Horridon the horrible

In MoP, each raid has had its “roadblock” boss.  Mogu’shan Vaults had Elegon.  Heart of Fear had Garalon.  Terrace… well that didn’t have anything (on normal mode, at least).

Now in Throne of Thunder we are at a dead stop on Horridon.  I feel like this isn’t even the roadblock boss for most people, but it is for us.

I have issues with this fight, and not just because its a rotten fight for rogues.  Its also an annoying fight for just general playing.

(1) Horridon has a big ass.  Seriously.  I can’t tell you how many times my view has been blocked because this huge dinosaur has charged into my screen.  I have to keep adjusting my camera view during the fight to see around it.  Very frustrating.  I ended up playing with my camera zoomed out into the sky, but I really don’t like that perspective.

(2) Targeting is awful when adds are all grouped together.  In many add-based fights, you can simply AoE down a group of adds.  In this fight, that big group of adds has one tougher one in the group that you are trying to focus.  Finding him in that pile is a terrible chore.  Yes, you can write a targeting macro, but I consider that to be an inelegant kludge solution to an encounter design problem.

(3) Frozen Orbs.  Oh, to be a ranged class that can spread out and plink away at the Frozen Warlords without standing in the midst of Frozen Orbs.  Either I’m in the melee zone, dying to Orbs or I’m out of range doing essentially nothing.  This phase stinks for rogues.

I have yet to see past the third door, so I can’t even comment on the rest of the fight.

Maybe something will suddenly click and I’ll find a secret that I’ve been missing.  Until that happens, this fight annoys me more than any other in MoP raiding so far.

 

Rogue-only Easter Egg

I originally saw this on Reddit, then it was posted on WoW Insider.  There is a hidden bit of content in WoW that is a nod to the Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson.  Only rogues can access it.

For the full discussion including background and a thorough walkthrough, go to Chase Christian’s writeup at WoW Insider.  For the quick version, here are the steps:

• Go to Ravenholdt Manor
• Outside the Manor, find Reislek’s Ghost
• With the Glyph of Disguise equipped, pickpocket Reislek’s Ghost and take his appearance
• Go into the Manor and go to the basement
• With the Glyph of Detection equipped, look for a sparkle near the floor in a corner of the room
• Use Detection to reveal the ghost of Orsur
• Talk to him.  He’ll think that you are Reislek.
• You’ll get the Survivor’s Bag of Coins, which is a fun item to play with
• Pickpocket humanoids to get coins to fill the bag (they fade whenever you change zones)

See the WoW Insider article for more discussion on how you can play with the coins.

 

 

My Opinion: LFR is ruining the game

What does that title mean?  Let me explain.  I’ve said this all before, but seeing GuildOx rankings really slammed the point home for me.

First – understand that I don’t consider LFR to be actual raiding.  Its more like sightseeing.  Yes, I know that LFR is tougher now than it was back in Cata.  However, the increasing Determination buff means that you can continue to screw up and you’ll eventually succeed despite yourself.  Its a nice way for everyone to see the raid encounters without being accountable for their performance.  Its a good thing.  I am not anti-LFR.  I don’t run it myself, but I don’t hate it.  Its an aspect of the game that is available if you want it.

However…

I recently went on GuildOx to see how my guild stacked up against other guilds on my realm.  I was surprised to see that, on Sen’jin which is by no means a dead realm, only 20 or so guilds have completed Tier 14 raids on normal mode.  In fact, my guild *just* killed Amber-Shaper Unsok this week on 10 normal, and we are only the 25th guild on the server to do so.

I’m not even looking at heroic modes.  Just normal.  If you have cleared T14 on normal and done the first boss in T15, then you’re a top twenty guild on my server.

WTF?

What does this tell me?  It tells me that guilds (at least on my realm) aren’t really doing progression raids anymore.  Since raiding is such a large part of the game, I can’t imagine that people aren’t raiding.  The obvious conclusion is that people are getting their raiding fix through LFR, and not so much in guild raids.

I have a problem with this.

In my personal vision of WoW, guilds and interpersonal interaction are the heart and soul of the game.  The need for cooperation to overcome obstacles is what the original raid encounters were built on.  Communication, people doing their job, everyone having a role… these were the skills that set the foundation for the more fun and challenging raid bosses.  LFR doesn’t have much or any of that.

I really, really don’t like this model.  Yes, LFR gets people into raiding, and that is a good thing.  But its being used as an expected part of the gearing path.  People run Thone of Thunder (LFR) in order to gear up for Throne of Thunder (normal).  What is this nonsense?  Run a raid to gear for the same raid?  How is this different than the ToC days in Wrath, when you ran 10 man to gear up for 25 man?

There isn’t even any sense of anticipation or buildup.  A new patch comes out with a new raid.  A week later it opens up on LFR.  Then… Boom!  In a couple of hours of pugging you have cleared the newly available raid content.  It trivializes the time and effort of raid design.

For me (and this is just my approach) I am looking forward to seeing Throne of Thunder.  I’m looking forward to figuring out the encounters one by one and progressing through it.  I’m looking forward to hearing the vocalizations of the bosses and getting to know their story and their personality.  I’ll see it when I get to it, after my guild clears tier 14.  All of that anticipation is lost in LFR raiding.

WoW is a great MMO.  WoW is a mediocre single-player game, and LFR has allowed it to drift into that mode.  LFR as a way into raiding is fine.  LFR as a true alternative to guild raiding is not in the best interests of the game, in my opinion.

(What?  You don’t care about the story and anticipation of raids?  You only care about gear?  This isn’t the blog post you’re looking for.  Move along.  Move along.)

Are you Entertained?

I still like WoW.  Love to raid.  Like to quest.  Like to battle pets.  Like to tend my farm.  Love to get achievements.

However, the game is not sucking me in these days.  On any given afternoon, if I have a few hours to spare I find myself being able to pass on WoW playing.  For the past seven years that was not the case.  I used to be online every spare moment.

Right now, I have very few goals that realy turn me on.  Everything is too grindy.

“But WoW has always been a grindy game” you will all say.  You’re right.  However, for a grind to be playable there has to be a goal – a carrot on a stick to make you log in and try to get a little closer each day.

WoW has become almost entirely a gear grind.  Why do dailies? To unlock gear vendors.  Why run LFR?  To get gear upgrades.  Why grind heroics?  To get VP for gear.

This is good for the majority of WoW players, it would seem.  It misses me entirely.  You see, I don’t care about gear at all.  That puts me in the minority, I know, but it is nonetheless true.  Gear is not, nor has it ever been, a draw for me.  I’ll get it when I get it.  That’s why I don’t run LFR.

And since that is the case, I have no carrot to make me want to log in each day.

I was all about Operation:Shieldwall while that was going on.  Grind or not, the story progression kept me coming back day after day.

I never missed a day on my farm.  Te rewards for Exalted reputation had me hooked.  Now I’m exalted.

While I was striving for a million gold, that kept me logging in every day.  Now that I’ve reached that goal… the AH is not so appealing.

The Isle of Thunder dailies have not captured me.  I don’t feel any inclination to go there and do dailies, other than the distant idea of getting to Exalted as a step toward the 60 Exalted reputations achievement.  I think I’ve only done the dailies on that island four or five times – enough to get to Honored.

Even pet battles have lost their luster.  I was all into that for about two weeks – trying to get a good assortment of pets to max level.  Now that this is done, the idea of flying around two worlds to do repeatable pet dailies is not very appetizing.

I always log in for raid nights.  Other than that, its hit and miss.  Is it just me?  Are you all locked in on the gear rewards?

Are PvE rogues all the same spec now?

Look up and down the top dps parses for rogues.  Lots of assassination rogues tearing it up.  Nary a combat rogue to be found (no subtlety either, but that’s old news).

Recently my guild has been working on Garalon.  This is the quintessential cleave fight.  You target a leg and get a crit buff for doing so, and your cleave hits the boss.  When the leg dies, its damage is transferred to the boss, so all cleave damage is pure bonus.

At the start of MoP, combat rogues were putting up obscene numbers on this fight.  Patch 5.2 brought the big change – making the cleave do only 40% weapon damage (down from 100%) but affecting more targets.  Sure, it was a needed fix to a balance problem.  However, it has perhaps gone too far.

All the theorycrafters have emphasized that Blade Flurry is still a plus whenever you have two or more targets in proximity (and its effect increases for three or four targets).  Since Garalon has been the Combat Spec Fight in this tier, I completely regemmed and reforged for combat when we got to this boss.

After a number of tries and lots of practice, I was frustrated with my sub-par dps numbers.  So, this week I switched back to assassination.  Immediately, I gained nearly 20k dps without using any cleave.

Currently, I don’t see any reason to spec combat in raids.  Assassination is so far superior its not really even a discussion.  Since subtlety has again fallen out of use in PvE, I guess that means that all raiding rogues are or will be assassination spec.  World of Logs reports bear this out.  While there are still combat rogues out there, it looks like that spec is around 40k dps behind assassination in ToT raids.

Having specs a little unbalanced is routine and almost expected.  If two specs are producing numbers that are 5% apart, then you can justify using either one based on familiarity or gear or just preference.  However, if one spec is 20% ahead, as it is now, then its almost impossible to justify not using the top spec.

Until this is addressed (and it will be), I expect to see just about all raiding rogues in assassination spec.  That’s a shame – especially in a pure dps class.  I look forward to seeing how Blizzard balances things.

Rogues in patch 5.2

How patch 5.2 going for everyone?

This is my busiest time of year in my life outside the game.  My son’s baseball season is in full swing.  My work responsibilities are more significant in this part of the year than during other seasons.  I can barely find time to sit at my desk at home.

I’ve logged on enough to do the Isle of Thunder dailies once and have two nights of raiding in MSV and HoF.  That’s all the time I’ve spent in WoW so far since the patch.  I had to figure out a lot of changes by trial and error since I have not had time to keep up with them.

Right away in MSV, I noticed that my Combat spec did less damage than normal on Stone Guard.  That’s because of the change to Blade Flurry in the patch.  It now hits for less damage, but affects more targets.  On Stone Guard, when you’re hitting two or three dogs, you’re not getting the most out of Blade Flurry.  Damage is good, but not as spectacular as it once was.

I also noticed that my single target damage in Assassination spec was a little higher, but not much.  Assassination got buffed a bit in the patch.  I hear that Subtlety got a small buff as well.  I expect Blizzard to keep giving us small buffs until more people play rogues.  For those of us who still play our rogue mains, it just makes us that much more awesome.  However, I will also note that I wasn’t as far ahead on the damage meters as I usually am on some MSV fights, like Elegon.  I suspect that other classes got buffed as well, and maybe more than we did.

I was really surprised when I went to use Ambush as an opener and I teleported to directly behind the target without using Shadowstep.  That’s when I remembered that there were talent changes in the patch.  Preparation was removed as a talent, and now all rogues have it as a baseline ability at level 68.  Instead they added Cloak and Dagger in Prep’s old spot on the talent tree.  It works like Shadowstep built into your stealthed openers.  It essentially gives your openers a 30 yard range.

A change that I noticed while I was fighting Elegon was for Cloak of Shadows.  It now has a shorter cooldown (1 minute), but its no longer reset by Preparation.  That surprised me.  I usually use Cloak-Prep-Cloak to mitigate damage at the end of the fight when we’re burning Elegon down.  Didn’t work this time.

I was, as usual, dismayed when our raid got to Will of the Emperor.  I don’t like that fight.  At some point in that fight, I always end up far from my target with Vanish and Sprint on cooldown.  This time I specced into Shuriken Toss.  This gave combo points and also made my autoattacks into ranged shuriken throws.  I don’t think it was very effective, but it was fun.

Also on the Will of the Emperor fight, when we all grouped up to AoE heal through the Titan Gas phases, I threw down my Smoke Bomb.  It was just given a new ability – reducing incoming damage by 20% on everyone in its range.  I have a defensive raid cooldown!  That felt good.

There’s another talent change that I tried.  Versatility was removed as a top-tier talent and replaced with Marked for Death.  This gives 5 combo points to start with on the fight, so its much like the Premeditation ability on steroids.  A major difference is that when your target dies, Marked for Death resets.  That makes this good for burst damage in target-switching situations, since you can start with 5 CP on each new target.  Its not useful on most boss fight in PvE, but good in fights with a lot of adds that need to be bursted down.  That said, I tried to use it on Garalon’s legs, and the cooldown never reset when a leg died.  Is it because the legs don’t really “die”?  Is this a bug?  (not Garalon himself, but the lack of cooldown reset).

Most of the changes were not very noteworthy, although a lot of rogues are affected by the alterations to the talent tree.  The Smoke Bomb change is nice – I wonder how long it will take everyone to realize that it is there, so that raid leaders call for it at times of high incoming damage.

And so it begins (the QQ, I mean)

“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time” – John Lydgate

Patch 5.2 has brought with it yet another chapter in the endless “hardcore vs casual” debate.

In MoP, Blizzard has been gating the LFR difficulty differently than the normal and heroic modes, opening up wings gradually.  With this schedule, the final boss of tier 15 won’t be available at LFR difficulty until April.

Yet they are releasing the entire tier today on normal mode, and the entire tier next week on heroic mode.

This is not a new phenomenon.  All of tier 14 had a comparable staggered release.

• Mogu’shan Vaults LFR Wing One opened October 9
• Mogu’shan Vaults LFR Wing Two opened October 16
• Heart of Fear LFR Wing One opened November 6
• Heart of Fear LFR Wing Two opened November 13
• Terrace of Endless Spring LFR opened November 20

Each raid’s first LFR wing was opened a week after normal mode was released, and the second LFR wing was opened a week after that.

So lets be realistic here.  Can we look back on the tier 14 raids and think that so-called casuals got the shaft?  Was that delay such a burden?  Was there not enough to do to keep everyone busy during that waiting period?  Did “casuals” feel somehow insulted that they couldn’t steamroll the entire tier within the first few days?

…

I put “casuals” in quotes because I don’t feel like the big complaints are coming from actual casual raiders.  I could be wrong, but I feel like a lot of the complaints are from people who simply don’t want to play the game that Blizzard is designing.  Raids represent thousands of man-hours of design and development time and resources.  Are we so spoiled that we expect Blizzard to hand us all of that on a no-challenge platter so that we can faceroll through it in a week’s time?  Is it wrong for Blizzard to give people a chance to play the encounters as they were designed before they allow the masses to be farm them on LFR?

And yet nothing is black and white.  There are many shades between lazy, casual, dedicated, hardcore, or whatever other labels you want to throw around.  Its just a shame that online forums are dominated by the loudest whiners, while the vast majority of people who are satisfied – even appreciative – toward all the different in-game options are drowned out.

Personally, I think this is a good model.  The heroic raiders aren’t pressured into running LFR repeatedly for gear.  The normal raiders have a chance to see encounters as they were intended before a predominance of LFR gear dilutes the difficulty.  LFR players get to see the content, albeit a few weeks later.  Everyone gets something.

 

Current raid status and how it is affected by the new tier of raids

With patch 5.2 about to drop and bring a new raid tier, my guild finally completed Mogu’shan Vaults on normal mode this past week.  We’ve definitely been far behind the curve in this expansion.  This is very different than our situation in Cataclysm, when we kept up with the raid content (normal mode) as it was released.

This time around we’ve been hurt by the dps checks.  We spent a long time on Gara’jal before we could beat his enrage, and then another long while on Elegon with the same problem.  Our raid dps isn’t up to par (separate post coming on that) and as a truly casual, friendly guild, we don’t try and pick and choose our raid composition.  We take who wants to come, for better or for worse.

This week we will be setting our first steps into Heat of Fear, and we won’t see Terrace of Endless Spring until some time after that.  The new Tier 15 raids are in the more distant future.

Unfortunately, our experiences in the remaining tier 14 raids will be somewhat disappointing for a couple of reasons – one that is raidwide and one that is personal to me.  Here’s the point of view of a truly casual raid guild on the current situation.

———————————————————————-

For the raid, the challenge of HoF anf ToES will be vastly diminished on two fronts.  First, they are getting nerfed by 10% in the upcoming patch.  While we could disable the nerf, it makes no sense to do so.  Guild morale will be improved by quicker progress through the raids, and it catches us up to current content faster.  Its just a shame that we won’t see the fights as they were designed.

In addition, the new T15 raids will soon be available to us at LFR difficulty.  That will allow our raid members to get higher iLvL gear, further reducing the challenge of the tier 14 content.  It took us three months to get through Mogu’shan Vaults.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we finished the next two T14 raids together in half that time.

On a personal level, I refuse to enter an LFR raid until I have seen it on normal mode first.  I have yet to ever see a single boss from Heart of Fear or Terrace of Endless Spring.  I won’t do the new raids on LFR either.  My raid-mates don’t have the same stance on this, and they will be gearing themselves up in LFR.  As a result, I will personally fall behind them in gear.  (although I still expect to lead the raid in dps, for what its worth).  That’s disappointing in the short run, but it will all work out eventually.

———————————————————————-

I think that our current position is not that uncommon.  We are currently ranked #43 on our server and #11,155 in the USA.  There are still lots of guilds behind us in progression.  Here’s the question: is this situation damaging to casual guilds?  Will we see guild defections to move to more progressed guilds?

Next week, when new gear is dropping and people are getting new items from the new raids, it can certainly generate gear envy.  In a guild that is still working on T14, a jump to a T15 guild might be appealing.

I don’t think this will happen in our guild, since we are a pretty tight knit group.

WoW hasn’t really had the “feeder guild” issue since Burning Crusade.  The difference between then and now is the presence of LFR.  Back in BC, if you were in a Karazhan/Gruul-level guild, your only chance to see SSC and then Black Temple was to guild-hop.  Today, you can see all available content on LFR difficulty.  Will that be enough?  I really think so.  Time will tell.

Auction House – another gearing path

I really hate to buy gear. There’s no real logical reason for this, other than it fits into my own personal version of the way the game should be played.

I know that I’m in the minority – the large majority of players just want their iLvL to get higher, no matter what path they take.  Its like their own personal scoreboard for WoW. For me, though, I play the game in a certain way.  I won’t run raids on LFR until I have first cleared them on normal mode with my guild.  I don’t repetitively grind heroics to cap my valor points every week.  I try to earn the gear I get.

This has put me in a bit of a bind, lately, as far as weapons go.  Specifically, daggers.  We’re four months into the expansion and I am still using two blue level 463 daggers.  Until very recently, I was raiding with a 450 dagger. There are no daggers to be purchased with Valor Points.  The Stone Guard, the first boss of Mogu’shan Vaults, has stubbornly refused to drop a dagger for me.  I had no luck even getting the dagger that dropped from the Greench daily during Winter’s Veil.

I’ve got all the gold I need to buy anything I want, but I have always felt that I shouldn’t resort to buying gear.  This week, I finally gave in to frustration.  I bought myself a Miniature Winter Veil Tree from the auction house. That got me to thinking – how well geared can a rogue get using strictly the auction house to buy items?  That means BoE drops and crafted items which can be sold.

• Head: nothing good for this slot other than the crafted PvP piece, Contender’s Leather Helm (iLvL 450, pvp)
• Neck: If you’re lucky you might find the rare drop Don Guerrero’s Glorious Choker (476) on the AH.  Otherwise you’re certain to see a Golembreaker Amulet (450).
• Shoulder: only the Contender’s Leather Shoulders here (450, pvp).
• Back: the rare drop Dory’s Pageantry (476) is when you want.
• Chest: several options here – two crafted items – the Chestguard of Nemesis (496) and the Greyshadow Chestguard (476).  Also, there is a rare BoE drop, Vulajin’s Vicious Brestplate (476).
• Bracers: the best option here is a BoE drop from the Heart of Fear raid – Smooth Beetle Wristbands.  There are heroic (509), normal (496) and LFR (483) versions.
• Gloves: more crafted items: Murderer’s Gloves (496) or Greyshadow Gloves (476)
• Legs: only the crafted pvp item here, Contender’s Leather Leggings (450, pvp)
• Feet: only the crafted pvp item here as well, Contender’s Leather Boots (450, pvp)
• Finger: if you are lucky you might find the rare drop Perculia’s Peculiar Signet (476).  You can always find the JC-crafted Roguestone Shadowband (450).
• Trinket: the top option here is the Relic of Xuen (476) (from Darkmoon Faire).  Also useful is the Ghost Iron Dragonling (450) which has nice stats when you put the better cogwheels into it.
• Weapons: All pretty pricey options here.  The Krol Scimitar (476 sword) and the Gloaming Blade (476 dagger) are both super-rare pickpocketing results.  The Miniature Winter Veil Tree (480 dagger) can still be found on the AH, too.  After that, its the crafted blacksmith dagger or sword, both level 463.

Overall, if you’re willing to spend a couple hundred thousand gold and be patient until all these rare items show up on the AH, it looks like you can get yourself to about iLvL 470, although that includes some pvp pieces which are not optimally itemized for raiding.  That’s a lot of gold for little reward, because you can easily do better than that through some dabbling in dailies and heroics and maybe a trip or two into LFR.

Gold cap… then a Yak

I’ve been dabbling in gold-making using my crafting and the auction house since sometime during Wrath.  I spent most of Wrath just doing glyphs, because that was practically printing money.  Then in Cata I moved also in jewelcrafting and a little bit of enchanting.  I wasn’t too serious – I didn’t hover over the auction house cancel-reposting.  It was enough to earn a couple thousand gold a day.

When I hit 350k, I realized that I could eventually earn a million gold this way.  I just had to keep doing what I was doing and resist the urge to spend a lot.  And that’s what I did, for over a year now.

This week, I finally reached my goal of a million gold.

 

So what do I do with all that gold?  Interestingly, I felt like I *had* to spend some.  When I first collected my gold from my mailbox and exceeded a million, I ended with 1,001,500 or so.  My first thought was, “I can’t spend more than 1,500g or I’ll drop back below a million.”  That’s crazy!  That means that even though I was a millionaire, I couldn’t buy anything that cost over 1,500g?  It’s like I was broke again!

So I decided to break the hold that this magic number had.  I went out and bought myself the Grand Expedition Yak for a cool 108,000g.  It was a huge expense and for no real purpose, but it broke me out of the “save your gold! save! save!” mindset I was stuck in.

Its now been three days since I hit that milestone and I have not crafted a glyph since.  I’m sure I’ll get back to it, but I feel no real compulsion to push it.  I feel much more relaxed.  I am spending more time now doing other things in game rather than posting auctions.

ahhhhh, nice.