Fool’s love back again

“Holy contributing to the delinquency of minors Batman! The Joker has poisoned the city’s supply of Valentine’s Day candies and perfume. If we don’t stop him people are going to start acting strange and may indulge in unspeakable acts! ”

“Looking at the chemical composition of the compound Robin I detect a faint in of Wolfsbane. Wich as we all know is the bane of werewolves wich means that there must be werewolves working for the Joker that are involved in the candy making.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense… Werewolves would want to avoid…”

“I got it Robin! To the Bat-Gryphon and to Shadowfang Keep we go.”

Well this is how the new and improved Valentine’s Day questline felt to me to me when I did it yesterday. Someone been distributing deadly perfume and candies and it’s up to us to find the mad scientists and stop them. Something wich I’m pretty sure was in some Batman episode at some point. The fight with the event bosses, three crazy chemists does feel like something the Joker would come up with. All green and purple gases around and it plays a bit insane. I had lots of fun.

By the way they are named after The Rock movie characters and even use quotes from the movie.

Although a lot of events leave me a bit meh I have to admit I had fun with that questline. Go give it a shot!

To boldly go where we’ve gone before

I’ve held off writing this because I could not quite put my finger on exactly what my feeling were about STO. I knew something felt odd but I had trouble saying it without a wall of text.

So… last monday I relented and shelled out some of my money to try out Star Trek Online out of sheer curiosity. I wasn’t expecting a great game but the reviews did say it has great space combat and I’m a sucker for that.

I won’t go into great details about my impressions of the minutia of the game. Syp at Biobreak does a fine job of that and I pretty much agree with him. Space combat is awesome, ground combat is bad and I have trouble seeing myself playing this past the first month.

That’s not what I want to talk about, I want to talk about our good friend Bill Roper. You see Bill designed a little game back in the day called Diablo. It was a revolution and popularized those hack and slash rpg we love so much. Random dungeons, tons of actions, classes and abilities and tons of loot defined the gameplay. It was fast paced and awesome. Bill toped himself with Diablo 2 and eventually went on to form his own studio and bring his concepts to a demon infested London in Hellgate:London.

To say Hellgate:London was a failure would be an understatement. Basically, the gameplay that made Diablo popular didn’t work anymore. People didn’t want repetitive pre-generated gameplay anymore. Then we move on to Champions wich isn’t a big success and finaly we come to Star Trek Online.

And I kind of feel like’s it Diablo all over again. Everything looks like it’s been randomly generated by the computer. The game boils down to doing the same exact missions with different enemies. Once you’ve done the first few missions you are going to repeat the exact same things over and over and over again. The same bland randomly generated planets, the same space encounters, the same transports you have to escort.

Then you add skill based progression. Just like Diablo you develop your character by investing points in skills that rand 1 to 9. The problem here is that there’s not respec in this game (correct me if I’m wrong) but the ones that you will be able to buy from the C-store. So when you realize later on you made a mistake(wich is sure to happen) you either start anew, redoing hours upon hours of gameplay, or you spend some real life cash…No matter how I look at it… I truly hate it.

So what’s my verdict? Pleasant enough game that ought to have been a single player game and not something we pay for every month. After all it’s nothing really knew here.

O noes!!u brok mah raidz!!!1!

 

Warning! Small spoilers about the mechanics of the Arthas fight!

So Ensidia killed Arthas in 25 man last night and thus became the first guild worldwide to finish ICC. And…. they got swiftly banned for it.

From what I gathered what happened is that they were told they exploited the raid. How? Turns out that during the fight Arthas throws big ice structure arounds that play a big part in the encounter. Ensidia found out they could destroy those using Saronite Bombs made by engineers wich deals structure damage. With those bombs the encounter became much more manageable and allowed Ensidia to complete the encounter.

The geekiest story

Before continuing let me tell you a story. A long time ago in College I used to run a lot of roleplaying games and Larps (Live action roleplaying for you non nerds). When I say run I mean organize them, create the story, rent the locations and everything else that needed to be done. And I was really good at it. So good in fact that more than 10 years later some people still talk about those Larps to the younger generation, speaking of the good old glory days. It’s something I take pride in.

You know what is my secret to for a succesful Larp?? Let the players run with it. No matter how much it destroys your universe or your scenario never say no. Instead work with them and adapt things. In the end it only makes the story better.

For example, we had a weekend planned around a main villain who would cause all sort of trouble for the players. During the first night that villain attacked the village to create a bit of action. He was supposed to stand at the back of the fight protected by some magic thingy. Well one of the players who was an assassin managed to stealth up to him and deliver a killing blow. We tought our villain safe until the player reminded us we had given him a magic weapon a few weeks back wich allowed him to bypass shielding shields.

At that moment we could have ruled that that particular spell didn’t count as a shield and save our scenario but we didn’t. What we did was have an emergency meeting between the npcs and we came up with the idea to try to convince some players to resurrect the villain as something even more powerful. It worked so well that it became the storyline for the rest of the summer and it was entirely driven by the players. Like I said people still talk to me about it.

Back to WoW

By now you should have guessed where I was going. By banning Ensidia Blizzard reacted like a kid who got his toy broken. Instead of congratulating them on creative use of the game resources they accused them of exploiting the game.

First of all as far as we know Ensidia did nothing of the sort. They didn’t use buggy terrain, lag or any other game bug to kill Arthas. What they did is use saronite bombs like they always do since it can give a slight dps boost for some classes. Using your professions is not exploiting the game, it’s using your resources.

Instead of administrating a swift kick for being intelligent Blizzard could have simply congratulated Ensidia and then remove the saronite bomb effect on the ice. A sort of pat on the back with a “nice guys but next time it won’t be so easy”. That way no one would have been cheated out of anything.

Right now it sounds like Blizzard has this idea in their head of how an encounter should be beaten and if you don’t do it exactly the same way your blamed for exploiting. Well if that’s the case they should give us the manual because we can’t read into their minds.

Is 10 man really easier than 25 man?

There’s something that’s been gnawing on me for a while now and recently it’s becoming more and more clear.  I’m talking about the supposed increased difficulty of 25 man raids.

I mean what is really more difficult in 25 man raids? It’s getting 25 people at the same time. Besides that the fights are mostly if not exactly the same, the tanks get hit for about the same amount of damage and the fights last the same amount of time. So gameplay wise it’s about the same.

Sure there’s an increased chance of someone messing up wich can be disastrous when it concerns mechanics than can wipe a raid in one shot but overall it’s pretty much the same.

On the other hand we get 10 mans where even the slightest mistake can mean a difference between a wipe and success. If a dps dies to a fire you just lost 20% of your dps output (assuming 5 dps) versus losing 6,25% in 25 man (assuming 16 dps). Guess in wich raid it’s easier to recover?

Same goes for healing. Tanks get hit for about the same amount of damage in both version. When you have only 2 or 3 healers it’s easier for them to miss a heal or get distracted and end up with a dead tank. With the 6 or 7 healers in 25 man the chance of them all missing healing the tanks is much smaller.

Finally from my experience our 25 man raids are smoother and easier than most of our 10 man tend to be. So why I ask do we get inferior gear in 10 man when in fact we should be getting equivalent gear if not superior gear?

Or maybe I’m missing something here…

Wipe night

As you can guess from the title last  night adventure in Icecrown citadel didn’t go well. Wipe after wipe after wipe wich ended up in us not even being able to down Lord Marrowgar despite a few close calls. People stayed on spikes, in flames,  lag was horrible, it was first time for a few of our raiders, etc… etc… whatever the reason we wiped.

I consider myself a pretty good judge to point out what went wrong during an attempt but yesterday reasons for our collective failure still eludes me.

Tanks: Yesterday I was the main tank on call with a newer druid tank to go along with me. I’m honest enough to know when I mess up and yesterday I can say I did not. I did run a bit more around the place that what we’re used to but then again, I’ve seen the healers follow the tanks before, something wich didn’t seem to happen yesterday. As for my other tank partner it was his first time on Marrowgar and overall he was doing well enough.

And that may be one the problems we had. “Overall” doesn’t cut it in ICC, you need flawless. There was a few times where he had trouble following me around wich resulted in wipes. Lag was blamed but I also suspect he was a bit overwhelmed by everything going on. Before the raid we found out a few odd things in his spec and glyphs wich leads me to wonder what else might have been wrong. All in all it felt like someone who didn’t came prepared. he was also taking buttloads of damage.

I know I look like I’m blaming him but by the last attempts he had his game down and I cannot find anything to say wich means we also had problems elsewhere.

Healers: The next stop of course is the healers. Yesterday, as with all Tuesdays since ICC came out lag was truly horrible. For a healer this can turn a 1 second spell into a 5 second spell. With all the damage flying around it did cause a few wipes where I was going down and the healers either didn’t see my health move because of the lag or the heal took so much time casting I didn’t get it in time. No one really to blame here. I did feel like they where a bit overwelmed yesterday but it was also our first time trying to two heal it. We had a shaman help out on the later attempts wich helped a lot but it seems we need 3 healers for Marrowgar.

DPS: We had a few new dps coming to our group yesterday and again I’m pretty sure it was the first time for some. The spikes stayed up long and people stayed in fires.  Also, on average dps seemed really low. I’ve seen an improvement with the dps of our regular crew so I’m hopeful that with practice and time everyone will keep improving.

What did went right: Reading this you may get the impression last night raid was looking like a huge train wreck. To our credit it did not feel that way. Sure we were all a bit frustrated by the end of the night but no one ragequitted, no one complained (well there was some groans) and the comments were done politely. I don’t even recall hearing the word “fail”.

This may not seem like much but for me it’s important. It’s a sign that we can pull through when things go bad. These days a lot of guilds fall apart at the first sign of trouble and I’m glad not to be in one of them.

So thursday we have the follow-up raid and I’m hopefull this time we will pull through!

PS: If some of you guys are expert on druid tanking and know a few good resources do leave a comment here so we can help our new tank.