Soooo much Gnomer….

My adventures in leveling a warlock solely through dungeons continues and things are going smoothly on the whole. Run a dungeon, wait on professions while I wait for the next one and repeat. I’m managing good dps on the bosses generally speaking but still struggling to keep up with melee on trash. All things considered, not too shabby.

But of course my dungeon bliss couldn’t last forever and Gnomeragan had to rear its ugly head. Now, I know Gnomer has its fan but I’m not one of them. It’s too long, trash is boring and the rewards are meh…. plus you get to run it way too much. See Gnomer stands at that weird spot in the dungeon progression where it’s pretty much the only thing you run for a few levels in the high twenties. Case in point, I ran it 6 times during the weekend, 4 of those in a row…

But yesterday I had my first run of Scarlet monastery so there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Read Full Post »

So Recount, we meet again….

I have been a vocal hater of Recount and other Dps meter addons in the past. I value greatly the ability to be able to compare your own performance from one encounter to the other and being to compare to other players but too often, the information gathered is badly used and interpreted.

Recount is too often used as the only indicator of skill. The simple equation being more DPS equals more skill and that’s the end of it. Dps meters can be one of the many tools to evaluate skill but it shouldn’t end there. If I use a critical non-dps ability to save a healer for example and thus give us a win, I might end up lower on the dps charts but my being able to think on my feet and save the raid actualy shows more skill than someone having dps tunnel vision. Still many players are using DPS meters as holy gospel and it drives me nuts… hence my Recount hate.

But, if I want to be a good warlock I need to be able to see how I’m doing so I have put back Recount and I’m monitoring my progress in the low level dungeons. Good news is that I’m not at the bottom so I must be doing not too bad but I’m strugling getting over the tanks… in fact all the dps seems to be having trouble beating the tanks so I’m suspecting this is a low level issue. If not the heirloom twinks are usualy doing better than me but I’m pretty close to them and I beat a few on boss fights so I’m somewhat satisfied.

So that’s how I’ve been doing lately. Trying to improve my dps actualy makes those old dungeons a lot more fun so there’s hope. Also, heirlooms twinks are total cheats

Read Full Post »

Horde acceptance in the workplace

My adventure continues in WoW and for the past two days things have been more or less stable in terms of my MMO of choice and things are veering nicely toward WoW. This is due partly to my being able to do instances in WoW and finding it way more fun than doing the Barrens yet again and my honeymoon ending with Neverwinter.

Speaking of Neverwinter I want to make a detour to talk about it rapidly. Neverwinter is great, kickass mindless dungeon fun… but nothing else besides that. The content gets repetitive quickly (ie there’s one or two mob types per zone) and the cash shop is probably the greediest thing I have ever seen. We’re talking 40$, 60$ for free services in other games… it all adds up very quickly.

But back to WoW now. Most of my WoW buddies are, for a reason that still evades me, favoring Alliance and it did cause me to question my Horde choice for a moment. I mean, if I want to play with people I already know, it would be much easier to roll Alliance.  I mean, I spent most of my raiding career as Alliance but in the back of my mind I always rooted for the Horde and this time I decided to stick to my guns… which led to Alas making fun of me.

So my dear Alas, I just wanted to tell you that my being Horde is not a choice, I was born this way and I hope that one day you’ll be able to accept Horde players for who they are without discriminating them. Hordies have a right to a happy life too…

… and we do bath… occasionally… in the blood of our fallen enemies…

Read Full Post »

The first rule is… I have no idea what I’m doing

Back in WoW, I finally managed to land a Brawler’s Guild invite after watching the black market auction house like a hawk for an hour or so the other night. For the low low price of only 6.8k gold, I got myself the right to fight more monsters in an arena and pretend I’m the most awesome monster killer ever.

Turns out that these guys hit hard… Sure the first few fights are a matter of “stay out of the bad” mostly but it didn’t take long before I started to die with some regularity. Sure my gear could use improvement(a lot in fact…) but I’m wondering if it’s even designed to be done by all classes. I’m a warrior and I can see how my old DK would have an easier time.

Anyway, any of you guys have any advice about how to go about this whole Brawler buiseness?

Read Full Post »

What if LFR had a MMR?

I was talking last weekend to someone about how I’d probably love to be able to raid with a hardcore crew where I wouldn’t have to handle raid leading or tell people to gear up or any of the stuff I often have to do in more casual groups. That I’d love to only have to worry about my numbers, my gear and leave it at that. You might be tempted to tell me to find such a guild but I have a big problem… I simply cannot and don’t want to commit to a set schedule of raiding… and all the more serious raiding guilds do ask that you be present at the raids.

I started thinking about all of this, about how I’d love to be able to raid with people of similar skill level to mine but without having to follow a set schedule of raids. I started thinking that I’d love to be able to hit the LFR button and be matched with people of similar skill level and be able to run a few harder raids. I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who would love that.

But how do we achieve this? Why not take a page out of RTS and Moba games and have a MMR (match making ranking) value for each of us? We’re already edging in that direction with the gear level requirements but why not take this further? Assign a value based on gear, on dps done, on unavoided damage and anything else relevant. Make it so that if my score is good enough I can queue up for hardmode version of the LFR.

I’m curious to see what everyone thinks about this. I know there’s some who will say it would split the community, would turn people into bigger asshats but still, I  think the idea has some merit.

Read Full Post »