Not quite doing nothing here, but not a lot.
I’ve not been playing RIFT, in fact I’ve cancelled my subscription already. It wasn’t giving me anything that WoW wasn’t giving me, and that’s not much.
Not been playing Warcraft either lately.
Been playing Assassin’s Creed.
Bleugh.
It’s been quite some time since I last posted hasn’t it.
There’s been a few changes in my gaming.. I’m playing Rift at the moment, and it is fairly decent, though to be honest you could quite easily justify the claim that it is a WoW Clone. Certainly most of the hotkeys are the same, which of course means that the core facilities offered are likewise similar.
I’ve been enjoying leveling up in Rift, just like I enjoy leveling up in WoW. There’s not a hell of a lot to differentiate them , WoW has a stronger “lore” and long quest chains are mostly missing in Rift, or at least they aren’t anything like so obvious. Of course Rift has better quality graphics (in some ways), but only excited 8 year olds think that makes a real difference. In other ways Wow wins out, particularly in the animation department.
The Rift economy is obviously young, I’ve taken some gathering professions, and found there are a number of items that you can’t sell on the AH for any kind of profit. Earning the 250 gold it costs to buy a mount was really hard. I was struggling to make the money, and then, on the day I finally did it I earned a further 150 gold from the AH in one day - The reason being that I’d coincidentally finally reached the area of the beginner zone that had the more valuable items.
On the plus side, I do quite like the eponymous Rift events, though they seem perhaps a too frequent, I’m feeling that they may lose their novelty value pretty soon.
On the down side, no guild chat.. they’re almost all still playing WoW.
And finally, why am I playing Rift instead of WoW? Frankly, I think I’d become a little too addicted to WoW and my guildies, so I’m weaning myself off MMO’s by playing something similar, yet different, and less captivating. No guild chat removes one of the more addictive features. Blizzard did their own job of removing some of the other addicting features when they released Cataclysm..
I don’t do reputation grinding, it’s like having to eat custard for starters, main and pudding.
Constantly wiping just removed a lot of the fun and gave me performance anxiety.
So really, wow wasn’t doing it for me anymore.
Like Li Kao in the Barry Hughart books (an excellent read by the way) I have a small flaw in my character. A light was shone upon it this weekend when I tanked a dungeon or three with my Paladin Tank.
It was the first dungeon I’ve tanked in cataclysm, in fact the first in a few months. Anyway I rage quit in the middle of the first encounter when someone had time to type “tank u r shit“. To be fair there was a fairly good reason for the comment as I had just completely failed to master the only mechanic in that fight.
So, I was reflecting later on my chosen “roles” in warcraft groups. I play healer as my main and tank as my alt, what I don’t do is play DPS at all. I have a sneaky suspicion that I want to be “special”, thing is, I don’t like being singled out! And that, my friends, is the core part of my flaw, and it leads to rage quitting.
I normally read a lot of healing blogs, and a common theme is that the healer is often blamed for wipes. Now I’ve played tank I can say, the healer only gets blamed if the Tank is doing their job correctly. And, what’s more, the healer gets the cop-out excuse that the DPS are actually probably a significant part of the problem. If the DSP are doing their job and the tank is doing thier job and the group wipes then, yes, it is the healers fault, but there’s also a fair chance that they can claim their gear is simply not good enough.
Anyway, enough about my personality problems.
–
After the rage quit, I rejoined and got a Black Rock Caverns run. Did the usual, “I’m a noob” speech and the mage volunteered to help me out. We cleared the place without any problems. I really enjoyed the run, there was chat, and not just of the “gogogo” kind, there was Crowd Control too, it was great. I was very surprised at the end when I discovered that I wasn’t just filling in a partial guild run, the atmosphere was that good. We did so well that three of us stayed on and did the run again, with a new healer and a friends DPS. Again it was pleasant with the players poking fun at each other.
So strange. Such a difference in attitude between two groups of randomly picked people. I’m glad I “got right back on the horse”.
–
Lessons learnt…
I wish I could say that I learnt not to rage-quit, but actually I think I may have learnt the opposite!
I have learnt that my tanking UI is completely useless and messed up.. I’m going to have to spend a couple of hours tidying up and trying out one of those UI’s where the information is just where it’s needed.
I will be tanking again! When it works it’s fun.
I wonder if I should try initiating a “vote-kick” with a reason of “too impatient”.
Cataclysm heroics have got me all of a topsy turvy.
I’ll run a couple of heroics and end up with a solid dislike of them, I’ve ended up feeling completely incapable of performing my chosen role as a healer. It feels like I either don’t have enough healing throughput, or enough mana, or maybe I’m simply healing the wrong players. It had gotten to the point where after my last run of despair I was seriously considering at changing to DPS and letting someone else worry about how the hell they’re supposed to heal.
Then I get a run where everything clicks, I run out of mana on the last heal just as the boss dies or ,in one case, I end up on full mana and was trying to find where I’d hidden my Lighting Bolt. (4th row, 3 in from the left)
Last night’s run was the latter, of course, otherwise this would have been a very different post.
I’m not saying we didn’t wipe, at least twice through my very personal fault.. Draenei tail pulls are a particular speciality of mine. Other wipes were random disconnects and some were because we were trying ‘Zerg’ tactics on a boss, (worked on the 3rd attempt)! I even got a couple of upgrades! The first upgrades I’ve had since my first ever heroic. So now I’m not feeling so useless.
It *could* just be because I spent loads-of-money on enchants for every single piece of gear and reforged all the mastery into haste, but that would be really badly downplaying the rest of the group who were playing at raid standards.
–
One of the problems with being a healer, and a tank too I guess, is that you don’t have anything to compare against. You can’t see how the healing should have been managed. There’s no place where you can go to see which player shouldn’t have been getting heals. You can’t even take a look at the healing meters and decide if you’re underperforming. Because, at the end of the day, there’s absolutely no where to see just what your healing should have looked like.
And if the party wipes there’s a pretty clear causual line to not getting enough healing, a fact that Pugees seem all to aware of!
Maybe this will change as we all start to get better gear. Maybe not.
I suspect that healers will become almost as rare as tanks in pickup-groups. I already know there are a number of tanks that never PUG, and the new level of difficulty may well make healers decide likewise … I know of guildies that never PUG, and my experience with PUGs is pushing me in the same direction, it’s already rare that I join Looking For Group.
Nothing like a guild run to make you realise that things ain’t so bad.
Halls of Origination, smoe wipes, particularly on the first boss and a couple of trash wipes. Who would have thought that casting a spell that didn’t even happen because the mob was too far away would still aggro?
Anyway, nice run. No upgrade drops (5 dungeons and only 1 Heroic item equipped!), but that’s pretty irrelevant when you’re having fun.
I’m beginning to love Druid battle Rezzes, I seem to need so many!
Nothing much more to say, except I learnt that mixing Leather and Mail armour means I lose a 5% intellect buff! Dammit Blizzard! I’ve vendored the mail pieces! I’ve got to spend a shedload of justice points now.
On vendoring, you may remember my blab about equipping hit weapons before casting hex? Well it turns out there are very few shaman weapons with +hit, and I vendored a particularly decent quest reward one, some time back. I’m cursing my habit of vendoring stuff that isn’t immediately useful now!
Tried to PUG two heroics this weekend.
Failed both times.. Tank quit one. And I quite the other.
The other was the boss where you have to stand upwind of the boss. Total fail. I can’t seem to easily see which way the wind is blowing, and when I can see it I get cycloned. Not to mention getting dragon breathed because the tank was facing the boss upwind.
Bah!
So I did a normal dungeon. It wasn’t a terribly nice experience, the tank started pulling while I was still changing spec and capped it all off by typing “fail” several times on the last boss when many of us were hit by one of the AOE’s. He finished up by wondering how we could fail more than once.
I pointed out that just maybe we didn’t understand the mechanics. And I also suggested that engaging the last boss while the healer was on 2/3 mana was maybe not a good idea. He didn’t seem overly impressed! Still you’ve got to allow these 10 year olds a bit of slack I guess.
I didn’t point out that if he had time to comment on our performance during a fight suggested he wasn’t trying quite as hard as he could be. I know as a healer I don’t have any time at all to type in combat.
I hope he was really young, otherwise he’s got a nasty shock coming when he enters the real world.
So I’m gonna see how Fflow the paladin tank does while leveling instead since it seems I’m having severe problems healing.
So the observant will have figured that BOTH of the above spells are offensive spells that a Restoration Shaman is quite likely to have to cast before or combat.
There is a reason for this post, offensive spells have a baseline miss chance, according to the tooltip for my healer my usual restoration kit has zero +hit stats (and an extra 1% because she’s a draenei) … giving
Hit Chance+1.00%
Hit Rating: 0(+0.00% hit chance)
85: 3.00% – one in 30
86: 4.00% – one in 25
87: 5.00% – one in 20
88/skull: 16.00% miss chance
That means every CC cast has a between a 1-in-20 to 1-in-30 chance to fail.
So I got to thinking… I can swap in and out weapons and relics, perhaps I can do some swapping before and after casting hex to reduce my miss chance.
Swapping in a couple of items from my enhancement set into the weapon and relic slots (Mindshear Shanker, Carnelian Spikes, Exhausted Flashgrowth Mote no gem) I get a hit rating of 190, changing these figures to
Hit Chance +2.85%
85: 1.15% one in 80 ish
86: 2.15% one in 45
87: 3.15% one in 30
88/Skull:14.15%
Brinnging the miss chance down to between one in 30 and one in 80, a definite improvement and worth doing — if I can!
And it all started so well!
A guild Heroic run last night, yipee! Guild runs are so much better than the strange unidentifiable smell that is PUGs! I was really hopeful that I was going to be able to get a new dungeon under my belt, what with having only run 3 so far, the odds were looking good.
But the random heroic tool decided to fart on me and we ended up in Heroic Grim Batol. A dungeon I’ve actually already run once in normal mode. I waved goodbye to the chance of ticking another dungeon off the list and settled down to doing the do. Some of the comments in party chat suggesting this was a hard heroic were a little worrying, but so what.
It turns out – and you probably knew this already – that Heroic GB is indeed a hard instance. We managed to down the first two bosses, with some difficulty, three or four attempts each, but they did at least have the good grace to bow out under our persistent, yet gently insistent, persuasions.
The third boss though is a right swine! Not only does he run away before his health gets very low,coward that he is! But he comes back with a “friend”, a flippin dragon! Talk about cheating! At this point the fight becomes a little “complicated”, what with dodging the randomly spawning adds, staying out of the two different kinds of strange stuff on the floor and running away from the purple flames (I think even Clifford would feel doubful about recommending Listerine?).
Anyway, I found this fight so complicated I was either:
a) running around and not healing enough
b) healing and not running around enough
neither of which seems to be the right strategy!
And crikey! And carrots! Dungeons are hard again!
So here’s some not-news…. I’ve leveled healy Flowersz to the new level cap questing as Enhancement and grabbing the healy gear where possible. So at level cap she was a bit undergeared as both Enhancement and as Restoration.
She’s 525 in mining and JC. Jewelcrafting is not the huge moneyspinner it was at the equivalent time into Wrath. If memory serves me right I was one of the early JC’ers crafting epic rings and neckpieces and making huge amounts of money out of it. In cata the top level rings are only blue and cost a huge fortune in raw materials well out of proportion with the benefits gained in wearing them, so the market is non-existant.
So that’s crafting, then there’s questing…. which has been quite entertaining.
Reading the quest text has made be laugh out loud a couple of times, Blizzard have gotten still better at providing depth to the leveling experience.
And onto dungeouns … I’ve only done 3 dungeons,
Stonecore
I did stonecore with a Pickup Group (PUG) using the looking for dungeon tool, and that was a shock! No more ROFLSTOMP-ing lots of wipes, and I mean lots!
It would have dented my confidence, but to be honest I was expecting problems. I haven’t read any strategy guides, but I have read a number of articles saying the Cataclysm dungeons were going to be hard and requiring Crowd Control. Since no-one seemed to be doing any CC in my group it didn’t surprise me that we wiped 8 or 9 times!
Vortex Pinnacle
The next dungeon though was a guild group doing Heroic Vortex Pinnacle. Even after doing a little bit of shopping for a new shield and a couple of other minor necessities I was still undergeared even by Blizzard’s measure. I wasn’t dragged screaming into the dungeon, but I was mildly reluctant.
Unlike the “normal” dungeon though this “heroic” one didn’t go so bad. I was personally responsible for over half of the wipes we did have. Bad placement and not knowing the mechanics of the fights was the main cause. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of “back-to-the-wind”, I tried but it just didn’t seem to work, couple that with a few “chain-cyclones” and we wiped twice on that boss. I also had placement difficulties with the “grounding-field” on the last boss causing an unnecessary wipe there. As is usual with a guild group there didn’t seem to be any bad feeling, and I think they’ll be loads of fun if we get onto vent.
I have to say our tank/party leader (Raq) did an excellent job of marking up the mobs and devising strategy. Hopefully it will go easier next time.
Grim Batol
And my final dungeon of the holidays was a half-pug into Grim-Batol “normal”. This was OK ish, again with the wipes, but I don’t think these were my fault this time - the out-of-guild tank and boomkin were perhaps a little over-eager.
I think theres a long way to go yet before these dungeons become standard fodder, but then if we keep on running them in-guild, as it were, I think they’ll keep us entertained for some time. In difficulty level they’re feeling almost raid level, certainly they’re a lot lot longer the 15 minute races that they became in Wrath, consistently taking over an hour. I can’t decide if I like this, on the one hand they’re a lot more epic and “classic” and on the other hand they require a bit of time commitment to do.
Well my original plan, way way back in the day, was to take several days off work and level my JC shaman healer most of the way to the cap and try to make a killing on the JC market.
This and that got in the way and I eventually found myself unable to take any days off during the release of Cataclysm, and little time to game at all.
Since then I have leveled a bit and got Flowersz’ Jewelcrafting skill up to the point where she needs to buy recipies to progress any further. And that is a minor problem, you see I didn’t find the daily quest giver until recently so I don’t even have enough “tokens” to buy a single recipe!
That said, there’s a chance she could still level enough to make a killing, or, alternatively she could just sell the JC gems for what wowhead recons is 600-800 gold each! That’s a lot of gold for a daily and it certainly looks very tempting. The biggest fly in the ointment is having to go to Stormwind to get the daily!
I might level my paladin instead – I’ve got a couple of drops already that he can use and there’s been a couple of byproducts from JC’ing that are suitable for him too.
Still undecided.