and depressed people in their predicaments? As the blog post I linked to mentions, when someone suffering from learned helplessness does get out of their situation, they often have a hard time committing to anything afterward, and tend to continue believing in nihilism and futility, rather than having hope and being optimistic. When I first logged in to my warrior, I had my doubts about whether he would be any more fun to play, but I gave it a try anyways. As you can tell, I was blown away once I did, but the important thing was whether I hesitated at all. Well, I did find it a bit tedious to need to go to the trainer and learn new moves, and viewed rearranging my action bar with the same weary view. In fact, that fact that I started playing again after rearranging my abilities doesn't really do much to disprove the learned helplessness theory, because I still expected playing to not be all that enjoyable; the surprise came from the fact that I enjoyed play my warrior, not from the fact that I did, in fact, play him. Thus I was engaging in old behaviors with the same kind of futile outlook; all that changed was the result.

So perhaps we alt-aholics who braved our way through the early levels of the unfun classes did suffer from learned helplessness, but patch 4.0.1 is here now, here to liberate us from the previous doldrums of the early levels. Along with this forced liberation comes the force relocation (metaphorically speaking) to a much more fun game design; in other words, we are being flat-out prevented from going back to the situation that caused our learned helplessness in the first place. We have been forced into our escape, forced into a more hopeful situation, and though we might not have been cured of that helplessness, at least we have been saved in spite of it. What this means for the future of low-level playing and us alt-aholics, though, remains to be seen.

The absurdity of feat-of-strength panic

When I realized just how soon patch 4.0.1 was coming, I was hit by this ambiguous sense of panic I had never felt before about the onset of a patch. I'm sure others are familiar with it, though: the sense of urgency, the idea that we need to do whatever we can in what little time we have been given before it isn't available to us anymore. Leveling weapon skills, for example; once Cataclysm comes around, weapon skill will no longer factor into the game; they'll be gone completely. We'll start with our characters knowing all of the proficiencies for weapons they can use, and we won't have to go through the arduous process of level up a skill we have neglected. Of course, this means that Master of Arms and Did Somebody Order a Knuckle Sandwich? are going to become feats of strength. Things like that, the idea that certain aspects of the game won't be available to me anymore, set me into a panic as I wondered, should I level my weapon skills to try to earn those achievements before they go the way of the dodo?

As you may be able to tell by the title, I decided against it. I realized that this kind of panic was only brought on by the fact that these achievements aren't going to be available, and that fact was causing me to misjudge whether I should do them. After all, if I got any enjoyment out of leveling weapon skills as anything other than a way to pass time*, I would have gotten those achievements by now, wouldn't I? The fact is that I just don't think that leveling weapon skill is all that fun, especially when I know that, as a druid, weapon skill is completely irrelevant to my playing. Quite simply, I had no good reason to level my weapon skill, and the fact that these achievements weren't going to be available was the only thing making me consider doing them. I suppose this gave me a first-hand lesson in what Saniel was talking about when he commented on my post about reverse feats of strength by saying, "No one likes being told that there's parts of the game they'll have no way of ever accessing." I found out that I myself was not immune to this kind of thought.

I suppose the take-home message from this whole experience is that if your only reason for wanting to do something is because it's not going to be possible to do later, it's best to ask yourself whether you really want to do it before you commit a substantial amount of time to it. I suppose this advice could be applied to other areas of the game as well, such as content that will be available later, but that you want to do while it's still relevant. A friend of mine, who just downed the Lich King, seemed to be suffering from this kind of delusional motivation. He was burnt out from raiding, to the point where he feared logging in each night to try to kill Arthas again. He complained to me about how he just didn't enjoy the game anymore, and once he killed the Lich King, he was going to quit. Non-raider that I am, I couldn't help but wonder, is it really worth it? Is it really worth it to play the game long after it has ceased to be enjoyable for you, just so you can kill a raid boss while he still matters? Are the bragging rights and the satisfaction really worth the unnecessary misery?

I ask because, at the end of the day, the Lich King is just another boss. He may be the most difficult boss now, but new expansions will come out with even harder bosses, and defeating the Lich King won't seem so impressive then. I'm sure the same could be said about the weapon skill achievements: we may be able to smile when we see them in our feats of strength panel immediately after Cataclysm comes out, but soon they'll be just another box in our achievement panel, giving no more satisfaction than anything else in there, if any at all. So really, when we decide to go for these achievements, whether we be motivated because they are going to become feats of strength or because they are going to become trivial, the real question is, is it enjoyable? Because if it isn't, then we have only ourselves to blame for not enjoying the game.

*One example of a way to level weapon skills to pass time is to attack the enemies in Violet Hold for weapon skill before starting the instance. Before patch 3.3, when we got the ability to teleport into the instance through the dungeon finder, I spent a lot of time waiting for people to get there, so I'd just attack the enemies with my weapon to level up my skill.

Gear demotion and justice points

I'm going to write this post at the risk of putting my foot in my mouth due to lack of information, but I will give my reasons for believing what I believe so that if I look like a fool, I can at least look like a reasonable fool.

We already know that, come Cataclysm, the current emblem system will be replaced by a point system to simplify and streamline the process of getting gear from heroics and raids without depending on raid drops. (Which, incidentally, has motivated me to retire the "badges/emblems" tag for my posts and replace it with "gear currency", which reads better than "badges/emblems/points".) In order to finally retire the current badges and emblems, Blizzard is converting most of them to gold when they release patch 4.0.1, but emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are going to be converted into justice points. Not only does this mean our current emblems will give us a head start on gearing up in Cataclysm (though probably not a big one), but more intriguingly, emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are being converted to justice points at the same rate. (2.75 points per emblem)

Now, I am going to make a few assumptions at this point before I go on, assumptions which could easily be proven wrong by the PTR, but I'm going to take that risk. First of all, I'm going to assume that gear that can be bought with emblems now will be purchasable with justice points after patch 4.0.1 is released. While it might make sense from the players' perspective to save those points for Cataclysm gear that we'll use for a while, rather than spending now it on gear we'll likely replace while leveling, it wouldn't make sense from a business perspective to keep players from having that option. After all, I'm sure there are many players play just to see their numbers go up, and denied the option to do so with gear that was once available to them, how would they respond? Not well, I'd imagine.

The second assumption I am going to make is that both emblem of triumph and emblem of frost gear will cost justice points equal to 2.75 times their current emblem cost. Yes, this means I am assuming that a piece of armor that costs 50 emblems of frost and a piece of armor that costs 50 emblems of triumph will cost the same amount of justice points. Were it not for the fact that the two emblems will be worth the same number of points, I would not make this assumption. However, if emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are going to be converted to the same number of justice points each, it's only reasonable that cost of gear would be converted similarly. Suppose someone is limited to heroics and has been saving up emblems of frost for one special item by running the daily heroic each day. Just before he has enough emblems saved for that one special item, patch 4.0.1 hits. Now, if the point costs of emblem of frost gear was calculated at a higher emblem-to-point ratio than emblem of triumph gear (that is, unless the cost of emblem of frost gear were 2.75 points per emblem, while the cost of emblem of triumph gear was less than 2.75 points per emblem, a possibility I'll go over later), then that patch has diminished the fruits of his labor. That patch has now made it so he needs to work harder for gear that will soon be obsolete, and why would Blizzard do such a thing?

Of course, we must also ask the opposite question: why would Blizzard make emblem of frost gear so easy to get this late in the expansion? Elementary, my dear Watson; it's a final gear demotion before the expansion. Gear demotion (a term I made up for this post) has happened before, in the form of heroics and their daily quests rewarding better emblems with each patch after and including 3.2. When patch 3.2 made emblems of conquest the base-line emblems for heroics, gear that had once been exclusive to raiders who could enter Ulduar-25 or ToC-10 became available to anyone who could run heroics. Thus, the gear became less exclusive, which is why I say it was "demoted". The same thing happened in patch 3.3, which made emblems of triumph the baseline emblems in heroics. Why did Blizzard do this? To make it easier to get right into the most current tier of raiding content.

It's my theory that, by converting emblems of triumph and frost to justice points at the same rate, Blizzard is doing one more gear demotion as the expansion comes to a close. At this point, anyone who wants to defeat the Lich King while he's still relevant doesn't have long to do so, so being able to farm heroics for emblem of frost gear will certainly give players a leg up in getting the gear they need to do so. That combined with the more powerful talent trees and the stat conversions should make the process easier, allowing more people to see the content Blizzard put so much effort into designing, and in the end, that's a worthy goal.

Reviewing the new quest tracking feature

In all of the excitement over the new dungeon finder feature, a lot of people seem to have forgotten the other big feature added in patch 3.3: the new quest tracking feature. As a long-time user of QuestHelper, I was excited that they were finally including this feature in the game so that I could finally stop using that incredibly memory-heavy addon, but how does it compare? I took my shaman though some quests in Un'Goro Crater to find out. Keep in mind, the only mod I used to make my leveling easier was QuestHelper, so some of the features I mention and extol may be familiar to you already if you use other addons.

The new tracking feature, when activated, puts dots on your in-game map to represent where you need to go for each of your quests (with a few exceptions, which I'll go over later). If you click on one of those dots, it shows you all of the areas where you can do that quest. If there are multiple areas, the dot will be on the closest one to you. The new feature will also show you a question mark where there is a quest giver whom you can turn in a quest to. You can also click a little arrow on the top-right of the map to make it smaller, allowing you to move around and fight while still being able to see the tracking dots, a useful feature considering that Blizzard didn't copy QuestHelper's arrow that pointed you to your next objective.

Then again, I don't miss that arrow, since half the time, it never pointed me towards the quest I wanted to do. The quest tracking feature doesn't suffer that problem since it doesn't have an arrow; it simply shows you where to go for each quest and lets you decide the priority. Well, not each quest. If a quest must be turned in in an instance, the quest tracking feature will not point you to that instance, a feature that QuestHelper had. It will also not point out where to go for quests with general directions rather than specific locations to go to (e.g. the fishing dailies Blood is Thicker or Monsterbelly Appetite) or with a wide area where the quest can be done (like Monsterbelly Appetite or Un'goro Soil). Granted, QuestHelper wasn't very helpful with these kinds of quests and would rarely point you to the best spot to go for them, or it would tell you to do them first when you really should have done them while doing other quests (e.g. Un'goro Soil). Thus, with the exception of pointing out where to go for out-of-zone quests, the quest tracking system is satisfactorily extensive.

Some of my complaints about the new system are that you can't see the quest objectives unless you are looking at the map of the specific zone the quests are in. If you don't know where to go for a quest, you can't just look at the map of the continent and look for the dot there. Still, if you look at the quest in the quest log, you can click on the "Show Map" button, and it will automatically show you the map of the zone the quest is in. Still, the one thing I do really miss from QuestHelper is that the little dots that show you where the quest objectives are do no show up on the mini-map. I'm sure its only a matter of time before someone invents an addon that does that, but it's still a fairly big oversight on Blizzard's part.

Overall, I am very satisfied with this new feature, and though it may not be as game changing as the Dungeon Finder, it has made me as excited for leveling my alts as the Dungeon Finder has made me for doing heroics. My interest in the game had been waning quite a bit since patch 3.2, and these two features together have really brought my interest in the game back up. Well done, Blizzard. Well done.

I suppose that since this is a review, I should end it with a rating of some sort. Three and a half stars out of four.