Filed under: WoW
I’m still having fun in WoW. In fact that’s probably a big reason why I haven’t been posting much, when I have free time I mostly want to be playing instead of writing. My shaman has gotten to 85 and done quite a few heroics and is actually pretty well geared now for healing with a few epics and 346 gear in all the other slots. The new instances are still fun, but I haven’t been able to do heroics as much as I’d have liked due to play time constraints at night. Especially as the healer, its not too nice to have to suddenly go afk due to baby aggro.
There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve been meaning to post about, from a review of some of the new zones and instances to some of the interesting experiences running heroics and such. But after a while I start thinking that it’s not any much different from what a lot of other people write about, and they write much better than me so… Besides, I think I’ve written enough grumpy WoW rants in the past.
So instead I will show a picture of my alt hunter, innocently standing in Stonetalon trying to figure out what to do for a quest, when suddenly…
What just happened?
Yeah Deathwing attacked and I got the “Stood in the fire” achievement (not that I actually even saw the fire, I just collapsed dead on the ground). Not only that he wiped out the entire horde base as well, which doesn’t really make much sense since they just appear again after a couple of moments. Hilariously though the only survivor was that little level 1 girl Clarissa who I have targeted in the screenshot.
Deathwing’s flames were also so powerful that they bugged me out and I couldn’t resurrect, not even after reloading the interface. I had to relog to get to the spirit healer.
Well it’s been quite a long while since my last post. It’s been hard to find time to write something since I’ve been busy at work on a bunch of stuff. And at night, if I’m not taking care of our son (who has been sick for quite a while, the poor bear) I’m busy having fun in WoW.
Thankfully I have no regrets on resubscribing and I’m loving Cataclysm so far. Since starting on Christmas day last year, my goblin shaman has hit 84 and has just a few bars to go to 85. That sounds like I leveled pretty fast, and according to the in-game time played its just under 8 days. In fact I spent a large amount of time afk idling in game as well during times when I get called off to attend to a bawling little carebear, so I suspect the actual time spent would be about a week to go from 1-85. That’s a testament to how fast and easy levelling is now, especially with the dungeon finder.
New old stuff
In fact, just as many have said it’s almost too fast. I love doing the new revamped zones, but I also love the opportunity to run all the old dungeons that I never got to do in classic because it was such a pain putting a group together. Me and my wife used to run each other’s characters through some of them once we had high level characters, but it’s not as much fun as doing it at the level it’s meant to be done at. However, doing all the dungeons made me very quickly outlevel every zone I was questing in. 95% of the time I never managed to see the later half of each zone before the quests became grey. Personally I would have continued on finishing up the grey quests, but my wife was playing my shaman as well before she started work again and she’s the type who just tosses quests as soon as a next zone becomes available (not a completionist like me…). So I levelled though half of Azshara, half of Ashenvale, half of Stonetalon, half of Un’goro, half of Blasted Lands… you get the drift. The new quests are a blast, especially in the zones that received complete revamps like Azshara and Thousand Needles. Instances were fast, with the longest ones like Maraudon and Scarlet Monastery all split up into wings, and quest-givers are conveniently located at the start. No more running all over the world to pick up 4 quests! The goodie bag for doing a random also gives good blue gear for quite a few slots such as neck and rings that are otherwise normally hard to get. Plus there are in-game maps now for the dungeons, with bosses conveniently labelled. Man that’s so much better… Wilhelm from the Ancient Gaming Noob talks about needing 3 hours to do Wailing Caverns in the past, which isn’t an exaggeration since it was so easy to get lost in that darned place. Now it only took me 45 minutes!
Overall 1-60 went by like lightning, so much so that I really want to roll alts to see all the stuff I missed. I hardly even stepped foot on to the Eastern Kingdoms before I was heading through the Dark Portal… again.
Time warp to Outlands
A lot of people have said that there is such a strange disconnect between the Shattering and Burning Crusade. It’s really like going back in time, because everything in Outlands is supposed to be in the past from levels 1-60. Oh well, even if it doesn’t make sense I’m perfectly happy to kill 20 fel orcs for nice clown gear that has double the stats of my old Azeroth gear. Plus now that you can train flying at 60 (with a buff to normal flying speed from 60% to 150%), the quests in Outlands are really a breeze. They were obviously not designed with flying players in mind. Case in point, the quest in Nagrand which requires you to bounce on a trampoline on to a big bird nest to smash a giant egg. Previously I used to use the “epic mount with carrot on a stick” trick to jump onto the nest, since it was really tricky to time the trampoline correctly. Now you just summon flying mount and fly up there… Trampoline? What trampoline?
The quests in Outlands are unchanged, and unfortunately so are the dungeons. This means you have to do the prequests and pick them up from the usual NPCs outside the instances… boohoohoo no more bevy of questgivers awaiting the rabid click-fest at the entrance. This meant that I wasn’t particularly encouraged to do that many instances, especially since we had played a lot during BC and therefore were very very familiar with them. So I mainly quested through Hellfire Peninsula, parts of Zangarmarsh until 65, then headed to my favourite Nagrand where I hit 68. Sadly Outlands has been reduced to 3 zones, since there’s no reason to grind any of the old factions or try to get any gear once Northrend becomes available. I had never played Horde past 60 before, so I was looking forward to some unique quests but sadly they didn’t seem any much different from the Alliance versions.
Snowing again
Once I reached 68, it was time to train cold weather flying and head to Northrend. Again, flying really makes things a breeze, especially with the fact that you can mount up in water. Makes the shaman water walking spell almost redundant actually, unless you really want to fish in the middle of the ocean or something. The Horde quests in Northrend are actually quite different, so it was kind of refreshing and I mostly quested all the way with a few instances done here and there since once again you have to do all the pre-quests first before the instance quests become available. The Outlands clown suit thankfully was replaced pretty quickly with Northrend stuff. At this point I dropped mining for alchemy since I wanted the alchemy trinket for healing at 85 and figured it was a good time to start training up. Plus alchemy should be a decent money maker too, better than flying around mining at least.
I went from Borean Tundra to Dragonblight, some Grizzly Hills, Sholazar Basin and then finally on to Icecrown where I hit 80. Also finally saw a few Alliance players, which were like an extinct breed up till now since Thaurissan is heavily Horde dominated. Even though it is a PvP server, it plays almost exactly like a PvE server. I encountered a gnome DK at a quest giver at Icecrown, but just spent a few moments staring at each other before going our way. I later met him again fighting an elite mob as part of the same quest I was on, and killed him while the mob was on him. I got quest credit for the mob kill too… but I felt kinda bad about it later since he hadn’t done anything to me. I don’t know why but being on a PvP server initially made me crazily try to kill every Alliance I saw for no reason but now I’m much more inclined to just leave them alone.
After hitting 80, I was initially tempted to try to do the new ICC instances which I had never done before such as Halls of Origination and Halls of Reflection. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to because my gear level was too low, plus I needed to do some quest to unlock the instances. So too bad, it was off to Cataclysm!
New shinies
I started in Vashj’ir, after first doing some frantic googling to find out how the hell to actually get there. I really enjoyed the whole zone, not sure how much of it was due to it being totally new. But all the quests flow nicely together and tell a nice story, plus the seahorse mount is so cute. The zone design is amazing and makes me think of Nemo or One Piece, especially all the random sea monsters swimming around like a giant boss whale shark that blots out the sun and some huge elite shark boss too. I wonder if they drop any loot…
Since it’s a new zone my wife was pretty keen to play too, so I think she actually did most of the quests. I felt a bit lost sometimes when logging in because I would be in a totally different place, but that’s ok I’m sure I’ll get to do the quests with one of my numerous alts. The gear is amazing, especially considering I went in with lousy Northrend greens. It was pretty hard to kill mobs initially and I had to heal myself like 3 or 4 times just to kill a single crab, but after getting a few gear upgrades which had like triple the stats of what I was wearing my shaman started WINDFURYing things to death in 2 seconds again. I mean really… some mace dropped with 871 spellpower on it wtf. I think my previous caster mace from Northrend had 303 spellpower… I guess most people were decked out in the free epics from facerolling the later half of WotLK and probably wouldn’t have been as impressed but I still feel shocked seeing gear with like 400 stamina on it. Can’t help but recall the times when I was raiding Molten Core and people would drool all over the Azuresong Magebladewhich had… gasp! 50 spellpower!!!! Funny how the game has changed…
The end of the quest line leads to the new Throne of the Tides instance. I tried it out as DPS first, since I hadn’t done any healing till now and didn’t want to go into an instance totally unfamiliar with my bars and spells. On that topic, respeccing seems to have changed a lot now. I was expecting the usual 10 silver cost to respec for the first time from my elemental dual-spec to resto, but it cost 29 gold instead… seems to be related to how many talent points have already been spent. Not only that, but the dust to change glyphs cost 10 gold per glyph change for characters above 80! Ouch… Anyway, back to Throne of the Tides. Was quite an interesting instance and not too long. A bit confusing since I had no idea what was going on, but that’s why I went in as DPS. Spam buttons and piakpiakpiak!!! The boss fights are quite interesting and much better than the Wrath-style fights which all boil down to “hit boss, move out of bad stuff kill, adds when they come”. I especially liked the squid-headsucker boss, he reminded me of a Justice League episode I had randomly watched about Starro the facehugger starfish. I’m sure someone at Blizzard must have watched that too, the similarities are uncanny. Anyway a dps shaman makes Starro cry, since his Lava Bursts instantly got interrupted and his Absorb Magic buff gets immediately purged. Ahh I love my shaman…
After finishing Vashj’ir, I went to Hyjal even though it was the same level as Vashj’ir. I need to get Hyjal rep eventually anyway, so might as well. I think the Blackrock Caverns instance is unlocked here, but I never managed to run it (although my wife did) and now I can’t go back using the dungeon finder since I’m too high level. Hyjal quests were fun but nothing really much to say about them, although I did like the final battle against Ragnaros. Seems strange to fight him until he retreats and Cenarius says “We can only defeat him in his own elemental plane” when I very obviously killed Ragnaros dozens of times in Molten Core 
It’s not like he retreats there either, I mean he obviously drops down dead in front of the raid and gives you his hand.
Now I’m 84 and questing in Deepholm. I’ve since also done Stonecore and Vortex Pinnacle as resto. Stonecore isn’t very enjoyable to heal and feels very long, even on normal. Plus I once had to heal a 4 melee group in back-to-back runs. Talk about ouch… Vortex Pinnacle is much easier to heal although the bosses are a bit more boring since they are almost tank and spank. I can’t access the other dungeons yet because I haven’t discovered the entrance yet, so I’m going to be holding off on instancing for a while until I hit 85 and unlock the other dungeons. After 85 I still intend to go through Uldum and Twilight Highlands, not to mention Tol Barad and the new BGs.
So far there’s still tons of content left for me to enjoy, so I’m looking forward to seeing lots of new stuff. Even though I haven’t done any heroics yet, I really hope Blizzard doesn’t listen to all the whiners out there and revert back to Wrath-style stupidly easy dungeons. I love the new instances so far, especially when done with proper CC and nice pulling. During my first Stonecore run, some idiot rogue started chafing that the tank was too slow and pulled the first pack by himself (“gogogo!”) while the tank was marking the kill order. I was still setting up my bars when suddenly the whole group started taking massive damage. The next 5 minutes were filled with me spamming my buttons like a blind monkey trying to find the “open” button in front of a peanut dispensing machine. Greater Healing Wave! No wait that’s too slow, Riptide! What’s this Unleash Elements thing, mash it mash it! Oh wait I don’t have earthliving weapon on… I’m running out of mana?!? Doh water shield fell off… chain heal! Bugger that only 1 guy in range??? Mummy!
Somehow we got through that without anyone dying and after being berated by the tank for pulling, the idiot rogue initiated a vote kick against the tank for being “too slow”. Well guess what, he gets 1 strike for being a rogue (therefore useless by definition). 2nd strike for being from Jubei’thos, and I hate the name Jubei (there was an annoying griefer in Duris who went by that name). This was the 3rd strike since I like tanks who mark kill orders instead of charging in like stupid Wrath babies. So I rejected his vote kick and vote kicked the rogue instead for being annoying. Guess I wasn’t alone in my sentiments since he instantly got booted and no one was surprised when a replacement DPS got in immediately. Kek I like this kick feature.
Hopefully the tougher instances will actually teach players how to play properly, or at least encourage the stupider portion of the player-base to quit. That would instantly raise the quality of WoW drastically and make Cataclysm a resounding success in my opinion.
Filed under: WoW
Well that was an extended holiday. After spending a week at my in-laws place, I then managed to skip work and stay at home for the next two weeks due to Christmas and end of year holidays. So what was I doing?
Mean and green
Yeah I’ve been bitten by the WoW bug again and resubscribed for Cataclysm, despite all my earlier attempts to convince myself not to. I had started getting the urge to resubscribe before going on my trip, but decided to hold off until after to make the decision. No point paying Blizzard for 1 week when I’m not going to have internet access. But I discovered that I could make a trial account and play through the starter areas for free for 10 days, which is a pretty good deal since the revamped starter areas and lowbie zones in Azeroth were one of the big features in the expansion. No Burning Crusade or Cataclysm races though, just the plain old classic characters. Of course first I had to go through a few days of IT hell trying to get Blizzard’s new streaming client to work, but eventually discovered that the problem was due to my still using Windows XP Service Pack 2 instead of the 3. After upgrading, everything was good to go and some other applications that weren’t working before are now ok too, which was an added bonus. So after getting everything set up, I puttered around with a gnome warlock and human hunter for a few days to see if I still enjoyed WoW enough to resubscribe.
Turns out I did. The new starting areas are a blast, and the quests are hilarious. I am convinced that the main target of this expansion is not new players, but actually ex-WoW players. There must have been a very sizable number of people that cancelled their accounts in Wrath of the Lich King, judging by the feedback from developers about how they tried to improve Cataclysm. The various changes in the lowbie areas would make much more sense to returning players who would know what it was like before the Shattering. I think a really new player would be quite puzzled at being told by the quest giver that “this area that used to have lots of trolls has now been taken over by troggs, which were forced out of their underground lairs by Deathwing!” To them it would be like… “um ok so this place has troggs… that was a lot of extra information that meant nothing…”
I was also particularly tickled by one quest in Dun Morogh in which you have to protect a ram farm from being raided… and the rewards were a bunch of white gear called Robes of the Endless Raider and Boots of the Nightly Raid Really reminded me of my old raiding days haha, and again something that would be totally lost on a real new player.
Anyways after finding myself enjoying the trial, I was kinda still twibbling about it until my wife told me to just go resubscribe 
The monthly sub isn’t a big deal since she was going back to work, and I think she was getting tired of me wuffling around and would rather me just be happy. She’s such a sweetie when it comes to me. So with the permission of the Chief Financial Officer, I paid for the Cataclysm digital download and resubscribed for 1 month since I wasn’t that sure how long I was going to play. With the current low USD exchange rate, it’s not that much although I later found that I could buy the box version cheaper. So that was my Christmas present of sorts.
Since I had decided to start afresh on a new server, we picked Thaurissian since one of our friends was playing there and he said there were a ton of Singaporeans on the Horde side. Fits all my criteria, since I wanted to play Horde having never gotten past 60 with a Horde character, and I wanted to try a PvP server just to see how it was. Turns out that the Alliance side on Thaurissian has been thoroughly beaten into submission though, the server is just totally Horde dominated and to date I think I’ve only ever seen 2 Alliance players so there wasn’t even much PvP.
The economy on Thaurissian is totally insane though, or maybe I’m just not used to the gold inflation that has been going on since I stopped. Thaurissian is also one of the older Oceanic servers, so maybe there’s a lot of excess gold floating around. A single goldthorn herb can sell for 20 gold, and simple peacebloom and silverleaf sell for about 70 silver per herb. Prices fluctuate insanely, with stuff selling for 1 gold in the morning that can be resold for 5 gold in the evening. This is really surprising since the server population is high, and all the players are concentrated on the Horde side. I’d have thought that money-minded Singaporeans would dominate the economy, but it turns out that all the usual money making tricks still work and there’s plenty of room for arbitrage. My wife has taken over the trading activities again and in the short span of one week has gone from 0 to 3750 gold. Ok fine many people make thousands of gold per day, but we’re starting out with absolutely nothing here. At least we don’t have to worry about gold for training and mounts.
I say we because my wife has actually been playing just as much as me. I created a goblin shaman, to play through the goblin starter zone and because I love shamans. The plan is to eventually go resto with elemental dual spec, so I can concentrate on caster gear. But for levelling, enhancement still seems faster with no downtime so we are currently enhancement with elemental dual spec. I had thought that she was sick of WoW and hadn’t shown any inclination of wanting to play, but surprisingly she seems to be enjoying herself a lot levelling the shaman and running through instances with the new (to us) dungeon finder. Which has actually been a great surprise too, queue times as DPS are still quite fast and most of the instances have been great, if a bit rushed. Of course there were quite a few failures and assholes but it’s much less than I was expecting. It’d be perfect if she decided to resubscribe too, then we could play together on a few nights. She won’t be able to play as much once she starts working though, so I doubt Scrooge McDuck will be willing to spend the money on herself even though she’s happy to let me spend it, despite it actually being quite insignificant compared to the money we easily shell out for our son’s toys. In the meantime, with the holidays and both of us being at home, the shaman has made it to level 55 in a single week. Wow, seems pretty fast… flying mounts in 5 more levels!
Another of our friends has decided to resubscribe and start a goblin shaman on Thaurissian too, so I also made a new Tauren pally to play together and tank through instances. I’ve never played a prot pally before, so it’s something totally new to me. Guess it’s a good time to learn since I don’t have any preconceptions about the class and thus won’t be confused by the huge changes to paladins. The plan is to get to 15 and start doing random dungeons together, me being the tank, our original friend creating a goblin priest to heal and the goblin shaman will be one of the damage dealers. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some instance runs in at night without being too interrupted by our son, who at least seems to be sleeping a bit better now.
Doh. Sometimes you do things that really make you wonder if you forgot to turn on the brain in the morning.
Well at least I hope it’s not just me.
I just got podded for the first time since playing EVE. Lost a full set of +4 implants, plus another set of missile skill hardwiring implants that I put in for missioning a while back that cost about 320 million ISK.
Did I get ganked by an evil army of ninja salvagers in my awesome Rattlesnake? Unfortunately it’s not as dramatic as that…
It all started due to my new hobby of ship collecting. I am currently building up a collection of all T1 combat ships, from frigates all the way up to battleships. I’ve already got a fair number of them, but I’ll elaborate more in a future post.
Anyway I was looking through the list of frigates when I remembered, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of old Gallente ships back in Couster from doing the tutorials! Might as well haul them back to add to the collection instead of buying new hulls!” Plus I get to tidy up my assets tab, I’m a neat freak like that. Couster was 11 jumps away, which was why I had left them there instead of flying them with me way back when I moved over to Caldari space.
Each hull took about 2,500 m3 worth of space though, so I needed a big hauler. Fortunately as part of training up for my freighter, I had trained Gallente Industrial V so my Iteron V had a whopping 25,000 m3 cargohold with full cargo expanders (without cargohold rigs). Plenty of space… Hopped in, fitted 3 medium shield extenders, an invulnerability field and a medium shield booster just because they happened to be lying around.
And then I made the fateful mistake of all newbie pilots… autopilot. I figured I’d be pretty safe anyway since most pilots would scan their targets before suicide ganking, amirite??? I mean why gank an empty industrial just for kicks… plus I had some sort of tank right? So off I go, slowly trucking along, while I went downstairs for some breakfast and to play with my kid.
Came back and found myself in a station… looking at an Ibis. “Hmm, that’s weird, could have sworn I didn’t dock….” Then saw that I was in Jita…. wtf. Sinking feeling… damn I was podded!
At first I couldn’t believe that anybody would have bothered suicide ganking an empty Iteron V… until I remembered a tiny little detail. Like joining the Caldari Militia. Which made me enemies to the Gallente, and attackable by the Gallente Navy in Gallente high-security space…. such as Couster.
Geez. Those frenchies must have wondered wtf this Caldari noob was smoking, jumping into their turf in a little Iteron V and idling at the jump gate. NPCs don’t pod players though, so some Gallente pilot must have come across my pod spinning in space and gleefully crushed it. Blaaaaaargh.
So, just to pick up a bunch of ships worth less than 1 million in total, I jumped 11 systems to get my Iteron V destroyed (worth more than all the other ships combined), then lost half-a-billion ISK worth of implants. Sigh yai yai. I’ve replaced the +4 implants, but will probably wait until I’m really going missioning before replacing the skill hardwiring implants. In case I pull another dumb one…
Filed under: Uncategorized
And finally my Ph.D applications are over with. My god, such a completely soul-draining experience. Applied to 7 schools this round, which will be my last. If I am unable to get into a decent program with financial aid, then I’ll have to start looking for a job again. In a sense it’s actually quite a relief too because then I’ll be able to put this idea of getting a Ph.D out of my mind forever and get on with my life.
Pwned by Application Turtle
At least I can now relax over the holidays (going on week long trip tomorrow) without having to worry about this crap.
Filed under: EVE
The past weekend I finally bit the bullet in EVE and dipped my toes into the kiddy pool of PvP. I quit my corp (after having to wait 24 hours to remove roles, doh) and joined up with the Caldari State in faction warfare. Whee, I’m now part of the Blob!
I was originally a bit hesitant to do so for fear of getting ganked while flying around in Caldari space. Only recently did I realise that this wasn’t very likely because any war targets would aggro the Caldari Navy the moment they jumped into Caldari high security space. While the Caldari Navy is probably only good at chasing donuts, the extra inconvenience means those dirty Gallente frenchies and Minmatar rebels need to keep moving and are unlikely to muster a large enough force to just sit around waiting to gank my Obelisk.
First up I had a lot of preparation to do. I already had my Iteron V filled with 8 Rabid Rifter packages ready to go in Jita. However, I’m not sure how much pod-death actually happens in low-sec during faction warfare, so I didn’t want to risk my +4 implants and costly missile implants which would be useless in a Rifter. So the plan was to pick up some other gunnery-related skill hardwiring implants and clone jump back to my old clone with +3s and use that as a PvP clone. I bought implants for 3% small projectile damage, 3% tracking, 3% capacitor recharge and afterburner speed boost. Only got cheaper ones since I wasn’t sure how long they would last, altogether the cost was less than 50 million ISK. After piloting the Iteron over to Sobaseki where my old clone was, took a while to actually do the clone jump due to all the session timers. “You can’t clone jump in your ship… oh you can’t leave your ship yet cos you just docked. Ok now you’re in your pod, but you have to wait a while before you can jump.” Finally it was done, and feeling slightly stupider with inferior implants I started the trip out to Nourvukaiken, 1 jump out from low-sec.
Of course that -1 to intelligence showed its effects pretty quickly since I forgot to start training again after pausing to make the clone jump, but fortunately I only lost 20 minutes of training time before noticing.
Finally, arrived at Nourvukaiken and parked myself at a friendly Caldari Navy Assembly station. Time to unload and assemble my first ever Rifter.
Looking good. My gunnery skills are pretty up to snuff now after that long period of training, with every skill at 4. The Incursion change to rockets would also prove handy since my Rifter packed a rocket launcher rather than a nos or neut. Time to boldly go forth and meet flaming death.
First time ever jumping into low-sec. My target system was Tama, which was on the list of most dangerous systems according to my faction warfare overview. I had no safe spots ready either…. but it turned out there was no one on the other side of the gate.
Checking d-scan I noted there were a buttload of POS towers up. And a small bunker up for grabs! I knew there was something about capturing bunkers or plexes, so I figured that was a good place for some action.
Warped in and saw lots of NPC frigates around, with a group of 3 around a capture point with a timer on it. No enemy pilots though. Decided to try out the Rifter in combat against the NPCs, wow it’s fast. Pretty high dps also and easily shredded them all. After waiting 5 minutes for the bunker to be captured, still hadn’t found any enemy pilots. There was a Dramiel on d-scan somewhere, but I wasn’t eager to try taking that on. Also a couple of industrials, but they seemed to be parked at a tower since it was unlikely that there would be someone just sitting around waiting to be shot. One of them was an Badger Mk II called Pinata, so could be bait as well.
I also realised that I’m really bad at using the d-scan to find anything. I saw another Rifter and tried to narrow it down, but the best I could do was decide that it was in the vicinity of Tama VIII. Unfortunately Tama VIII has 7 moons, and I never did manage to find that Rifter.
Finally I was running out of time, and decided to take a peek at another site, some abandoned Caldari outpost. This one had cruisers and destroyers in it, and was pretty tough. I was taking huge amounts of damage and only managed to kill 2 destroyers before having to warp out in half armor, ouch. I made my way back to Nourvukaiken and that was the end of my first ever PvP foray, ironically without any actual PvP.
Since I wouldn’t get that much time to play during the week, I clone jumped back to my +4 clone to maximise skill training. Time to learn a bit about using the d-scan and hopefully next time I’ll find someone to blow (me) up.
Filed under: WoW
There’s a ton of stuff I want to write about lately, but I find myself lacking the time to do it due to being busy either a) finishing up my PhD applications or b) procrastinating about finishing up my PhD applications by reading random stuff. Ok fine so maybe I just need to be better at time management or actually have some semblance of willpower.
One thing has struck me repeatedly though when reading through various WoW blogs recently. I hadn’t read them in a while, so there was a lot of catching up to do. And not surprisingly, the most talked about subject is of course the upcoming Cataclysm. I’ve read multiple posts lavishing praise on Blizzard for “being bold enough to radically alter a game this way” and they go on and on about how the new Azeroth is great and much better than how it used to be.
And I just picture myself standing in a room of excited people, going “Hello? Am I the only sane one here?”
First off, I am very excited about Cataclysm. Much more excited than I thought I’d be, so much so that I am actually very seriously contemplating resubbing to WoW (yeah yeah, together with the other 5 million ex-WoW players).
But come on, there is a reason why Azeroth was redesigned. THEY HAD TO DO IT. It is one giant bug-fix expansion. The expansion is not lore-driven; you can bet your mechanobikething that somewhere in Blizzard there was a meeting where some designers sat down and said “Ok we need to totally revamp the 1-60 content because it is totally broken and inconsistent with TBC and WoTLK, somebody come up with some plausible idea why Azeroth has to blow up and we’ll ask some guy in marketing to do the rest”.
They have said before that the reason why they couldn’t enable flying mounts, which were introduced in TBC and met with much joy and girlish squealing, to be used in the old world was simply that the old world was not designed that way and it would require a total revamp of the models and landscape. There were tons of weird stuff and hidden zones packed behind supposedly impassable mountains that would have been revealed to players. If you’ve ever coded any portion of a major project, you would probably have some inkling of the scope of change that would need to be done and the amount of error-testing, so it wasn’t something that they could just roll out after changing a few variables (like enableflying=true).
In addition to the flying, the entire questing design was 3 years out of date. There was a very jarring change whenever a character passed through the Dark Portal into Outlands at 58. You went from ridiculous quests that sent you all over the place for a completely useless reward (like plate legs with spirit) to quest hubs with 10+ quests at a go that sent you on a nice circuit around the zone, with lead-in quests to go to the next quest hub and useful reputations along the way. And the quest rewards suddenly became amazing even though they looked like a hobo suit. Dungeons in the old world had also become a complete joke due to all the changes to talents, so much so that most people could solo or duo them at level.
So basically, the expansion should rightly be thought of as “81-85 and an update for long-requested features”. The Shattering is not some omg awesome and original idea. It is a side effect of the necessity to completely redo the 1-60 experience (hence why Outland and Northrend is left untouched, even though it makes no sense story-wise). Since they had to do it, they might as well make some cosmetic changes here and there and market it as part of an expansion. It’s a great patch, and one I fully support and am quite excited about. Without it, I wouldn’t even be contemplating resubbing at all since the main attraction is to level a new bunch of characters on possibly a PvP server. But I don’t really see any risk or originality from Blizzard here, it’s like praising Nvidia for updating a bunch of 3 year old graphics drivers to conform to current standards. Actually I think even Blizzard tacitly agrees… which is why the Shattering is not exclusive to Cataclysm subscribers. It’s a bug fix for all players, not a feature of Cataclysm.
Are people so easily convinced by hype and marketing? Or am I just a grumpy curmudgeon who always sees the practical (i.e. real) motivations behind the spin? I guess people are just happy that their favourite game is changing (for the better) and there’s new stuff to see and explore.
Even after 1 year, I often look at my son and think “wow I can’t believe I’m a dad”. When I play basketball on weekends, I often find myself playing with teens and or young twenty-somethings. And amazingly I find that I get along with them better than I do the older crowd, who tend to come later at night and always talk about boring stuff like the economy or the stock market or cars. Most of them would probably be amazed to find out how old I am.
Well after today I’m officially 30.
Ok fine so maybe that’s not that old. But it’s still a sobering feeling that I’ve been muddling around for 30 years already. Geez. By the time my son is 30 I’ll be a 60 year old geezer. And here I am, still trying to go back to school for a Ph.D, still playing games. Sitting down with a roomful of adults still bores the heck out of me.
It’s funny how people always have such good impressions of stuff that happened “during their time”. Things were always better in the good old days. By the time our son is old enough to play games, he’ll probably look quizzically at the games I used to play and wonder how anyone could make out what all the pixelated crap is supposed to be. I intend to dig out my old SNES-clone and show him classics like Super Mario Bros and Balloon Fight too.
Boxy characters in a boxy world
Is that a bird or animal or robot or what
Even when I play basketball, I keep hearing kids nowadays talking about Kobe Bryant being the greatest player ever. And I’m like…. how can anyone who plays basketball not have heard of Michael Jordan? Then I realize that these kids were like… 6 years old when Jordan retired in 1998. I don’t even remember a single thing from when I was 6 years old. When you mention Michael Jordan the image in my mind is like this:
In reality this is what Jordan looks like now, and this will be how those kids remember Jordan:
Kinda sad that in a few short years the Greatest Of All Time could so easily be forgotten by young basketball fans. I post up and do a fadeaway jumper and they go “wow good Kobe move!” I have to restrain myself from telling them to go actually watch some real basketball and see how Kobe learnt everything he knows from Jordan.
Anyway I guess I’m officially middle-aged now, although the burgeoning white hairs on my head were already testament to that. Despite my earlier post about not coming back for Cataclysm, I’m still feeling tempted and might resubscribe after all, for a couple of months at least. I’ll see how it goes after I finish my Ph.D applications and after I come back from a planned trip to my in-laws.
On the EVE front, I’ve really been getting the itch to blow some stuff up. I was training Heavy Drone Operation V on Noork, when I realized that I was wasting skill points with the upcoming removal of learning skills. I had remapped my attributes to favour Perception and Intelligence after getting T2 medium drones, so I wasn’t getting Drone skill points at the maximum rate since they use Memory as the primary attribute. What I should have done was immediately switched to training some Perception/Intelligence skill. That way, I would get more skill points now and when the learning skill reimbursement comes in (about 1.3 million skillpoints) I could just dump it in Heavy Drone Operation V and finish it off immediately. Oh well, its not a big loss.
With Incursion out, I’ve bought the new ORE Industrial skill book and will train it up to try the Noctis, which looks pretty good. The prices for these are stupidly crazy now though and it’s not like I desperately need it, so I’ll just wait for the market to return to sanity. I like the fact that faction ships are on the market now, hopefully that will push the price down a bit with the better availability of information on historical prices so we won’t see crazy swings with limited volume.
Unfortunately, now that I feel like playing EVE I can’t seem to login to the EVE servers from this PC. The connection keeps timing out when trying to authenticate. CCP’s tech support is pretty helpful though and per their instructions I’ve just sent them back some DirectX diagnostics and a ping trace sample. Interestingly I’m experiencing 100% packet loss somewhere in Europe along the way to their servers, no idea why. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.
Filed under: EVE
So my skills on Noork and Yannie have been chugging along while they sit at their desks in Venilen studying away like good little bookworms.
Noork’s skills have been all over the place as I managed to round out most of my gunnery skills as well as get T2 small autocannons for my Rifters. Then I finished off Shield Operation V as part of my Tengu plan, leaving only Caldari Cruiser V and the subsystem skills (and T2 heavy missiles, musn’t forget that…). Now I’m training Heavy Drone Operation V so that my Rattlesnake can fly proudly knowing she’s not carrying a bunch of noobie Ogre I’s in her drone bay.
Yannie on the other hand, as befitting her simple ambition in life to be the bestiest missile lobbing mission runner in the universe, has been concentrating furiously on anything shield and missile related. Her capacitor and shield skills are now comparable to Noork’s, and she has all missile skills up to at least 4 and most impressive of all, has finished Cruise Missiles V to get T2 cruise launchers.
However, the other night I mentioned to my wife that I sort of felt like playing EVE again and she blithely asked “so can I fly a new ship now?”. To which I could only go “er… no?” She didn’t seem all that excited to simply fly her Raven a bit better, so I went to look into what else there was available. Seems like the only upgrades are either a CNR or the T2 Marauder version of the Raven, the Golem.
Most information I’ve read seem to consider the CNR and the Golem a wash in terms of mission running, in fact the majority seem to prefer the CNR. But anyway I went ahead and put together a couple of fits in EFT to compare what they would look like with full skills.
Caldari Navy Raven
Golem
Going with cruise CNR and torpedo Golem because torpedo CNR and cruise Golem are just stupid. They both have similar drone bays and bandwidth so we can safely ignore those.
Looking at simple T2 fits, it’s clear that the Golem has quite a large advantage in terms of DPS and volley damage. Not sure if the double target painters plus ship bonus to target painters are enough to be able to effectively hit cruisers with torpedoes though. Defense-wise the Golem has the advantage again due to the ship bonus to shield boost amount, so it can mount 1 less resistance module and still out-tank the CNR. The Golem also seems to have slightly better shield thermal resists, as well as better armor thermal and kinetic resists (whoopdeedoo). It can lock on to 10 targets compared to the CNR’s 7. And the cargohold is huge, almost double the CNRs.
On the other hand, the CNR can hit much much further than the Golem with ridiculous cruise missile ranges boosted by the useless ship bonus. Kind of ironic that the CNR can hit further but has a lower targeting range than the Golem, which can only hit to 60 km but can target out to 112.5 km. The CNR has a much bigger EHP buffer and slightly more capacitor. And it’s very very slightly faster and has faster lock times.
Price wise the hulls themselves go for similar amounts (around 600 million ISK). However, if you intend to splurge on faction modules the Golem may turn out to be cheaper due to only having 4 launchers compared to having to buy 7 for the CNR.
So on paper at least it looks to me like the Golem has a clear advantage. I’m not sure if the 60 km range on the torpedoes is really going to be an issue though. Of course the trade-off is that the Golem requires A LOT of skill training, 151 days more to be precise. Weapon Upgrades V, Caldari Battleship V, Advanced Weapon Upgrades V, Torpedoes V…. ouch. And it would mean that training for T2 cruise launchers was a bit of a mistake. But the CNR fit is really really tight though, I can’t even fit a T2 shield boost amplifier due to the CPU being overloaded from the 7 T2 cruise launchers. Again it seems like the CNR doesn’t really reach its prime until you go all-out pimping it with faction gear, which I’m not really a fan of. Even with all faction modules the CNR doesn’t break 800 dps either.
Oh well. She’s not in a rush to train anything else, so I guess she’s going on the Golem plan for now…
Filed under: WoW
So I haven’t really been keeping track of WoW for a long while, short of casually reading a couple of blogs here and there.
Today I browsed over to Blessing of Kings which I kind of use as a link hub to a bunch of other blogs, and a glance at the plethora of new posts from other bloggers made me realise that today was the launch date of Cataclysm, the next WoW expansion.
It was kind of a bolt from the blue since I really wasn’t expecting it, aside from a vague impression that yes there was an expansion coming sometime soon. I hadn’t played WoW for over a year (not counting that time I got hacked and logged in to restore my items) but still I immediately felt a wave of nostalgia and a tiny voice inside my head went “hey remember all that fun you had… why don’t you check it out”.
The good old days
WoW still stands out as probably the game I played exclusively for the longest time (about 3 years?). During that time I hardly played anything else, so I was really monogamous (hur hur hur OK OK I promise I’ll stop). It was also my first MMO, scratch that my first online game of any sort other than MUDs. Even now my wife and I sometimes get reminded of something and we would go “remember when that happened haha”. It was really a great ride and I have no doubts that WoW itself remains a great game.
The reality
Unfortunately the human brain always looks at the past through rose-tinted glasses and after some deliberation I would probably get annoyed and quit WoW again after a few months if I resubscribed. The fundamental reasons why we quit are still there; namely, it’s a multiplayer game and most people are idiots.
You need a guild
I think one of the reasons why Wrath was a bit of a letdown for us was that we didn’t find a guild that was a good fit for us, and in WoW you really really need a guild. There are people who play solo but frankly there’s only so much you can do. Wrath made pugging a lot of things possible, but “possible” and “enjoyable” are two really different animals. If you only solo the only left to do at level cap is running 5-mans over and over again and signing up for nightmare trade pugs.
We left our old guild at the start of Wrath because of the guild drama at the end of TBC that made us quit in the first place, and tried to join a more casual Singaporean guild. However, it really wasn’t the right fit for us either because while my wife and I were trying to be casual in our playtime, we weren’t casual in our performance. The rest of the guild however…. I mean there was a pally rolling on a spirit trinket “for mana regen” and one of the warrior tanks took DPS talents over 5% dodge and other survival talents because he “needed threat”. I really wanted to be more laid back after the stress of being the warlock officer in TBC and dealing with all sorts of guild crap, but seeing stuff like that just makes me facepalm and get annoyed.
What made it worse in a sense is that Wrath was so easy. And when the game is ridiculously easy, you can succeed even while playing like utter morons. So poor players never learn and never improve, because they are never slapped in the face with the consequences of their afk-tv-raiding behaviour. Plus in a casual(social) guild everyone goes out of their way to be nice and friendly instead of actually addressing issues like… you know… don’t be an idiot and actually put in some effort.
So it would be difficult to find a guild that suits me, leaving 5-mans and PVP as the main end-game activity. This might not be so bad for me, since I’m a grade AAA altoholic and love leveling and gearing up new characters. As an aside, no you don’t “roll” characters or even worse “role” them. Sheesh. Although most people do seem to play by rolling their face on the keyboard so maybe it’s appropriate for them. I’ve never experienced the new dungeon-finder system so getting groups for 5-mans may not be the unholy time-waster it used to be… but then I also haven’t experienced the GearScore era and the legions of “gogogo” retards either. I don’t think joining group after group of incompetents is an ideal way to relax at night. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad but I really don’t know.
Cataclysm is harder, we promise!
Ghostcrawler, one of the better Community Managers that Blizzard has, put up a devblog on why they are making things harder for healers. The game being too easy was the reason I gave when I quit, and I guess I was not alone since one of the major points made about Cataclysm was that it’s not that easy anymore.
Tanks no longer have crazy AOE generating moves like bears being able to just spam swipe all day long. Pulls are supposed to require some form of crowd-control. Healers can’t just spam AOE heals while running along after the tank pulling the whole room.
Except I don’t think you can really put the elephant back in the cage once it has been out and rampaging around for the past year or so. I’m highly doubtful that the average Joe will be able to accept being shown that he is a sub-par player after being able to chain-run 15 minute heroics with his welfare badge epics for the entire previous expansion. Instead of one-shotting new bosses, will casual groups be able to take wiping on a single boss for more than a night (or even weeks like our Vashj + Kael’Thas kills)? I really don’t know how long it will be before there is a backlash from the average and sub-par player population, who after all pay the exact same $15 a month.
The price is not right
At the end of the day though, I would probably have no issues giving Cataclysm a spin with or without my wife if it did not require a subscription or a box price. With my current playtime of 1.5-2 hours a night, raiding would be a very difficult proposition and it just doesn’t make sense to pay a monthly subscription for a game where the best parts are not accessible to me. It’s not that the savings of $15 every month is keeping me above the poverty line, but I’m not getting equal value for my money with a fixed subscription. I might even be tempted to resubscribe for a couple of months, like I’m sure a lot of people do with each expansion, except that I have to pay the box price just for those few months which again doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Be strong
So I have to silence that little voice in my head. Maybe it would be fun. Probably it wouldn’t. But I will try to remind myself that fond memories of the good old days may be best if they are just left where they are. Great to visit once in a while, but maybe not something I want to go back to.
