Patch Day 3.1

This is going to be painful. The realms are going to be down longer than usual, and when they come back up, they will be down sporadically due to heavy traffic. My guild wants to try to do Ulduar tonight, and I am willing to go along, but in my heart I have little faith that it will actually happen.

As for me, I have other reasons to be worried. I’ve been tinkering with 3.1 talent calculators for some time now, and I have not been able to come up with a good Demonology raid spec for my Warlock. Demonology isn’t a strong raid spec anyway, but I like the challenges it presents in that regard, and I want to stay Demo.

The problem is that the cookie cutter specs that SimCraft has suggested don’t include talents that (for me) are essential. I need that point in Mana Feed for solo play. I want Demonic Pact for raid utility. I need those two points in Intensity to reduce interrupts when channeling Rain of Fire or some other Destruction spell.

It’s impossible to put points in those without sacrificing other essential talents, though. Part of the problem is how the Demo tree is constructed. Once you get down to Mana Feed and Master Conjurer, you are forced to put at least one point in Master Conjurer in order to open the next tier of talents. If I could get past Master Conjurer without having to give up a talent point to it, I could almost make things work.

Affliction has a similar problem. How do you take essential solo talents like Fel Concentration while not sacrificing raid DPS? I don’t like pushback! And it seems to me that even in some raid situations, pushback would be a DPS detriment, but the SimCraft specs all remove any points in a pushback-reducing talent.

I have no answers as yet. Right now, I am probably going to sacrifice Demonic Pact and go with this 3/51/17 spec. It gives me most of what I want, but sacrifices raid utility—which is a debatable priority anyway, since the buff it provides can be overwritten by a Shaman’s totem. However, without the Shaman, it’s a powerful buff that should not be underestimated.

I am not liking these choices.

Edit: This is the Affliction spec I’m considering 54/00/17.  I feel like I get more of what I want/need from this, than from Demonology.

One More Quest

Despite my mutterings about leaving the game back in November and December, I am still playing WoW.  I took a break over Christmas–an entire week!–but then the week of New Years, I went on a bit of a binge and leveled from 77 to 79.  Now back to work during the day, I have been playing a couple hours at night and advancing, ever so slowly, towards 80.  I will probably break the barrier tonight.

I don’t think I ever really decided “Yes, I love this game and I’m going to keep playing it!”  In the end, after my week off, I played first a little, then a lot as I discovered a whole series of fun and interesting questlines in Dragonblight, Stormpeaks, and Icecrown.  Of course the Wrathgate questline is perhaps the most epic of all quests in the game, but there were others.

Thus what it came down to is that I found myself interested in the story, for the first time in WoW, and I wanted to know more about what was happening.  It helps that our characters feel intimately involved in the story, as well, due to the NPC’s constantly referring to us as Heros and telling us how much the future depends on our actions.

I’ve also enjoyed the instancing of certain parts of the game, much as in the DK starter area.  The series of quests out of the Argent Vanguard encampment that introduce the player to Icecrown are a case in point.  When you arrive, a battle with the Scourge has just ended but another is about to begin.  After undertaking a couple quests deeper into Icecrown, you return to find a major battle going on, and you are asked to man artillery on the walls of the fortress and kill Scourge.  After completing that quest, the Scourge are wiped out and you are dispatched to another camp a little farther into Icecrown near the Breach.  The battlefield remains devastated, but the Scourge don’t attack again, as they would in an un-instanced version of the game where other players would still need to complete the same quest.

Thus there is a real sense that you have “won” this fight once and for all and can now move on.

Story elements, combined with improvements to questing sucha s outlined above, have conspired to revive my interest, though I don’t know for how long.  In my free time, I’ve been doing a little research into raiding–what to spec, what glyphs I need, what Heroics I need to run and what gear I need to acquire first.  My excitement is almost the equivalent of what I felt a little over a year ago, when I was gearing up to begin raiding in The Burning Crusade.

Additionally, I’ve been grouping with an old, old friend from my very first days in the game, a fellow who helped me so much when I was starting out and who I am now repaying by helping him any way I can.  Sharing the game with someone else is a huge component on the enjoyment factor of a game like this, at least for me.  I know there are people who never group, but for me it is people more than the game itself that keeps me playing.

Touring the Fjord

Almost three weeks after release, and my impressions of Wrath of the Lich King remain pretty much the same.  It’s a heckuva lot of fun, and Blizzard did a great job with it.  The quests are interesting and more interactive, less stultifyingly trite.  The world of Northrend itself is beautiful and immersive, and much larger than one would believe, looking at it on the map.  There is really very little by way of complaint about the game itself.

I suppose the only thing I would complain about it that it seems to take an extraordinarily long time to level.  That may be more relative to who I am, and how I play, rather than indicative of a problem with the game, however.

Yet it goes to the chief reason why I am not enjoying the expansion as much as I had hoped.  My warlock is 73, and there are Death Knights that have already leveled past me.  Most people in my guild are in their mid-seventies or 80 already.  Five-man groups are already gearing up in the Heroics, preparatory to raiding.  And one of the things I was looking forward to–hitting all the instances at the appropriate level, with guild mates–has not come to pass.  In fact, except for the Heroic groups, I think most people in my guild who are doing instances are pugging it due to the wide spread of levels among players in the guild.

I’m not sure what happened.  I know that many people looked upon it as a challenge to level to 80 as fast as possible, and if that level grind did not include instance runs, so be it.  Other people weren’t doing instances because they weren’t finding any gear upgrades in the regular dungeons–the gear reset in Wrath has been much gentler than in BC.

Still, it’s sad to ask in Guild Chat if anyone wants to run a regular, lower-seventies instance, and to be met with stony silence.

Part of the issue is me, I’m certain.  I missed my window of opportunity to keep up with folks.  Yet, I don’t know that I would be running instances even if I had kept up.  It just seems like no one is running them, or else they are pugging it.  Maybe I should be pugging it, too, I don’t know.  It’s depressing to think that after all the expectation of leveling with friends, instead of trailing behind them, it has all turned out the same way anyhow.

Way Up North

Several events have conspired to keep me from writing lately.  First of all, I had a death in the family on October 29 and travel and funeral took up all of the first weekend in November.  Since then, I just haven’t felt like writing.  I haven’t even written more than a couple posts at my non-WoW blog.

Then there was the election on the fourth, and after blogging about that for months, when it came to an end I sank even further into a non-writing slump.  But now with the release of Wrath, I feel like I am regaining some of my energy.

Last night I was listening to the Instance podcast from November 14,  a day after the expansion was released, and I was amused that Randy Jordan (at that time) had bought and installed the expansion but was stubbornly refusing to set foot in Northrend because there was no NPC in Shattrath telling him to do so.  Instead he was busily doing Netherwing dailies as if no new content had been added.  The other host poked fun at him for his rather luddite-like behavior, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy.  He was missing so much fun.

I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve played Wrath so far.  The landscapes are gorgeous, the story lines are compelling, and sometimes the quests themselves offer something new to the tried and trite “kill 100 rats” formula.  Take The Flight of the Wintergarde Defender, for example.  In this quest, a town is under siege from the scourge and you, the intrepid hero, are tasked with flying a gryphon into the town, swooping down, and rescuing 10 villagers from the clutches of ghouls and abominations.  Other quests have you operating a harpoon or controlling a falcon you send out to hunt for you.

I’ve been working at leveling my Warlock, although unfortunately not as fast as I’d like.  To me, leveling seems to take forever, whether because of my own ineptitude (I have a tendency to fall off high places and then waste a good half-hour trying to recover my corpse) or because Blizzard has greatly increased the amount of XP needed to level up.  Currently Holdwine is at 71 and I hope to level to 72 tonight or tomorrow.

I am also playing my Shaman, Rintrah, who is just about ready to hit 71.  Rintrah is questing in the Borean Tundra; Holdwine is in Howling Fjord.  I’ve been torn between which one to level first, so I decided to level both at the same time.  Ostensibly, my Shaman is supposed to be leveling as a healer to make it easier to get into instances, but in practice I am devoted to Enhancement.

I love dual-wielding axes or maces and just bashing the hell out of things, and then when things get tricky I can call on my Spirit Wolves to even the odds.  I tried leveling as Resto, but even with the changes to spell-damage gear stats (there is no +healing gear anymore, only +spell damage) I found it incredibly slow and boring.  I can really tear through quests and mobs as Enhancement.

If I were a little more sociable, I probably ought to find myself a tank to buddy with, and then spec Resto.  That would make the most sense and would probably make it even easier to find a group for an instance.  That is still an option for me, except that my schedule is so eratic and infrequent that my buddy would probably be lonely much of the time.  Tuesday and Wednesday nights is the only dedicated time I have to play, and I prefer to give those hours to Holdwine since he is going to be my raiding main and needs to level first.

Holdwine doesn’t need any tank.  He is a tank–a cloth-wearing gnome tank that can put dots on ten Shoveltusks and just stand there and watch them die as they pointlessly hit him.  It’s a great thing, being a Warlock.

The Patch That Failed

My excitement for the new patch fizzled rather quickly when the servers did not come back up at the scheduled time.  An hour passed, and it was six o’clock.  Then seven.  Then eight.  Some servers came up around eight, but none of mine.  I created a level one Orc Shaman on Altar of Storms, just to log in and evaluate the state of my addons.

Eight-thirty, and our raid was cancelled.  Nine, and I was still playing that level one Shaman (now level five).  Actually, “playing” is not the correct term because the world server went down so often.  Even when it did not crash, the lag made playing next to impossible.

Altar of Storms was crowded with everyone else locked out of their own server.  Sarkoth was being slaughtered every few seconds before his spawn spot had even grown cold.  The ground was littered with the corpses of boars.

Inevitably, every minute or two someone would ask in General, “Does anyone know if X server is up yet?”  No, you moron.  Why don’t you log out and check.

At ten, my main server was finally online, and I logged in to my bank alt first.  I added his non-combat pets to his character pane; I checked mail.  I went to the bank to drop off some items…and the world server crashed.

At that point, I gave up.  There may have been a time when I’d have sat there until midnight or later trying to log in and play, but accomplishing nothing.  No more.  Those days are over, and I refuse to lose valuable sleep for a game that will still be there tomorrow.

Supposedly, it’s more stable today.  Some of my guildmates have already powerleveled Inscription as far as they can.  Others have tried out all three new specs.  I have yet to even log my main character.

At this point in my life, my mottos are “All in good time” and “I’ll get there when I get there.”  No game is worth a wasted four hours trying to patch, log in, and play.  Tonight, if the server is fairly stable, I’ll log in and deal with my respecs.  Then I’ll probably do some dailies to test my new spells.  If the servers aren’t stable, oh well.  I’ve got books to read and a weekend ahead.  I’ll leave it to others to play a game that is temporarily somewhat  broken.