Loremaster Insanity
Loremaster is insane. Not as insane as Insane in the Membrane, but insane nevertheless. Who in their right mind wants to complete 2700+ quests, spreadeagled all over every continent, with the reward being a nice title and funny meta-tabard? A lot of people apparently!
There’s been a lot of discussion about the worth/value/fun of Achievements, and plenty of gentle mocking and evil marketing plans, but there’s no question they’ve extended the longevity and appeal of WoW. Loremaster is the kind of thing that no-one would have attempted before Achievements were created, because no-one even knew it was a ‘thing’. By exposing the mechanical statistical details behind the game, Blizz opened up a whole new source of obsession and compulsion.
I haven’t seen a satisfactory answer to why Achievements are so successful, whether it be WoW, MW2, or foursquare. Chris Hecker posited that Achievements are harmful, in response to Jesse Schell wanting to make brushing your teeth an Achievement. Do we need Achievements to play a game these days, or should story and gameplay be enough? There’s always been the obsessive collectors, and the hoarders, and the trainspotting brigade.
Pokemon was probably the first game to really tap into and nail the collecting mentality, and Edge Magazine recently declared the unexpected success of Crackdown was due to the uncontrollable drive it created to collect all 500 Agility Orbs. People like being rewarded. Sid Meier described how Civilization was originally going to have Dark Ages, to mimic the peaks and troughs of human society. But people would abandon their game and start a new one whenever the pits occured in game. His solutions: Golden Ages instead. Like Blizzard decided with WoW, make everything epic, and people will enjoy themselves more.
Achievements are like that: they give people small incremental rewards for doing ‘stuff’. Some are silly and fun, some are the result of hours of hard work, and some happen by accident. But they all deliver a pat on the back and a reward for simply playing. It’s easier than achieving in the real world, they’re measureable and you know you can get most of them.
So I’m thinking about Loremaster. Either that or level another alt :-). Maybe a BElf pally who I can switch to Tauren the minute Cat launches. Sheesh talk about busy work, shouldn’t I be writing a comic or cooking some tofu or creating an iphone app or something? Nah.
On Wings of Nether
Some grinds are worth every minute
My approach was pretty bog standard: do all the one-off rep quests as they came up, obviously, and then just rotate through all the dailies. I got to Honored pretty quickly, had a break, and then worked through to Exalted. There was nearly always one or two others grinding away, which was fun to see. It’s nothing on the pain of the (pre-nerf) Hodir grind - no infuriating timesink design like the Spy Hunter wolf/dwarf quest - though you were sent back and forth over Shadowmoon Valley a few times too many, and as far afield as far West Nagrand.
One thing that really helped was being on a US timezone server - I’d be jumping on at 8-9PM Sydney time, which translates to 1-2AM US. Due to the low population at that time, there were usually plenty of stray Netherwing Eggs to be found, which is a bonus 250 rep per egg. It was always a thrill spotting one smoking away.
There’s a great “Netherwing Loop” YouTube video by wowangel showing a route to follow for all the known egg spawn points. I found eggs in most of the marked locations over the course of the grind, as well as a fair few in the mines, so it’s an accurate map.
Some of the quests are pretty fun - in particular the Drake racing sequence, which gets progressively harder as you beat each racer. And throwing an old boot at lazy peons was fun for a while, though having to do 20 got tired pretty quickly. The cleverest thing Blizzard did was to replace your standard flyer with a Drake whenever you are in the Netherwing zone. It means every time you go there you think “oh yes, I need to have this”, and the crushing disappointment of flipping back to your Swift Wind Rider when you re-enter normal space drives you on toward the Exalted goal.
I can’t even imagine how painful it would have been to do this at level 70, when you’d actually have to fight the mobs instead of facerolling through them. But the reward speaks for itself.
One percent
ToC was a bit of a pain when we got some kind of bugged opening joust which meant it went on f.o.r.e.v.e.r. The jousting is bad enough without it never ever ending, sob. We eventually zoned out and reset, which fixed everything. FoS and PoS were easy enough, other than when we tried to race up the PoS ramp after Krick and managed to catch the tail end of one mob for the accidental wipe. Exploits rarely seem to work, though this one would be worth getting right to avoid those annoying 5 pulls.
So we once again reached our bette noir, HoR, at 1130PM. We thought we’d give it one shot, and call it if we failed. It was much better this time despite the hour. We made our way smoothly to Falric, and we had him, before a 1% wipe.
Has anyone done the math on 1% wipes - they seem way too common to be legit? I remember countless one percenters in Kara and Outland heroics, and maybe even a few with Anub’Rekhan in Naxx. Maybe the last 2-5% is rounded to 1%, just to make it that much more painful :-) It’s pretty funny rueing a 1% wipe on normal mode mini bosses, when others are having the same kind of wipes on the Heroic mode LK himself. But who cares, we’re loving it!
It gets late early out there
The (half) weekly roundup:
- Spinks mounts a nice defence of TotC as a raid trainer, given “it’s not possible to really learn how to play your class in heroics any more” - and bemoans Blizzard’s lack of in game mechanisms for player to player coaching.
- Alison Roberts, still the best wow.com writer by a mile, on how hard it is to learn to tank given the high expectations of LFD: “Everyone wants an experienced professional. Nobody wants to be there for the learning process”
- Chastity at Righteous Orbs likes the ICC buff and doesn’t care about the boasting: “it seems that somehow, in the minds of a great many people, the moment somebody gets the World First Arthas kill that’s it, and Wrath is all over bar shouting”
- Rob Pardo, Blizz Supremo, presents an interesting insight into Blizzard’s design processes: “Easy to learn and almost impossible to master / Make everything overpowered”. Worth flicking through all the slides at the end.
- Ferrel at Epic Slant wants to slow down the levelling race: “MMORPGs need to adopt the Dungeons & Dragons model once more where the game is less about reaching the next level and more about enjoying the ride”. Ties in with his earlier argument to stop level cap increases as the higher the cap the bigger the mountain facing new players: “Additional levels also stratify the player base and create a level disparity”
- For all of y’all DKs out there, Gravity is taking a stab at creating the definitive DK forums
In other news, Civ V was announced, and at the GDC Civ creator/god Sid Meier discussed why everything game devs know is wrong.
Hard Easy Modes
On the complete opposite end of the progression spectrum, our guild hit a similar barrier last night in Halls of Reflection. Normal mode. On the trash waves between Falric and Marwyn. So not quite the level of epic our erstwhile twitterers have reached :-) But it was nevertheless a fun if insanely expensive and blood curdlingly annoying experience. We’d tried it a few weeks ago and failed to even get to Falric, whereas this time we downed him for the first time thanks to better tactics and clutch healing. Which led to much clenched fist “c’mons” before at all started again.
But we just couldn’t quite get past the next 5 waves. We did get to Marwyn twice, though each time with two DPS toasted so no way of finishing him off. I’d curse Blizz for not allowing our downed compatriots to bampf back in mid encounter, but I guess that would make the fight a doddle. Zomg it’s a tricky event. I’ve pugged it several times on my Rogue and zerged through thanks to OP groups, but with a slightly-undergeared slightly-undertrained strict 5 man guild like us, it’s a real challenge.
It’s enclosed, chaotic, you have to take down the mobs in order (Priest - Rogue - Casters - Melee) so I was trying to mark on the run, and PLEASE STOP HITTING THE HEALER LOOK-AT-ME LOOK-AT-ME! I struggled mightily with picking up the adds as they came in, always seeming to lose one, who inevitably one-shot our healer. The Shadow Mercenary in particular was trouble. B@stard rogues! And yet inch by inch we were progressing. We’d get one wave further each time, only for me to lose my agro seeking focus at the critical moment, or the healer getting frozen just as I got clobbered by something. It really felt like if we could just keep our healer up - i.e. my main job beside getting wailed on - then we’d make it. Aargh!
I started to feel like a failtank even though I really thought we could do it, so we swapped in our fresh 80 Tankadin for my Warrior, hoping the improved AoE threat would help. To no avail - staying alive and doing enough DPS and holding agro and healing through it all seem to be mutually exclusive on this fight. So it was nuts. We wiped and wiped and repaired and repaired. But we kept coming back, and everyone kept wanting one last try.
We nailed Falric (who dropped nothing of any use, naturally). And though we didn’t get past Marwyn (maybe just as well given the LK phase to come!), it did give us a truckload of experience of working together to try and nut a tactic out and progress. And I got to understand better what the high end raiders are talking about when they say that endless wipes doesn’t always mean epic fail.
Addendum This is to scold myself into improving - using the Warrior toolkit and paying attention. To wit:
- Watch my health bars - too often guilty of letting the healer do all the work, without saving myself (and their mana) when the situation gets desperate
- Watch the healer! Dang blast it, he died a lot of times when I just wasn’t paying attention to the fact he was being fireballed or backstabbed to smithereens. If the healer dies it’s my fault, and he died a lot
- Get my spell interrupting keys better mapped - I’m always too tardy in using them
- Use Heroic Strike! It’s bound to my mouse button, but i still forget. Grrr.
- While we’re at it: keep shouts up! Use Intervene/Intercept! KEEP THE HEALER ALIVE!!
Ahem.