This isn't about casuals versus hardcore players. Understand that before you read further.

[RANT]

Look blizzard, you don't spend enough time and money on development time as it is (this is half sarcastic and I'll get back to this claim); why don't you take a step back and take a look at what you're doing to your polished, high-end, world-class game, and instead of making it more accessible to retards and mouth-breathers, you get back to your roots and make a game focused on what hooked people in the first place: status and raiding.

Giving retards their version of a dungeon is not the way to keep people playing. if anything, that will increase turnover through boredom and disgust. Purples have been the new blue for quite a while. However, tier gear should not be a fucking cake walk to collect in a matter of days. Vault? Fuck off, dumb concept.

Seriously. Stop it.

Ghostcrawler: Give the game back over to Tigole and stop trying to be some sort of revolutionary. It's not working and you suck at your current job. You give us vague answers that no one gives a shit bout (Warrior QnA) and really convey no long-term plan as to where this game is headed. Most class buffs and PVE nerfs are knee-jerk reactions that have a dramatic effect on progression and arena rating throughout the season.

WoWs new slogan should be "The World of Wacraft: Now 100% Retard Accessible." It wouldn't be far from the truth.

DISCLAIMER: If you're offended by the word retard, then you take your politically correct ass and go stand in a fire, like you probably do in game.

[/RANT]

Elaborations:

• Higher status gives something for the average player to shoot for.


• Raiding used to give access to said status. PVP used to give access to it's own type of status, separate but not always equal, which is fine.

* * *

This is what pissed me off enough to make a post about it:

As a means to provide more flexibility to play with your friends, or move to a realm that may better serve your needs, we are reducing the cooldown of the Paid Character Transfer service from 30 days to 3 days. This should prove particularly beneficial to players who move to a realm they don't enjoy and wish to quickly move to a brand-new realm. For more information, please see the Paid Character Transfer FAQ -

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=20558

FUCK. YOU.

Put down the drool-cup; you're fucking up everything.

Do you think this is a good idea? Really? I'm willing to bet the three major groups of people who use this service are:

1. Friends who transfer to play with friends (regardless of being casual or hardcore status).
2. Loot Ninjas and Drama Whores. Self-explanatory. Use the money you were going to use to transfer, buy some rat poison and ingest a whole fucking truck load.
3. People who have bad luck on their new server and transfer back after the cooldown is up.

Hey Emptronic, I don't see casuals on that list! Why is that?

Holy shit, glad you asked. Most casuals won't bother spending another 50$ on a game they hardly play (hence the term casual).

Well look, do you really think casuals would pay 50$ to transfer twice, let alone 25$ to transfer once? Why pay the extra money if you're only raiding for 2 hours a week anyway. Join a shitty Naxx guild on your current server and live with it.

Also, raid IDs reset upon transfer. Hypothetically, someone could run Ulduar twice in one week for double the gear if this system stays in place. World class guilds with sponsors will utilize this just to get ahead (hey Ensidia!).

* * *

Back to: "Look blizzard, you don't spend enough time and money on development time as it is."

[RANT]

Time, sure they spend a fuck ton. Money, obviously not (check out the tier 9 designs and prove me wrong). Increase your development budget and stop wasting money on fucking fur people for the next expansion. For fucks sake now we're gonna have Furries in WoW? Fuck off with these major game-breaking and/or poorly thought-out changes.

AND STOP NERFING PVE CONTENT. PEOPLE WHO CARE ENOUGH WILL PUSH THEMSELVES TO SEE IT.

Holy fuck why do I still pay you people?

[/RANT]

Gonna add to this or make another post that further displays my frustration with this game and the direction Blizzard is choosing to take it.

Since I started playing WoW it's had me hooked. From waking up early before school to play some AB when I was level 37 to the vast and full of activities-to-do zones. Everyone always told me that the real game started when you were max level (60, 70, and now 80, the latter two that Ive been able to experience). Instances opened up, then heroics, then raids, max level BGs, arena, world pvp, profession stuff, rep grinds, epic gear, everything. There was so much to do, I didnt know what to start with, or where to go after I finished something (at least in my case since I was a fresh noob), but I knew I had to finish it all, be a perfectionist.

Yet you can never actually complete everything, the obvious purpose of an MMO, to never end. You finish one raid tier, then on to the next. You finish all of your main Outland rep (Honor hold, CE, etc), but then you have Ogrila and Shattered Sun. It's a never ending cycle that keeps you hooked, for awhile at least.

Finally, you start to realize professions aren't much once you get the majority of things that everyone needs and everyone else has them. Rep is useless to you if you are a hard core raider besides the helm enchants and various profession recipes. Sure you may get a discount repairing, but how often are you going to repair there, and are you really that poor? You can make thousands of gold every week if you put a few hours into it, no challenge there. BGs and Arena? Yeah ok maybe if you are 2k +, but PvP in WoW is such a huge flaw. World PvP is fun, too bad it never happens besides the random city raids that no one cares about. Everyone has epics now too, step in line for your free gear. I dont even know why blues and greens still exist beside enchanting mats.

With everything mostly complete, and with those realizations, you are left with nothing except for two things: raids and friends.

Raids keep you hooked, I mean whats better than killing bosses with 24 other friends or those you dislike in a video game? You get the challenge of learning a new boss (nothing in WoW is hard except for a few choice bosses), good gear, fun times on vent, head bashing on things that you think will never die because of screw-ups, and then finally after its all done, you get the reward of beating your goal. Throw in top 300 worldwide kills and server firsts and its even better because YOU did it before any other around you could. So make that 3 things: Raids, friends, and competition.

But, raids are only 16 hours in a 168 hour week. Giving you a ton of idle time (excluding any real life activities, only talking about WoW time) to do nothing. Sure Blizzard gives us stupid things to keep us playing like the Tournament, but repetitive dailies are something many gave up on during the Isle of Quel'Danas. Achievements are fun for awhile with mount rewards and various titles, but some are so damn boring it doesnt really make WoW fun.



Those two places are probably about 50% of my 137 days /played on my priest, and probably about the same for the 100ish hours on my warrior. Such a great way to spend time!

Hopefully Blizzard can make something that actually holds hardcore players interest, while still being a challenge. Catering to the casuals makes money, but they should be able to come up with something to keep us occupied for more than 2 weeks.

I started playing WoW in November 06 and havent looked back. I was 13 at the time and was still a part of the xbox live craze, which basically introduced me to online gaming. WoW was that one game everyone seemed to play or talked about, and i remember hating and thinking it seemed like a stupid game. Then some friends who i had known through xbox live got the 10 day trial and loved it and told me to try it out, so I did. One of my friends made a horde character which i though were pretty ugly, so me and my other friend rolled alliance on the server Cenarius, thus starting my road down the wow addiction!

Leveling up through WoW was an addicting process since there was never another game like it that i had played, the "first mmo" experience which kept me playing. Me and my friend started out as an arms warrior and shadow priest respectively. I leveled my warrior Zinge to level 40 and then BC came out, so i missed out on all the classic WoW experiences, but at that time there was no way i could convince my parents to let me dedicate that much time to a computer game.

So i keep leveling and eventually my friend starts to quit periodically, leaving me 10 levels ahead of him and deciding to say screw him to keep going. When I hit 70 i had made a good deal of friends (and enemies) through trolling the global LFG chat, then later the unoffical one. I asked them what do I do now since im max level? Their response was BG/Arena(Season 1 just started)/PvP or I could raid. Around this time i made the decision to go prot and gear up through heroics (LFG HEROIC SL FOR MY BOLD SHOULDERS). In one of these heroics i meet my first good friend Leilas who played a lock. Because of him i joined a raiding guild and began my trolling of trade and forums. The guild Indignation was the name and Leilas was the ex-co leader. They had Attumen and Maiden down when i joined in Apirl 2007, and naturally i thought this was good because i was a terribad noob to raiding, but learned quickly and led them to Shade of Aran before leaving.

The next guild was Sodality. Sodality could be described as the 'rising action' in my raiding career because i made many great friends, became MT, and we progressed decently (Vashj down before BT/Hyjal attunements were removed). But after 9 months of raiding with 13 bads (hunters who sucked utter dick etc.) I quit.. By this time i had leveled up a shadow priest named Menohealyou. I thought this name would prevent idiots asking me to heal but no dice. The last 3 weeks of my experience in Sodality was spent gearing up my priest in kara/gruul/tk/ssc, but the /gquit was a heat of the moment type thing after discussing raiding with a friend in a more progresssed guild. When i left many of them whispered me saying ''Why did you leave? we need good players in this guild", to which i simply responded "tell the bads to not suck then". They eventually went through like 4 failed mergers before all the baddies quit.

Driven was the apex of my entire WoW experience. It was with them that i cleared BT/Hyjal with and got Kalecgos down before the 3.0 nerf, all on my shadow priest. The progression was acceptable, all the people we're great and there were constant jokes, shitting on people, and general bullshiterry. They quickly accepted me because of my dedication (4 missed raids in 9 months), common sense (BLUE FIRE WTF), humor in guild and my trolling antics, and just having fun. By this time i had become the biggest troll on cenarius and found the greatest person to get trolled.

Rabidelf was a hunter that had tailoring, used a shitty MM spec that made no sense, had no guild, and the best part was a daughter who was 15 ( i was too at the time) who easily got offended over anything about her father or herself. Eventually all the trolls turned him and his daughter into a server wide flame fest. He got me banned for 3 hours and 24 hours because he flamed me on alt accounts but i was dumb to bypass the ignore on my own alt =/. Some classic lines from random trolls were "id like to pound into your daughters baby maker and roll her across the motel sidewalk any day" and anything regarding his daughters sexuality. Which all led the paranoid 50 year old to rage and say he called the cops over and over about us (who never did anything haha) and stuff. This probably sounds really dumb but i dont remember much of it and all the threads expired =/


So anyway about a month after WotLK comes out, I quickly realized Driven was going nowhere and decided to join a spin off of a 5/6 pre nerf muru guild with a bunch of old friends called Epitaph. It was a great time but the leadership was really lackluster as a guild council that centered around one person. After about 4 months, my clique decides to leave the guild after 2 of them announce they are transferring off to Explicit on Arthas (familiar name to some of you =p). 2 more of us go with them, but they need neither a disc priest (which is what i had been for the previous 4 months) or a shadow priest so i look elsewhere.

On my 16th birthday (March 10th!) i found this guild called Tribute saying they had immortal down and most of the heroic achievements which is what i really was looking to find. To make it even better they needed a shadow priest and a disc priest so i would be able to play either which i didnt mind (though im glad im shadow). So I send in an app as either the next day, praying i get in. The next day i get a mail from vlad's level one saying he wanted to talk with me and i was so excited i kept the mail and stored it in my bank. My first raid with you guys was my most nervous ever because i needed to live up to the immortal hype, figure out how to play shadow again after 4 months, and be at the top of my game. After i told Vlad i thought it would take me a few days to get good at shadow again, i was sure that he would doubt me and would be hesitant to keep me around. Thankfully after doing like 2 hours of dummy dps i was ready to go 6 minute maly that night, my first raid. I ended up doing like 6.4k dps after realizing the pots vlad was talking about were free which was like 3rd or something overall. I felt pretty good and was much more relaxed when Sunchips and Hyp complimented me! And after one raid with Plato and Emp i knew i would love being here, and i do so it was a great fit for me. Not such a great fit for my friends because Explicit disbanded a week after Ulduar came out and never got Immortal =p

B lizzard has attempted to cater to both the casual and the hardcore with the introduction of hard modes in their newest raid dungeon, Ulduar. I shouldn't say introduce, because the idea has been around since Ahn'Qiraj, and more recently in the form of Sartharion. I'm referring to the Bug Trio encounter of Lord Kri, Princess Yauj, and Vem in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, Blizzard's 3rd 40-player level 60 raid dungeon. The concept was simple: the loot you received depended on the order in which you killed the three mobs; more specifically, the last mob to die determined the drops your raid would receive. I would also like to note, the encounter was optional. This is important to know for later.

This was the first encounter in WoW where the raid had a direct influence on the loot it received. It's arguable whether this was the *first* hard mode; Blackwing Lair's Nefarian could grief a guild with his Red/Blue combination multiple weeks in a row. However painstaking, Nefarian is not the focus of this week's entry.

The AQ Bug Trio gave raid-leaders a choice: do you waste time on a harder mode of an early encounter? Do you skip this encounter altogether, being that it's optional? Or do you do the easy mode week after week, in favor of progression and faster clears? Many guilds simply did not attempt the Hard Mode for the Bug Trio. It was a major gear check for your raid as a whole, and pushed healing to higher levels then what had been previously seen.


If you know the mechanics of the Bug Trio encounter, you can skip this next wall of text. Basically, when you killed one of the three mobs the other two would eat the dead mob's corpse, and gain an additional effect depending on the mob you killed.

• If you killed Vem, the son, Kri and Yauj would gain Vengeance ( Attack speed increased by 150% - Physical damage increased by 100% ).


• If you killed Yauj, a small army of smaller bugs would spawn and your raid would have to cc and aoe of them down as fast as possible.


• If you killed Kri, he would drop a large cloud of poison under himself that ticked for 2000 nature damage every second.*

* This is important to note, because 2000 damage a second was well over 50% of any average raider's hp at the time. This means, if you were caught in the cloud, you were almost guaranteed to be dead within 2 or 3 seconds. This was especially deadly with a bad fear from Yauj.

Normal Abilities were:

• Kri: Frontal Cleave, Posion bolt volley (frontal damage, leaves a dot, cleanable).


• Yauj: AoE threat-dropping fear, heal (usable on the other two as well)


• Vem: Charge that knocked back the target back 40+ yards.

Even if you aren't familiar with the encounter, you can see what potential problems arise when dealing with all three bugs at once. If you didn't want to do the hardest mode, you would always kill Kri first. The enrage he and Yauj would enter upon Vem's death would wipe your raid very quickly if both Kri and Yauj received it. Not to mention the poison-bolt volley was a cleansing nightmare, even more so the longer he was left alive (we didn't have poison-cleansing totems). Yauj herself was quite the pain, with a fear that dropped all threat, and a heal that needed to be interrupted at all costs or it was surely a wipe.

The hard mode kill order would logically be Yauj -> Vem -> Kri (Kri dropped the best loot).
The "medium" mode was Kri -> Vem -> Yauj (not easy by any means).
The easy mode kill order was Kri -> Yauj -> Vem

Vem, being the weakest of the three, was a sort of tank and spank after his parents had been killed, putting the hardest part of the encounter towards the beginning and middle. With Kri and Yauj, the difficulty ramped up exponentially as the fight progressed making it so everyone needs to be on the ball for the entire duration of the encounter.

You might ask why I'm elaborating on this encounter in great detail. My motive is to enlighten the reader concerning hard modes and their effect on this game as a whole. The Bug Trio Hard Mode was a meticulously hard encounter to learn and succeed at. It was unforgiving and played heavily into RNG with fears, resists, and charges. Did the fact that this encounter had a hard mode ruin the instance for most people? No, I would say I'm 99.9% certain that no one was upset that this optional encounter had an optional hard mode.

The same can be said about Sartharion and his three drake brothers. This encounter ramped up in difficulty quite noticeably with each additional drake. Sarth-3D was a decent introductory encounter for what to expect from hard mode raids in Wrath of the Lich King.



I strongly believe that because Sartharion has his own instance, Blizzard had a far more successful implementation of a hard mode encounter then that of the bug trio. Sartharion is completely optional, and quite accessible given his various levels of difficulty. The raid does not have to progress through other, non-related bosses to get to Sartharion, which is great when you think about it.

For example, if your guild wanted to do XT-002 Deconstructor on Hard Mode, the raid-leader needs to decide whether or not to attempt him now, or later, because to progress through the rest of the instance, he needs to die, regardless of what mode the raid chooses to attempt. This means, if you do not have the raid composition for hard mode, but you do for bosses that follow him, the raid is stuck between a rock and a hard place whether or not to attempt his hard mode, or kill him normally, and continue progression. Needless to say, if he dies on normal, he is unable to be attempted on hard mode until the reset.

Hard Modes being optional on non-optional bosses, posses a unique predicament for progression guilds. At that point, you have to consider the options, and prioritize certain hard modes over others, not based solely on difficulty, but also on accessibility. Killing XT gives you access to an additional hard mode council (the Iron Council) and two relatively easy encounters (Kologarn and Auriaya), which give way to four more hard mode encounters, etc. Do you choose to attempt XT's hard mode, with a suboptimal group? Or do you kill him and clean up some easier bosses, and attempt other such hard modes?

We've chosen the later thus far, but that does not mean I don't want to try XT-002's Hard Mode. As a guild, we've prioritized progression in a way that gives us practice on a myriad of different archetype checks. To me, most of these hard modes are a healing check in the sense that, if you need more DPS, you bring less healers. A good example is Hodir ( four healers ), versus Freya ( eight healers ). If your healers can't keep as individual healing requirements increase, then you will lose to the hard enrage timers or wipes from attrition. We are trying not to limit ourselves to *just* DPS races or *just* healing checks; we want to be able to excel at both.

Tribute is currently attempting the Iron Council Hard Mode in Ulduar 25. We had some really good attempts the other day. At this point, healing is a bit more comfortable, although no where near perfect. The amount of increasing raid damage coupled with the amount of direct spike-damage on the tanks is unforgiving, and chain casting is a near necessity. This encounter is reminiscent of Brutallus in terms of healing spike, and maddeningly hectic in phase 3, similar to the Essence of Anger from the Reliquary of Souls encounter in the Black Temple. The entire raid taking 5000 damage a second towards the end is quite hard to heal through effectively on top of the static shocks Steelbreaker throws at our three ranged soakers. This and our tanks taking some 40,000 damage swings from the big guy himself.


Overall the encounter is well tuned from a healing perspective, although I'm never the biggest fan of multi-mob fights. Sometimes they are implemented in a fantastic way ( The Bug Trio, The Twin Emperors, The Four Horsemen, High King Maulgar ), yet other times less then stellar ( The Illidari Council, Fathom-Lord Karathress, The Eredar Twins ). Either way, I'm satisfied with our progress so far in Ulduar. We won't be attempting Heroic: Firefighter anytime soon, but I'm content with that. I'd rather not be done with content so soon ( after having to run that miserable redesign of the amazing Naxxramas for so many months ). That would just lead to boredom and burnout. Opposite of what you're thinking, I won't jump into a discussion about burnout, but that's a possible topic for next week.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading; I'll try to ramble a bit less next time. I'm probably expected to rant and rave though, if you've ever had the pleasure? of playing with me it shouldn't be much a surprise.