The druid resto tree: she's not broken, she's just a baby

Though I've been trying to keep myself spoiler free when it comes to the story of Cataclysm, one thing I have not denied myself is news on the mechanics of the game and how those will be changing. New spells, changes to the professions, changes to the stats, etc--I have been keeping up with all of these changes, mostly because I want to be prepared when Cataclysm drops to make the best decisions and not spend my time undoing or regretting a bad decision I made due to lack of information. It was only through the reflection brought on by this news hunt that I decided that my inevitable Worgen alt would be a rogue (Before that choice, I had considered a mage, warrior, and hunter, but it was upon reviewing the talents and ability distributions, as well as the abilities themselves, and some personal reflection on why I enjoy playing my druid, that I decided on the rogue.)

But there is a darker side to that news hunt, and that darker side is that we see classes in the middle of the great balancing act that is game design. We grow attached to abilities or talents that never make it to the live servers, or we languish in worry as we see that our class just isn't doing well in the design process. That latter point is affecting us resto druids on the beta right now. The comments I've seen from druids on the beta trying out resto healing consistently say that it needs work, and now the math has shown that our mastery bonus is the worst thing since pre-nerf Oculus. It's fair to say that this isn't a good time for resto druids, and that has lead to a lot of worrying on the part of the druid community. Will it be fun to heal in Cataclysm? Will mastery, this new and exciting stat, be of any use to us? Will we all just roll/switch to shamans/priests/paladins when we find out that we can't really heal anymore?

I used to worry about these kinds of things, but I now realize that it's better to think of resto druids on the beta as a work in progress, rather than a broken class that Blizzard needs to fix. After all, we're going to go through quite a shift in game design when Cataclysm comes out, and with Blizzard actually trying to keep all of the classes balanced, it can't be easy designing us druids to fit that philosophy, so I'm happy to not cry foul until a week or two before the game ships.

Let me elaborate on that point about game balance. Back in the day (I'm a player who grew up during vanilla WoW but came of age in Burning Crusade), the game was much less balanced than it is now. Once upon a time, warriors were the class that could tank, and any class that could heal was expected to do so (they couldn't do much of anything else; the game just wasn't designed to support them doing so). To put it simply, Blizzard didn't really care all that much about the classes being on par with one another. This mentality allowed the classes to evolve in their own special way, since they Blizzard wasn't all that worried about balancing them, and each class gained a unique feel to it. However, as the expansions went on, Blizzard started to care more about class balance, to the point where Wrath of the Lich King has been the most successful class balance in WoW history.

Of course, by the time Wrath rolled around, the classes had all developed their own unique feel to how they play. We druids, for example, specialize in healing with HoTs (heal-over-time spells) and tanking by absorbing damage, rather than avoiding it (this was especially true in Burning Crusade). This worked fine in Wrath of the Lich King, where the rapid damage spikes of raid bosses and our HoTs somehow worked well to make us good healers without us being overpowered (to my knowledge). However, come Cataclysm, that damage model will change. When Cataclysm rolls around, damage will be much more consistent, and healing won't be a race to top off every player's health bar. Healing will be more about using the right spell at the right time than using your most powerful spell as quickly as possible. Because of this, players will spend more time with their health below the maximum.

In an environment like this, HoTs would have dominated. The biggest weakness of our HoTs right now is that players are likely to snipe our healing by healing a target to full health before our HoT has run its duration, leading to wasted mana (though that was never really an issue). In a world where players won't be healed to full health immediately after they take damage, this would not have been the case. Our HoTs would have been able to do much more healing than they can now simply because players will be at less-than-full health more often, giving our HoTs ridiculous mana efficiency. After all, their current mana costs are balanced around the idea of them not healing for the full amount because of other healers bringing our targets to full health almost immediately. If those mana costs stayed the same while HoTs were able to heal for much more, they would have been ridiculously mana-efficient.

Of course, in a world where mana is supposed to matter and where Blizzard wants us using most of our spells, this just couldn't be. They would need to balance us around the ridiculous efficiency of our HoT's, making our direct heals much less appealing and effectively gimping us when we needed to use them to add extra healing to our style, like when we are the only healers in a five-man or when we are tank healing and our HoTs aren't doing enough. We would have been stuck in a style reminiscent of Tree of Life healing circa early Burning Crusade, when Tree of Life limited us to casting heal over time spells, meaning we could never use our only pure direct heal at the time, Healing Touch. It was this limitation that lead to the creation of the Dreamstate build, which forewent Tree of Life in favor of buffing Healing Touch. This was a viable build in heroics, where our HoTs might not have been enough to heal everyone there, but it petered out in raiding once the efficiency of Tree of Life HoT healing was revealed.

But I digress. We have been a HoT-centric class ever since Burning Crusade, and that needs to change in Cataclysm for us to remain balanced with the four other healers. In order to do that, Blizzard needs to effectively rebuild the druid class from scratch, taking our old abilities and reworking them to fill new niches, allowing us to retain some of what makes us unique (our HoTs) while still allowing us to fit into their new philosophy of healing design without being overpowered. Blizzard really had to overhaul our class to make us fit into this new game design, so it doesn't surprise me that they haven't perfected us yet. And considering everything else they have to do on the beta, I'm going to be patient as I wait to see what they do to make us good again.

In other words, the druid's resto tree and resto playstyle as they stand in beta aren't a failure, or a disappointment, or a sign that Blizzard isn't giving the same level of attention to us as they are to the other classes; they're just an indication of just how much work Blizzard has to put into designing it. While all of the other trees started mature and didn't need to change too much, Blizzard had less to work with when it came to designing the resto tree, so our tree is, if you will, younger than the rest. It isn't broken; it's just a baby.

Oh, to be a newbie again

Go ahead and play that video up there; there are no spoken words in the song it links to, so it shouldn't distract you as you read this post. Of course, for the full effect, it's best to just play it and close your eyes. Do you recognize that music? You should if you started playing before Burning Crusade was released. It's the music that played on the original log-in screen of World of Warcraft, when WoW was just WoW. I listed to that music recently, and I got the usual nostalgic jitters that I get when I listen to or watch something that I loved that I haven't seen or heard in a while. But something more than jitters overcame me that day. I was flooded with something similar to memories, but rather than a single flashback to a single event, I instead felt a certain sense. It was that sense of wonder I felt when I first started playing WoW.

Maybe you remember it, too: the time when you first started playing WoW, and everything was a new experience. It's hard for me to describe it, because, like I said, it wasn't a single memory that overcame me that day, but a sensation. The sensation I felt when all of the quests I was doing, all of the dungeons I was running, were all new. When I could walk into the next zone and literally had no idea what would be there to great me, aside form a scant few descriptions I had seen in general chat. When I took skinning and leatherworking because it was what I thought would be the best choice, not what others had told me would be the most beneficial in the leveling process. When I chose to level as Feral Combat because I thought it would be the most fun, in spite of all of the anti-feral sentiment that existed at the time (this was back when only warriors could tank).

Of course, I'm not one to wear rose-tinted glasses, and there are things that I regret about that time. I regret limiting myself to one quest at a time (my thinking at the time being that I would be better able to focus on that quest if I only had one). I regret selling my ore and leather to vendors (I thought that was how you made money with those professions; I wasn't aware of the existence of the auction house at the time). I regret staying in one zone without moving around when I ran out of quests, choosing instead to grind enemies until I was of a high enough level to do the quests I had. But these were all understandable newbie mistakes, and who doesn't have a few of those in their memory banks? We all did stupid things when we started playing the game, and only experience can teach us the error of our ways. Therein, however, lies the problem.

The loss of newbie astonishment is quite similar to the fabled loss of childhood innocence, an idea about which plenty of media has been made. In the case of the loss of childhood innocence, we (supposedly) gain knowledge about the world through our experience, but trade off the optimism of our youthful ignorance of all that is bad in the world. Of course, playing WoW isn't as bleak of a prospect as simply living in the real world, but in WoW, we still trade off our amazement at everything we experience in exchange for the knowledge that comes from experiencing that content. It's a trade off we all have to make eventually, in every game we play, if we enjoy it enough to play it again, and I certainly enjoyed leveling my druid enough to level more characters through the game again.

But it will never be the same. I now take only gathering professions on my alts, rather than a crafting profession that might add some depth to the experience, not only because I now know that to be the most efficient option (so I don't need to support my alt with donations from my main), but also because my experience has shown me that I rarely stick with an alt long enough to make it worth it to put that amount of dedication into leveling his profession. I am similarly jaded about raiding and PvP. When I first went into a battleground, the novelty was what captivated me, for fighting players--as opposed to computer controlled enemies--was completely new to me. After some time, though, once the novelty started to wear off, I realized I just wasn't cut out for PvP. I wasn't competitive enough, and hated dying as frequently as I did when I first started out, so needing to inflict that experience on other players in order to win left a bad taste in my mouth. My experiences with raiding have been similar. Though my first few raids were a fun experience, after some time, the novelty soon gave way to frustration with the constant wipes inherent in progression raiding, the monotony inherent in non-progression raiding, and the pressure to be at the top of my game and to not mess up inherent in both.

The PvP and raiding examples I mentioned may seem like me simply exchanging my former optimism for pessimism and focus on the negative, as seems to happen with the loss of childhood innocence, but it is really a case of the novelty of those experiences preventing me from noticing the things I didn't like about them. Once that novelty wore off, it was clear that raiding and PvP weren't for me. Losing the novelty of leveling, on the other hand, was different experience for me, because after the novelty wore off, I was still able to find things to enjoy about the leveling process.

So what was the difference between leveling before the novelty wore off and leveling after? It seems to me that the commonality between all of the contrasts between my nostalgia for the first time I leveled through Azeroth and my current experiences is concern. I take two gathering professions instead of a gathering profession and a crafting profession because I'm concerned about having enough money to make my alt self-sufficient. I take multiple quests at once and do them all in one go because I'm concerned about leveling efficiently. I don't grind anymore because I know it's simply not as efficient as questing (and yes, I do miss grinding). The things I used to do and enjoy are now things I shy away from because experience has taught me not to do them.

Would I still enjoy them if I were to ignore my experience and do something considered newbish? Probably. Would taking one quest at a time, grinding every once in a while, or taking a crafting profession on my alt diminish my enjoyment of the game? Theoretically, it shouldn't. After all, I used to enjoy the game in spite of doing those things. And yet, when I consider doing them now, I am hesitant because my experience leads me to believe that I will enjoy the game more by avoiding grinding or taking multiple quests at a time or taking two gathering professions.

Herein lies the greatest irony of the issue of newbish amazement: as we gain experience with the game, we think we become better at figuring out what will make the game more fun for us, but even if we do, we stop considering things we once found fun to be enjoyable. As much as I want to confidently say that doing multiple quests at once is always more fun than doing one at a time, that leveling an alt with two gathering professions is always more fun than doing so with a gathering and a crafting profession, and that questing is always more fun than grinding, I can't. I can't, because when I think back to how much fun I used to have while doing things the "inferior" way, I realize that the game was no less fun then than it is now; in fact, it may have been more fun. Of course, I may just be looking back with rose-tinted glasses and reminiscing about enjoying those ways of playing simply because I wasn't aware that better ways exist. Maybe the way I play the game now really is the "best" way, and I'm just getting bored with it because it's the only way I play, so there isn't much variety. It's really not possible to know.

I can't really find a satisfactory way to end this post, so let me just leave you with a song by Evanescence about the loss of childhood innocence; I think it fits the theme of this post well.

Why once difficult achievements sometimes need to be demoted

A WoW.com breakfast topic get me thinking about mounts recently. The topic discussed how getting a mount used to be a major achievement, whereas now we get our first mount at level 20 and our epic land mounts at level 40, neither of which requires an exorbitantly large investment. The writer of that topic asked whether we should go back to the days when getting a mount (especially an epic mount) was a real achievement, rather than being treated as a necessity. While I did comment on that post, I want to give the topic some more attention here.

As much as we may miss the days when having and epic mount meant something special, times change. Sixty is no longer the level cap, and there are no longer two levels of riding skill. New challenges have been added (like buying artisan riding skill, a.k.a. epic flying), and new challenges will continue to be added (like being able to buy an upgrade for all of your epic flying mounts that makes them fly at 310% speed, one of the features coming with Cataclysm). Achieving these new achievements is often contingent on achieving those old achievements first; for example, you need to buy journeyman riding (epic riding) before you can buy expert riding (regular flying) and eventually artisan riding (epic flying). This is where things can get problematic.

If you have been playing since before Burning Crusade, and you were one of those who worked hard to save up money for your epic mount (regardless of whether or not you got it), then think about all of the effort you had to put forward to get it. Think of all the time spent saving up money, all those days watching your gold slowly grow, until it finally reached that magic number: 1,000. Remember how good it felt? It's memories like those that make us nostalgic for those days and that make you wish getting an epic mount were the achievement it used to be. Now think back again. Remember all of that effort that you put in to getting your mount? Let's imagine that nothing had changed, that epic land mounts were still as difficult to get as they used to be. However, epic land mounts aren't the final goal of riding skill any more. There are now two more levels of riding skill that can be purchased after getting epic riding, and they themselves are also difficult to acquire. Anyone who wished to have a flying mount, let alone an epic flier, would need to put forth the effort to get the epic land mount first, then put forth the effort to get their regular flier--which, unless you were a druid, was no joke in the olden days of Burning Crusade, when dailies were only available to those with flying mounts--then put forth the effort to get the epic flying mount (which really wasn't a joke). Had nothing changed, the sum of all the effort would border on the effort needed to obtain Insane in the Membrane, and the number of people with epic fliers would probably be in the double digits.

This would have been problematic, for Blizzard designs the game under the assumption that most dedicated players have epic flying, and that most high-level players have flying in some form (epic or not). That's why the mounts rewarded by the harder meta achievements and the rare-drop mounts are epic flying mounts; if epic riding were as difficult to get today as it was before, those achievement mounts would probably need to be land mounts. Having epic riding be as difficult to obtain as it used to be would also create the problem of Blizzard being hesitant to design content with flying in mind. After all, only those who have epic riding can purchase flying mounts, so that would be a fairly small portion of the WoW population. And considering how rare players with epic flying would be, think of what would have happened to Netherwing: either it wouldn't have rewarded awesome drakes, it would have been highly under-experienced by the player-base, or it just wouldn't have existed. (For the record, my Onyx Netherwing Drake is one of my favorite flying mounts, so Netherwing never existing would have made me a very sad panda.)

In short, WoW is not a static game; new content is released, as are new challenges, and when those new challenges require the completion of previous challenges before they can be tackled, those old challenges need to be demoted to allow more players to take a crack at the new challenges. That's why things that were once points of pride sometimes need to be demoted, so that players can experience the new content even if they don't have the same head start as those who got there first.

Why have solo content in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game?

Whenever I talk about solo content in WoW, if I ever lament the sad state of it these days (whether it be on this blog, in the comments section of WoW.com, or anywhere else), I frequently get reactions that sound something like this: "WoW is a massively multiplayer online RPG. Why worry about the solo content?" I think we can all agree that WoW needs some solo content. The question is, how extensive should that solo content be? Should we expect Blizzard to deliver engaging solo content to us players on a regular basis, or should we greet extensive solo content with a surprised, "Solo content? In my MMO?"

Picture is unrelated.

It's pretty obvious why an MMO needs any solo content at all: when players are just starting out, it's a pretty big challenge for them to try to get a hold of all the new game mechanics that WoW throws at them; needing to learn group mechanics would make it even more difficult. Solo content allows people to become familiar with the game and get a feeling for the way their class plays. It allows them to push their class to its limits without the risk of letting other people down if the fail. Solo content is, if nothing else, a training ground for new players to get them comfortable with the game before they enter group play. There is a risk in that set-up, though. Blizzard could, if they so desired, make sub-par solo content to try to motivate people to move into group play, but if they did that, no one would stick around to see the group content, no matter how awesome it may be. Blizzard needs to make WoW's solo content fun and engaging to draw players in, so they do. This is where the trouble starts.

Though WoW may be a MMO, it is really the solo content that gets people hooked. However, people respond differently to the solo content: some say, "If playing alone is this fun, I bet playing with other people must be even more fun!" These people end up being raiders. Some say, "If the game is this fun fighting computer-controlled enemies, fighting other players must be even more fun!" These people end up fighting in battlegrounds or competing in the arena. Then you have the players like me. Players like me go into raids and say, "Ack, this is too much of a time commitment/too much pressure/etc." Players like me go into battlegrounds and say, "Ack, this is too much of a variable experience, and I play this game to relax. " Or maybe we just don't PvP as a matter of principle. Either way, we don't enjoy the group content that WoW seems to be geared towards getting us to play, so we are quite content with playing the part of the game we enjoy, the part that drew us in in the first place: the solo content.

This leaves Blizzard in a tight spot. They designed WoW to be, at its core, a group game. Ghostcrawler has even said explicitly that their goal is to get PvE'ers into raids. The solo content was meant to draw us in so we could move on to bigger and supposedly better things; to paraphrase one of my commenters, "If I want to play a solo-RPG, I'll play Dragon Age or Mass Effect." However, if the poll on the side of my blog is anything to go on, a fair amount of us prefer to stick with the solo content, in spite of the greater challenges to be had by grouping up.

It seems Blizzard doesn't mind that fact, though, or if they do, they have at least resigned themselves to designing solo content in spite of their larger goals for WoW players. Why else would they release solo content with each expansions pack and with many of the patches? In spite of Ghostcrawler's statement, it seems Blizzard has made it their goal to satisfy all WoW player, including those of us who are quite happy to chuckle at Ghostcrawler's sentiment and keep on solo-ing.

Why is he smiling? That can't be a good sign.

That could, however, all be an illusion. As I said in my post on the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content, solo content in Wrath of the Lich King has been streamlined to make it more straightforward and make the road from solo-ing to heroics to raiding a smoother one, and the road is only going to become smoother. One of the major promises of Cataclysm is that the old world will be made over to make leveling from 1 to 60 more fun and more like leveling through Outland or Northrend, i.e., smoother. After all, one of the biggest obstacles to getting to level 80 is vanilla Azeroth, which wasn't designed for fast leveling, but that's going to change. Come Cataclysm, the road to the level cap will have even fewer roadblocks than it does now, and the road to raiding will be similarly affected, assuming Blizzard sticks with their current design for solo content. What am I trying to get at here? It seems to me that Blizzard is designing their solo content to make it easier for people to get into heroics and raids, rather than as its own stand-alone content. Solo content in WoW is merely a stepping stone to bigger things, and they are making those steps even smaller.

I know that's a tough contention to prove. After all, why would Blizzard add two extra zones (Icecrown and Storm Peaks) of quests to do after hitting level 80 if they wanted to get us into raids as soon as possible? Well, those quests certainly provided a large chunk of cash, cash we needed to get some basic gear upgrades before starting heroics. (Hell, if you put in enough gold and effort, you could get your gear to the point where it was good enough for starting Naxx-10 without ever entering a heroic; I did. It wasn't advisable, but it was possible.) They also provided the back-story and starting points to the plots of the various heroics and raids those zones contained or would eventually contain, plots we could only see the conclusions of by running those heroics and raids. I think you get what I'm trying to say.

Now, I'm not saying that this design is a bad thing. There are plenty of people who just want to get into the group play, but without solo content, those heroics and raids would have no back story, and there would be no motivation to run them. Solo content also allows those who didn't get good gear in the last expansion to get on even ground with those who did, which prevents people from being locked out of raiding because they arrived at the party late (metaphorically speaking). Solo content is a good thing, even for people who prefer group content. The question is, how far should this smoothing of the path from solo-ing to heroics and raids go? When solo content is designed for the people who hope to surpass it, those who are quite content to stay within it are left behind.

I think Blizzard owes it to us soloists to not leave us out in the dust with their solo content. They drew us in with the solo content, and though they might want us to move on to bigger and supposedly better things, we would rather not. We like where we are, and that isn't going to change any time soon without a big change to the way raiding or PvP works. Now, granted, solo content shouldn't hinder people who want to go right into raiding or PvP, so where can a happy medium be found? Long-term goals. Burning Crusade had reputations like the Consortium and Sporeggar that gave solo-ists something they could work for that couldn't be steam-roled by grouping. The closest thing we have to them in Wrath of the Lich King is the Kalu'ak, and I hit exalted with them a week after hitting 80. What we need is more solo content that takes a large commitment of time to complete and provides appropriate rewards for that commitment. Supposedly, the Path of the Titans will be along the lines of what I am thinking of; let's hope Blizzard does it well.

Tips on leveling any class

Having written two posts with tips for leveling specific classes, I feel like it's time I write a post with tips for leveling any class, considering that leveling alts is what I spend most of my time doing these days, so it's a part of the game I know quite well. This guide will assume you know the basics already and are simply considering leveling an alt on the side. After all, if you have gotten into the WoW blog scene, you are probably already fairly familiar with the game, so I don't imagine anyone reading this will be unfamiliar with the basics. (Though if you are, I apologize for my assumption and applaud you for involving yourself in the greater WoW community.)

1. Stick with it.
This seems like a pretty basic tip, but it's only recently that I started heeding it myself, so I figure it's worth mentioning. Classes are supposed to be simple when you first roll them. This is to make it easier for a newbie to acquaint themselves with the game; if they had to juggle five or six abilities in addition to learning all of the things we take knowing for granted, it would be a very confusing experience. As such, expect one-button spamming at first, and don't expect it to get much more interesting quickly. Classes evolve slowly as you level up, and you really can't get a feel for a class until you have a few dozen levels under your belt. As such, don't give up on a class just because you find the first few levels boring. My shadow priest didn't become as fun as it is until I got Vampiric Embrace and Shadowform at level 30 and 40, respectively, so stick with it.

2. If you use mana, carry water with you during the middle levels.
During earlier levels, you mana regeneration is greatly increased, so you won't need to use water. During later levels, many classes gain abilities that allow them to regenerate more mana, so you won't need to use water as much. During those middle levels, you'll likely find yourself running out of mana, and many classes can't fight without mana. As such, you should always have some of whatever is the best water you can drink so you can reduce your downtime. You can buy water from most Innkeepers and general suppliers, as well as bartenders. Of course, it helps to practice smart combat practices and try to conserve mana as you fight, but water will likely be helpful anyways, no matter how little mana you use. I remember questing on my shadow priest, using only three spells at the beginning of the fight and doing the rest of the damage with my wand, and still running out of mana. Point is, keep water on you until you stop using all together.

3. Keep any and all healing potions you get from quests or that drop from enemies.
Some quests award healing potions, and most humanoid enemies drop healing potions from time to time. You may want to sell them for a bit of extra gold, but you should keep them when you get them. No matter how careful you are, you will run into situations that spiral out of your control, and that little bit of health can really help. Think about it this way: the money you get from selling a potion will be less than how much a repair bill costs; which is the better deal? I keep my healing potions in a bag I dedicate to holding things like my hearthstone, crafting tools and supplies, and bandages, so they don't take up space in my regular bags. You should drag your healing potion(s) down to your action bars on the bottom of your screen so you can have them handy when you need them in a pinch.

4. Take First Aid
Even if you are a class that can heal yourself, it helps to be able to save that mana for fighting. Bandages allow you to heal yourself without expending mana, which makes them good for healing classes and great for classes that can't heal themselves. You may end up abandoning the profession in later levels if you can heal yourself and you won't run out of mana doing so (that happened to my shaman once he hit Outland), but until then, you won't regret keeping bandages in your bags to heal yourself.

5. Switch around between zones so you are always questing.
Outland and Northrend were designed so you could move from one zone to another in a linear fashion: Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms were not designed that way. If you want to keep your leveling interesting and fast, you'll need to move around between zones so you are always questing. If you finish all the quests you can reasonably do in one zone, move to another zone in your level range. You can look on the Wowhead zones page to see which zones are in your level range, though make sure you look at the quests page of each zone to see if it will actually offer you any quests.

6. Keep quests that take you out of the zone you are in so you can do them when you eventually go to that zone.
Because Azeroth was not designed for fast leveling, there are many quests that start in one zone and end in another. If you get one of these quests, take it and keep it in your quest log. You will likely go to that zone at some point in the future. Doing that extra quest will give you more experience and give you more to do once you enter the zone. The one exception to this rule is if the quest takes you to a zone you have already out-leveled or a zone that doesn't offer any quests for you because it favors one faction; in that case, don't let that quest take up space in your quest log.

7. Turn on quest tracking and take advantage of quest tooltips.
Go to the map screen (m button) and check the "Show Quest Objectives" box. This will make your leveling much easier as the locations of the objectives of most of your quests will be shown on your map. You can then click the diagonal arrow to make the map smaller so you can look at it and locate your objectives without blocking your view of your character. As for the quest tooltips, if you move your mouse over an enemy or object that you need to kill or collect for a quest, a little blurb should appear under it telling you which quest it is for and your progress on that quest. It helps to scroll your mouse over enemies as you pass them in case you can kill them for a quest but didn't know it. That way, you can kill them on the way to wherever you were going and be a more efficient quester.

8. A macro for selling all of your gray-quality items
/script for bag = 0, 4 do for slot = 1, GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local name = GetContainerItemLink(bag,slot) if name and string.find(name,"ff9d9d9d") then DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Selling "..name) UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end
If you use this macro while talking to a vendor, you'll automatically sell all gray-quality items in your bags. This is very useful when you are out questing since you probably won't want to keep any gray items for any reason; they're called "vendor trash" for a reason. I also take advantage of this macro by putting my vendor trash in my extra bags and keeping white-quality or better things that I plan to sell in my main bag. That way, I don't have to go searching through my bags for the things I plan to sell, since I can use the macro to sell all of the vendor trash strewn throughout my different bags, and all of the other things I plan on selling will be right in my main bag.

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

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.

Why the new 5-man progression is a good idea (Spoilers ahead)

In case you missed Blizzard's announcement about the new 5-man dungeons being added in patch 3.3, take a look here. To give you the TL;DR version, Blizzard will be adding three new 5-man dungeons to Icecrown Citadel collectively called The Frozen Halls. You will need to finish the first one before you can do the second one, and you will need to finish the second one before you can do the third one. Blizzard is doing this so that players who don't have time to raid will feel like they can participate in progression in some way. As a capstone to the whole thing, the final dungeon will culminate in a battle against the Lich King himself.

It won't be easy, however. Each dungeon will drop ilevel 219 gear on normal mode (10-man Ulduar equivalent), and ilevel 232 gear on heroic mode (10-man ToC equivalent). This should serve as a warning that these dungeons will be difficult and will require good skill and good gear. I expect that guilds will be much more able to do these dungeons than PUGs, so you'll want to try to get your guild to run these.

I see this announcement as another way that Blizzard is catering to the casuals who want to see a conclusion to the storyline of Wrath without needing to raid. As I have said before, Wrath of the Lich King seems to be all about getting casuals into instances so that they can see the same content as everyone else, but it seems the Blizzard wants to take it one step further and allow everyone, raiders and those with no time to raid, to be able to participate in the end of the Wrath story, while also giving casuals a lot to do to keep them occupied until Cataclysm.

We could see the seeds of these thoughts when Blizzard put in a 5-man and raid version of the Argent Colosseum (Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader respectively), each of which was harder than the previous content of the same type. Normal ToC5 dropped ilevel 200 epics, while the heroic version dropped ilevel 213, making it equivalent to Naxx-10 and Naxx-25, respectively. However, even though the gear dropped by the normal versions of these new instances will be like Ulduar-10 gear, the gear that drops from the heroic versions will be better than Ulduar-25, meaning we can probably expect the jump in difficulty from normal Frozen Halls to heroic Frozen Halls to be even greater than that of Trial of the Champion and previous heroics.

Still, that's neither here nor there; what I want to talk about is just the idea behind these new dungeons: the idea of allowing players who don't raid to see a conclusion (maybe not the conclusion, but it's still a conclusion) to the Wrath storyline, something that was noticeably absent in Burning Crusade and even Vanilla WoW. Those of us who didn't have the time to raid never got the satisfaction of knowing what happened to Illidan, and though we got to face Kael'thas Sunstrider in Magisters' Terrace, those of use who never ran the Eye had no idea why the battle was so significant. As for vanilla WoW, well, we casuals may as well have not existed then.

As I have already said, the inclusion of three new really difficult 5-man dungeons will allow dedicated players without a lot of time to raid to actually have something challenging to go through and will reward them for their skill by allowing them to see new content, much the same way raids do now. The increased gap of difficulty will also serve to represent the difference of difficulty between running a 10-man raid and a 25-man one. (As someone who has run both 10-man and 25-man OS, I can attest to the difference, and it is not one that can be made up for by gear alone.) Thus players who just want to see the content will be able to run the normal instances, while those looking for a challenge that won't eat up their schedule will be able to run the heroic versions.

I could see one possible objection to the inclusion of these new instances. This objection is based in the assumption that the Icecrown Citadel raid and the Frozen Halls will follow different story-lines, which I am pretty sure they will. Hard-core raiding guilds could see these dungeons as a thorn in their side, since they will want to get through IC10 or 25 as quickly as possible, and if their guildies are all running around trying to see these new instances, that may distract them from the guild's main goal. Still, as long as guild members running these new dungeons doesn't cut into raid time, I doubt the raiding guilds will feel the effect of them, and considering the level of gear dropping from the Frozen Halls, it's unlikely that the hard-core raiders, who are probably decked out in best-in-slot gear, will run the new 5-mans more than once--that is unless Blizzard makes them so fun that players want to run them just for the hell of it.

But it's not all a bed of roses. As I said in my post on the homogenization of solo content in Wrath of the Lich King, though Wrath has been a great expansion pack for casual raiders, it has been a terrible one for solo-ers, and considering that Patch 3.3 is slated to include three new 5-man instances and a 12-boss raid, I don't see much solo content being added in this patch. I could be proven wrong when the PTR comes out, but considering the work Blizzard will need to put into these instances, if we do get any new solo content, it will probably be limited to some Argent Tournament based dailies outside of Icecrown Citadel, and considering Blizzard's track record with those dailies, I won't be looking forward to them. Ah well, let's just hope Blizzard can wow us with those instances, since for us non-raiders, they will be the last of Wrath of the Lich King that we see.

My top 25 favorite songs. Part 2: 10-1

Here's the second part of my list. I did this list in two parts due to time constrains. Here's the first part if you haven't read it yet. Without further ado, lets start the home stretch.

10. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
What can I say about this song that hasn't been said before? I first started listening to this song one summer when I took up walking as my main form of exercise. As such, I listened to it mostly while walking, and thus found the lyrics about finding one's path through life to be quite appropriate. I also enjoy the slow buildup from the relaxed intro to one of the best rock and roll outros of all time. Ah, hell, it's Stairway! Do I need to explain it?

9. Nemo – Nightwish
Unlike many of the previous songs on the list, this one doesn't have a special meaning for me because of its lyrics. I actually first heard it when I watched a video of an all druid raid taking down Onyxia back in the days of vanilla WoW, and then raiding the horde capital cities afterward. That said, I don't actually associate this song with the awesomeness of the druid class; I just like it because it is a great song. It's a symphonic metal song that slowly builds up from a mellow beginning to a more energetic conclusion without ever loosing its mystic mood. That, and Tarja's voice is just beautiful.

8. Cherub Rock - Smashing Pumpkins
I don't know why, but I really love this song. The lyrics don't mean much to me, but perhaps its the fact that, like ...And Justice for All, the various instruments on this track all have a similar rhythmic structure. Meh, it's a mystery to me. I just know that I like it now as much as I did when I first heard it, and a song that I can describe that way gets major points in my book.

7. 18 and Life - Skid Row
Sure, the lyrics to this song a pretty good, but I think the reason I like this song is the mood it creates. It starts out sad to match the protagonist's sad life, then gets angry as his anger at the world grows, but loses its angry edge when our protagonist kills someone. It's a sad song, without a doubt, but its deeper message about how there are no victims in the world of drunken townies and that everything that happens to them is pretty much their fault means that the flip side is that, if you make smart decisions, bad things won't happen to you. To be honest, I never liked this song because of the lyrics; it's just a good, slow rock-out song.

6. Going Under - Evanescence
Remember how I said that I interpreted My Immortal to be about two parts of yourself, one of which you were trying to let go of? I interpreted this song as the other side of that story. I saw it as the story of someone recalling their descent into this "other" part of themselves. This was actually a repeating theme I saw in their songs, whether it is there or not, and that's probably why they meant so much to me. I also really like how the songs melody complements the mood of the lyrics: sad, but not the saddest it could be, meaning the worst is yet to come.

5. Turn The Page (Live) - Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band
Now this is a perfect rock song. The lyrics, though specific to the theme of being a rock star, are truly about needing to put up a front when people expect you to be more than you can be, and how torturous it can be to keep that front up. Thus this song can have meaning to anyone who has ever pretended to be something they aren't. It also has, in my opinion, some of the best build-up of any song I have ever heard. It starts out mellow but intensely sad, and though the song gains more of a hard rock feel as it continues, it never loses that sad melody. It's just a really great song. 'Nuff said.

4. Through the Fire and Flames - Dragonforce
I'm probably going to get a lot of flack for putting this so high on the list, but I really do love this song. No matter what mood I am in, this song gets me pumped up, and few songs can do that. In fact, I'd say this is the best song for that purpose that I know. It also has a lot of meaning to me because I have tried dozens of times to beat this on Guitar Hero 3 and failed. (My best time is 83%.) But regardless of that, this song is the epitome of power metal, and Dragonforce deserves all of the fame that this song brought them.

3. Disarm - Smashing Pumpkins
And back to the sad songs. Though some people have interpreted this song to be about abortion, I see as being about the depression that comes with the loss of childhood innocence and the fact that even with all the pain we may be feeling, we still try to put on a happy face for others. Both of these themes resonate with me strongly, and the minimalist structure of the song helps to facilitate the somber mood the lyrics create. Corgan's pleasing vocals are the one happy thing about this song, but they are enough to make me able to listen to it and not cry every time. Really, it's that sad. If his voice was depressing as well, the song would be too sad to listen to.

2. Zombie - The Cranberries
Oh boy, where do I begin with this song? I first heard this song when I heard a snippet of it in some commercial for some album collection. It stuck with me after I heard it, and when I finally figured out what song it was and downloaded it, I was really glad to have finally found it. Its bass riff is right up there with the one in Rhinoceros as one of my favorites of all time, and every instrument on the track can be heard distinctly, something I love. The lyrics never played an important role in this song for me, but they are still great; though they are technically about the Troubles in Ireland, the lyrics could be applied to any situation where a group is fighting for control of your thoughts, something our culture seems to do all the time... but that's neither here nor there. In the end, I love this song. Dolores O'Riordan's vocal work is fantastic, the instruments all work really well together; I just can't say enough good things about this song.

1. Lithium - Evanescence
Ah yes, the song that defined my childhood. Before I transferred all of my songs to my new computer, this one had more play counts on my old one than any other song; at least fifty more than the next one on the list, and quite possibly a hundred. (That's no hyperbole; I loved this song that much.) So, what is so great about Lithium? Like many of my favorite songs when I was young, it was a sad song, but Lithium went beyond sad. The lyrics, the mood, the tone of Amy Lee's voice, the melody, everything about this song was meant to convey a feeling of deep depression, and I loved every second of it. However, even more importantly, the lyrics really spoke to me back then, and looking back on my youth, they speak to me even more now. In Lithium, Amy sings about how she is very sad, but finds a sort of ironic comfort in that sadness, and as such, the sadness is too familiar to let go off. If literally interpreted, the song is about a failed relationship that Amy refuses to leave, but as you can tell by now, I wasn't big on literal interpretations of Evanescence songs. Anyways, every line of the song speaks somehow to the theme of finding more comfort in the familiar emotion of sorrow than the unfamiliar one of joy. As sad as it is to say, that sentiment defined my childhood. I was not a happy child, and even when I was finally able to be happy, sorrow was too constant of a companion for me to let go of. It took me a long time to finally let go of my constant sorrow, and until I did, this song was the song that epitomized what I was feeling. To this day, this song still brings back memories of that dark place. It's haunting, really.

Honorable Mention: In Bloom - Nirvana
Nirvana is a great band, but I didn't put this on the main part of the list just because I don't like this song as much as I used to. I still enjoy the layering of the various instruments and pleasant melody the song provides, and Cobain's mysterious lyrics still boggle my mind to no end, but the fact that the song slowly speeds up over its duration always ticked me off a bit. The song has, in my opinion, a perfect speed at the beginning. Why they needed to speed it up was beyond me. Still, I won't deny that this is a fantastic song, because it is.

Well, there you go. I certainly enjoyed making this list, because I had to listen to all of these songs over and over again to put them in the order of how much I like them, and I hope you enjoyed reading it, at least a little.

What I think Wrath of the Lich King did right

Judging by my previous philosophy posts (this one and this one), you can probably guess that I feel that Wrath of the Lich King is a fairly flawed expansion pack. That said, there are very few dark clouds with no silver linings (just as there are very few silver clouds with no dark linings... work with me people), so I want to talk about what I think Wrath did correctly and talk about all of the good things it did for WoW, and believe me, there are many.

Although I do believe that Burning Crusade was not as bad for class balance as people say it was (see my second post that I linked above), it was far from perfect, as any feral DPS who tried to move beyond tier 4 content will tell you. When Wrath was released, all of the classes found themselves on more or less equal footing. Sure, its still not perfect, and death knights were pretty overpowered when they first came out, but any veteran player will readily tell you that class balance is a hell of a lot better than it used to be. In fact, in the class Q&A's, Blizzard flat-out admitted that class balance was not a concern of theirs in vanilla WoW. Luckily for all of us, that has changed.

I also think that championing was a good addition to the game. It allows for much more flexibility in how one gets to exalted with a faction, and it forces Blizzard to make dungeons interesting, rather than requiring players to run certain difficult or boring dungeons in order to get rep with a certain faction. (Steamvaults, I am looking at you.) It also allows players to choose to run dungeons based on gear, and though that could be seen as a way to force players to run a certain dungeon, at least there is more flexibility in gear than there is when it comes to factions. You can't really make the comparison between gear and factions, since you can eventually replace your gear from heroics, but certain reputation items like head enchantments remain necessary no matter how good your gear gets. As such, getting reputation with factions is less negotiable than getting good gear, so making the factions easier to get exalted with is a good change in my book.

An even bigger change, however, was the switch to make all raid dungeons either 10- or 25-man. This allowed players to run raids the way they want to, and allows more casual players to see the content. Like I implied above, it's a really good idea for Blizzard to try to make content for as many players as possible, and having two versions of each dungeon prevents players from needing to overcome the raiding hump encountered in Burning Crusade, where many guilds couldn't make the jump from 10-man Karazhan to 25-man Gruul's Lair. Thanks to Wrath of the Lich King, they don't need to make such a jump.

Another good thing I think Wrath brought to WoW was the addition of hard modes, which I already covered in this post. To give you the TLDR version, the presence of hard modes allows more players to see content without taking away the challenge that hard-core raiders look for in their raids. As I said in the first post mentioned in the first paragraph, many of the changes in Wrath seem to have been aimed at getting players in raids sooner, and the idea of making raids challenging but not difficult while allowing hard-core players to still have their difficult content definitely fits in with this idea. It allows more players to see the content that Blizzard put so much effort into making, which makes sense from a business standpoint; after all, why spend so much time on something so few players will see?

As for achievements, while I don't see them as a particularly outstanding addition, I do feel they added something positive to the game. If nothing else, they give players something to do, and reward them for doing things in the game. Thanks to the achievements, raiding and PvP are no longer the only ways to gain titles. (I wear my chef title with pride.) They also make it easier to look back on your past accomplishments and feel proud of them, since you have a tangible manifestation and record of said accomplishments that you can peruse with ease. Besides, if nothing else, that ding makes everything feel a bit more satisfying.

So there you go. I have opened up and shown that my opinions are not as one-sided as my previous posts seem to suggest. That said, I am looking forward to Cataclysm because many of the features being added will change many things I perceive as flaws with Wrath of the Lich King, like Path of the Titans, which will give solo-players a way to make their characters more powerful, and Reforging, which will give the armor-making professions some use again. Yep, it's going to be a good time.