Achievement metagaming
In any case, the Lunar Festival is a nice leisurely journey, and it certainly brings home the ginormous size of the world. It also illustrates one of the fundamentals of playing: the metagame. The idea of attempting the Lunar or any other festival without resources like wow.com or Wowhead is frankly unimaginable:
Bane: Hey there, guy-with-a-great-huge-halo-shooting-up-in-the-sky, how you doing?
GWAGHHSUITS: *spinning around with enthusiasm* Hail oh great PC! Thanks for visiting me. In fact, you know what - have this artfully crafted coin!
Bane: Whoa, thanks old guy! Hey - are there more of you ‘Elders’ around?
GWAGHHSUITS: Sure are - and they’ll give you free stuff too!
Bane: Great! I should go visit them. Um, where are they?
GWAGHHSUITS: There’s one somewhere in a dungeon somewhere. And another in a place you’ve never heard of. Just nearby. Kind of. *looks shiftily around while scuffing the ground with his worn leather boots*
Bane: Ummm, can you be more specific?
GWAGHHSUITS: Nope! Good luck! /ignore*quickly turns his back on the annoying PC*
Bane: …
Of course it would be possible to find all the Elders, but it would be a royal pain too. I guess someone once did it da solo, and more power to them, but players with that much perseverance are few and far between.
Whilst you could argue this means the game isn’t complete somehow, it seems more likely that this enormous community pool of knowledge that has formed around Warcraft is one of the things that makes the game, as BigBearButt observed. It’s social networking, and it’s been around since before that term became the property of Big Business™.
The amount of free info and time that people have committed to Wowhead and Wowwiki is phenomenal. It’s created a community of contributers, bloggers, editors, Auctioneers and passionate players. I barely move in game before referring to LightHeaded, zooming off as directed via TomTom, or using the Lunar Festival pack for TourGuide. In many other games this would be cheating. And maybe the boss encounters suffer a bit from needing guides rather than teaching. But I’d argue that overall, the metagame makes WoW miles more fun - it doesn’t reduce the challenge, just the frustration.
The truth is out there
Read it and weep:
- It’s Tank-parison week: BBB covers Druids vs Paladins, WoW in an Hour looks at Paladins vs Warriors.
- Achtung Panzercow on new 80’s tanking Heroics in LFD
- BioBreak has LFD struggles before catching purple fever, Tobold doesn’t agree it’s a struggle, and no-one is following my Normal Mode plan :-)
- Tankspot on LK Hard Mode progressions, and Cat predictions
- Jump on Contact present a nice infographic on the real world cost of EVE Online ships
- Interesting new site from Epic Advice, EpicPlan.com allows you to map out your Boss strategies
- Critical QQ psychoanalyses WoW’s in/competent players
- Righteous Orbs picks the wrong toon name
- Official factoids: 70% of trial players don’t get past level 10, and WoW’s 11.5 million playerbase is exactly the same as a year ago
And today’s offtopic, Music Machinery works out who the real drummers are.
Oo-oo, baby you’re a fool for love
The first was to get a nice bouquet of roses from the first boss in UK, Prince Keleseth. Because the roses only drop off the Prince and only for one person, doing it via LFD was fated to be a ‘ninja/drop’ disaster. So we guild ran it with our Rogue, our Hunter, and me. No heals, but I guess not surprisingly it was challenge on normal mode, given the mobs are ~70 elites and the boss not much more. We even two manned it for a second run, just me and the Hunter. We employed ice traps, misdirects, and much hilarity ensued.
The last achievement was to set off 10 Love Rockets in 20 seconds. I’d already burned through 25 of the @#$@# things and not got the ding, so this time I disabled all my add-ons, turned the graphics down to Vic-20 level, and went to an isolated pocked of Mulgore. Success!
The next festival on the list is the Lunar Festival. I’m really enjoying doing each one that comes up, having previously had no real interest. Planning what you’ve got to do, working out the most efficient way, and just the general design of the various quests is all good fun. I’m don’t even mind the PVP quests, I always intend to just zone in and do the Achievement, but tend to get caught up in the fight despite my appalling PVP noobness. For the Horde!
Normality
Refusing to learn our lesson, we thought we’d make our Forge of Souls debut - on normal mode. I was properly tanking for the first time in a long time on Banehammer, and my muscle memory was all for my Druid tank. So I was pretty rusty on the key mappings and priority rotation (where’s Heroic Throw gone? Where’s taunt!?). Luckily I’d mapped abilities pretty consistently across toons, so I unrusted relatively quickly. We wiped on the second trash pull, mainly due to me not grabbing agro on all five quickly enough, and not being able to resist the AoE power of our much better geared ‘lock ‘n’ Mage combo.
But there was an inkling of success there - our Rogue suggested we changed strategy to a mark-up/burn-down single target approach, which worked a treat and we proceeded to march all the way to the first boss, James Brown (the trash even dropped a 1% chance waist upgrade for me). I hadn’t tanked this before, and our off spec Shaman Healer hadn’t healed it. But after quick debrief from the experts, we managed to one shot the Hardest Working Man in Showbiz, and I picked up a stonking big mace (and a New Bag).
The Devourer of Souls awaited, and having experienced this from a Rogue melee DPS vantage point, I didn’t like my chances of moving him around correctly, and living through the various don’t-argues this guy delivers. We wiped on our first attempt, but weren’t discouraged. I found that the tanking vantage point was actually a bit easier than DPS - at least I knew when the guy was facing me, something I found confusing when slice ‘n’ dicing him due his multi-faceted face. Our second attempt went much better, and we managed to down him (but barely!). I’d blown every single cooldown, and our Shaman was down to 4% mana when our foe dropped. The hoots could be heard all the way to the Halls of Relection, two instances hence.
It’s fair to say that this was thrilling stuff. It felt great to be working as a Guild team, on the edge of our ability/gear. What was really interesting to me was that this was all in normal 5-man mode. There’s obviously recognition and challenge for world firsts (both alleged and legit) and 25 man hard modes, but for the ‘hard core casuals’ (otherwise known as the majority), I’d suggest that taking on the normal mode progression is just as rewarding. You still see all the content, still get epic upgrades, still have a huge challenge and still have to work hard on your tactics and awareness. Plus if you clear all the normal modes, there’s no doubt you’ll be ready for 10 mans next.
There’s a tendancy to think that if you’re not running at least Heroics, you’re not really playing. Which is just plain wrong - if normal mode is hard for your group, normal mode is the right level to be playing at and more importantly, enjoying. Throw yourself into the deep end of normal mode ICC. It may not be Ensidia depth, but it’s still pretty deep!