n3rd

Super long WoW related post cross posted from my other blog.

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World of Warcraft

Warning this blog entry is going to be very WoW intensive.

Note: Upon reading through a lot of this sounds really bitter and frankly thats sort of how I feel. I have put a lot of time, effort and money into this game so I'm very disappointed that my enjoyment of it has dropped off so drastically. shrug

I've been playing a lot less WoW recently and I'm not really missing it. I stopped the automatic renewal of my account, which technically means I canceled my WoW account but saying I canceled it feels likes I am overstating that fact. I haven't so much canceled it per se as set it up so that when my current time runs out I have to make a decision to keep playing and I'll decide for sure then if I'm still getting $15 a month out of it. When I was "canceling" my account it asked for my reason for cancellation. And to be honest I can't even begin to narrow it down to just one. WoW has so many facets to it and so many different ways you can enjoy the game its hard to say that I'm tired of all of it without getting into specific reasons why. So here is a list of many of the reasons I am enjoying WoW a lot less than I used to and why I may not be playing it soon when my account runs out.

Honestly the biggest reason WoW is less fun is because a lot of the people I know have quit playing. This is technically not Blizzard's fault that they quit playing but I feel like many of the same reasons that are making it likely I will quit led them to quit as well. I really like my guild and my guildmates and if it weren't for them I probably would have quit already but I know all of them through other games too so I'm leaning towards seeing them there instead of in WoW.

The raids this time around are kinda disappointing. I like the bit of Ulduar I have seen so far but it hasn't exactly blown me away. I raided a bit more seriously in the Burning Crusade and I enjoyed the raids there a whole lot more. Part of that probably has to do with when I started playing. By the time I hit 70 during TBC there were 8 raids currently available. A 9th came out while I was playing and I never even progressed far enough to enter it. In Wrath as it stands now there are 5 raids. However, some of them are, well, frustrating to say the least. Vault of Archavon is a PvP oriented raid and its for the most part pretty trivial. You go in and quickly get some gear and as long as the people you are with are ok at playing their class its basically a sure thing. The loot is way too good for how easy he is and its way too specific loot such that its possible for loot to drop that no one at all needs (tokens for classes you didn't bring with you) or loot that I personally am not excited about (PvP loot). Sartharion I actually for the most part enjoy. Its pretty cool killing a dragon and you can scale up the difficulty level by leaving more drakes up. Its infuriating that I still have yet to down Sarth with two drakes up but thats just a PUGing issue which I will get to more later. Malygos is a dick. Seriously, just a dick. Its a clever fight but it rolled out bugged. I'm not even sure if it is unbugged now and to be honest at this point I'm not clear what of the annoying bullshit moves in the fight are bugs versus which ones are just supposed to be hard. This has/had the potential to be a really fun fight but it just felt undertested. Also until Ulduar came out this was the hardest fight in the game so it wasn't easy to find groups for. Maly is the boss I most want to down personally right now but I just don't see it happening any time soon. Naxx on the other hand just blows. Having the premiere raid of a new expansion be an old raid thats just been retuned is pretty freaking lazy and well not that fun. I did not play WoW before TBC so I wasn't exactly running Naxx back in the day but I'm still frustrated on principle. Also Naxx is just plain really annoying. The place is pretty freaking huge to start with. Its got 15 bosses, none of which are skippable. The last boss of course has the best loot (can't really argue with that) and you have to kill 14 other guys with only ok loot in order to even fight him. Many of the fights are annoying and feature a lot of potential screwage. Thaddius is the MVP of the fuck Naxx team since its possible for one person being stupid to wipe the raid, and its possible for that one stupid person to keep wiping the raid until they learn to be smarter. Kel'Thuzad the big baddy himself is also a fight I find more infuriating than difficult. The first phase is basically trivial and lasts a few minutes. Just to make sure that it takes a longer time to get attempts in on him I suppose. During the actual fight a lot of rough stuff happens. Now I'm not saying the fight is too hard because its not, just that its really annoying. He mind controls people who then attack other people so you need to CC them in some way. Well usually two other things happen, 1) they don't get CCed and they put their daggers into the dick of a healer or 2) a hunter shoots them, a lot. Its not always a hunter mind you but it often is. Ice block is the bane of my existence. He freezes someone (and anyone within a certain range of them) and then you have about 3 seconds before they take more than their life total in damage. So if they do not receive at least one heal in that time they die. This infuriates me for multiple reasons, first of which is that I play a resto shammy. Resto shammies only have one instant heal and its a heal over time so its not necessarily enough to save them. Our main heal that we use is chain heal which heals one person and then jumps to people near them. If I cast it immediately after people get ice blocked it will heal them all and save everyone. If if takes me more than half a second to target the correct person and start casting it (and possibly stop casting whatever I was casting before) they all die. I can use a faster heal and save one person if its only one person hit by it but people aren't always super great at standing far enough apart and when it hits the melee its for sure going to be multiple people. Its just sort of a dick move and its particularly annoying to my particular class and role. So those are the raid options prior to Ulduar, one PvP raid that is a cakewalk, one dragon who is pretty fun but kinda quick and one clusterfuck of holy fucking Christ are we done yet. Oh and that clusterfuck is a retread. Oh and it never drops my boots, seriously how am I still wearing the same boots I got when I turned 80? Fucking hell.

Ulduar seems pretty ok so far. Some clever fights etc but man is it just not enough to hold my interest. First off its significantly harder (which is good) so its harder to find groups for. 10 man Ulduar which is easier to find groups for has almost nothing worth going after for me. I think I literally have 3 upgrades in the entire place. Now yes yes loot is not the only reason to raid etc. But for me its the biggest one. I like shinies, I want shinies, I try to get shinies. Ulduar 10 has a severe lack of shinies for me. Ulduar 25 has quite a few but no one seems to be running PUGs for it and I have no interest in running one myself right now. Plus some of the trash are just assholes. I don't have any particular dislike for Ulduar so much as its just not as good as it needed to be. I was pretty tired of WoW when I was waiting for Ulduar to hit and well so far its not making up for the rest of my issues.

Now there are all sort of other end game pursuits which could be taking up my WoW time when I'm not raiding and you know keeping me in the game interested and involved. They aren't and I'm gonna say why.

Professions: I have both Jewelcrafting and Herbing maxed on my shammy. Not the most synergistic set of professions but I enjoy them both in general. Herbing is more a way to make money than anything else and I do ok with it. I'm not exactly rolling in gold but I can acquire a bit pretty easily as needed. I'm not super fond of running around collecting digital herbs to make digital money but I'm fine with farming. Its not a favorite past time but I accept its part of the video game world and it makes sense etc etc. So no it doesn't excite me and I'm not like "oh wow I better log into WoW so I can have me a grand old time of flying around and picking herbs" but I'm not annoyed with it either. Jewelcrafting I am freaking pissed about. In Burning Crusade there were three ways to get the high end recipes. One was from increasing your reputation with factions, one was world drops and the other was instance drops. Reputation wasn't super hard to come by though it required a concerted effort (especially before they added them to SSO). Not every JC had all the reputation recipes but quite a few did. The world drops on the other hand were tough to acquire. Anyone could get them (JC or not) and then sell them for a pretty penny on the AH. In order for it to be profitable to buy a pattern you really had to cut a lot of that gem afterwards. I didn't like this and neither did a lot of people and Blizzard made an attempt to fix it in Wrath which we will get to. Instance drops were nice in that you had to run specific places to get the design. The ones from Sunwell were especially nice in that you could get some of the best loot in the game at the time and it was only available to JCs. In Wrath all that changed. The instance drops were no longer for actual gear you could use. They wanted to make it so no profession was a bunch better than any other so that people were picking professions they enjoyed rather than professions that gave them good loot. Now I know some people went to extremes dropping a profession they would rather have just to get a few more points but making every profession less powerful and less worth having in order to make them more "fun" just doesn't add up to me. They retained some profession exclusive stuff of course so the disparity still exists to some degree so it didn't really "fix" anything in my opinion but it did take away a percent of shinies from me. They eliminated most of the reputation patterns (and reputation gains from raids so far) and made the vast majority of them come either from heroic drops or dailies. The few reputation recipes were all with the major factions that weren't particularly hard to get rep for (except for Hodir who while not hard to get rep for sure does take ages). There are a handful of drops scattered throughout heroics but those were all guaranteed drops if you just kill the right boss so it didn't exactly take long before me and every other JC had them all. The vast majority of the patterns though were from the dailies. Every day you can do the JC daily which basically is kill some subset of guys until you get a thing. Combine the thing with some gems. Profit. Then you get a token from that. You can buy a pattern for 3 tokens. Now in TBC the main way to make a profit as a JC was to have a gem cut other people needed and cut those gems either for them directly for a tip or buy the raw gem, cut it, put it up on the AH. As such the people with the "best" gem cuts were in decently high demand. With the new system it takes 3 days to get the best gem cut, 3 more for the next best one and so on. As such within a few weeks basically everyone who had a character that was a JC had every important pattern. It completely crashed the market for gems and its very difficult to make money with JCing now. So their new system replaced an annoying world drop mechanic with a different mechanic that eliminates scarcity in a poor way. Then they added back in world drops for the recipes they forget to put in the first time. I'm not sure forgot is the right word but well they left them out and then decided oh hey we should add back in the worst part of what we had before so that our solution fixes nothing at all. Yeah. Oh and apparently they are making Dragon's Eyes color specific soon instead of prismatic. Just to you know make JC worse. Now I know a lot of people have a lot of complaints about how professions were handled in Wrath (I personally think enchanting got hit hardest) but JC is the profession that I have spent the most time with and enjoyed a lot and they messed it up pretty bad.

PvP: Death Knights and Paladins have ruined PvP for me. DKs are just OP. Sure they have been nerfed to fairly acceptable levels but for a while they were just curbstompingly OP. And no its not fun for me to have my face smashed in on my well geared character I have been building up for about a year by someone who just made their toon a few weeks ago. There have been volumes written on how overpowered DKs are so I won't get into it too much but it was seriously just not at all fun to fight against a DK for a while and it got to the point where it actually skewed PvP such that if the other side had more DKs they would probably win. Pallies just got a bit too much love in fixing ret and well I think every retadin took out his frustration at being weak for so long. Can't really blame 'em but hot damn was it annoying. Things have levelled out a bit but there are still some major lacks in PvP. Resilience just isn't cutting it enough and PvP was never my favorite thing to begin with so it doesn't take too much for me to not want to bother with it.

Wintergrasp: This area should be so amazing. Its got a lot of great elements, and epic battle for control of a keep between the warring factions. Unfortunately tenacity was obscenely mistuned for huge chunks of time and I swear every time I do Wintergrasp there is a new and different bug that has cropped up. The whole zone is buggy and laggy and well Blizzard is doing something about it. If by doing something about it you mean they reduced the daily rewards to weekly. I mean I suppose making the zone less desireable to be in does in fact reduce lag and improve performance but I'm pretty sure its the worst answer ever.

Arena: Fuck arena for all the times I got facerolled by DKs and fuck arena for class balance issues. Fuck arena for being a self feeding system where the best teams get the best gear making them more likely to stay the best teams. Fuck arena for being way too hyper competitive for me to stand much of a realistic chance in. And double fuck arena for having the coolest mount in the game as its super exclusive reward. Seriously look at this. That is really fucking cool and I will never ever ever get one because of how super exclusive they are making it. I had no issue with the netherdrakes because I could get my own slightly less cool netherdrakes but there is no other way to get a frostwyrm mount at all. Freaking lame.

Mounts: I'm pissed off about 4 other mounts also. I am an angry person apparently. One of them is more ironic than anything else. I've wanted the Attumen horse for a really long time. I just think its a really cool looking mount and I saw it drop one time and lost the roll by one point and since then I have been trying to get it. My wife has been helping me farm it and I have in turn been helping her farm one that she wants. The mount drops from Kara which is on a one week reset timer so once a week we head there. Before Ulduar came out and I was getting burned out on WoW my account expired for a bit and I didn't renew it right away. My wife is collecting mounts in general so she ran the instance without me since I would not be renewing my account before it would reset. Thats when it dropped. I have ran it for months hoping for it to drop and the one time I can't run it it drops. Its not the game's fault that RNG is swingy, I am not mad at my wife for getting lucky and getting it for herself but I am infuriated that I don't have the mount. I am no longer farming it just because it upsets me. Its something I really wanted but due to some bad luck no longer feel like pursuing. The other 3 mounts I am pissed about right now are the achievement mounts for the 10 and 25 man raids and the heroics. They removed the 10 and 25 man raids when Ulduar came out. They gave sufficient warning but it was still a surprise coming from their previous actions. I wanted to get one or both of these mounts. It wasn't a driving force in my life but it was something cool to work towards. Now that I can't I have even less reason to do the old raids. I have very little loot I can get out of them and now I don't even get anything if I do all the achievements. I just don't get how taking away reasons to play is a good idea for them. I would be a lot more likely to be trying to get these achieves if I got something for it. Same deal with the red proto drake for heroics. I haven't done a lot of the heroic achieves because I just can not beat Occulus. Its sort of absurd. The last fight you do from the back of a dragon which is actually really cool except for two things. 1) It ignores all of this great gear I have gotten since the first time I tried it. It is literally exactly as hard as it was the first time even though every other fight in the game is easier because I have gotten better gear and 2) The healer dragon SUCKS. In every fight you use a tank, some DPS and a healer. Its just the set up of the game. There are 3 dragon types you can choose for this fight and they fill those rolls. The healer dragon just isn't very good at all. In order to heal he has to syphon his own life force into someone else. Then he has to drain life off the bad dragon boss to recover it. Its slow, its inefficient, its difficult to target other dragons, its just plain annoying. I am sure that given the time and effort I could manage this fight but after two entire evenings of failing to kill a boss who according to their progression should be trivial to me I am no longer interested.

Addons: I use a number of addons to aid in my healing. Mostly because Blizzard's built in interface is completely awful for raid healing but also because I like to do things kinda my own way. Every time Blizzard adds a patch it tends to break the addons since they are developed by just random people and Blizzard makes no real effort not to do so. So this means every time there is a patch I need to go download new versions of a few different addons just to get the game back to the level of playability I am used to. Some however are no longer being updated so I have to make due without them. There is just something incredibly frustrating to me though about having to track down and install and set up 5 or 6 different things just to make WoW playable to me again. I mean we're not talking about addons I use because I like them, I'm talking about my healing addons which I basically need to raid (most raid leaders won't accept healers who don't have some sort of healing addon and with good reason) and which make it possible for me to cast my freaking totems. Seriously shaman totems are pretty poorly set up and so I have an addon to make them easy to cast. The most recent patch broke it so now I have to try to find another addon to use instead and I'm starting to just not care.

PUGs: I can't get into this without really going off but suffice it to say I hate morons and I hate morons even more when I am forced to group with them out of lack of other options.

There are so many little and big things annoying me about WoW right now and I'm just not sure its worth it to me anymore. Overall the whole of this expansion feels undertested and ill-conceived. A lot of good ideas don't seem to be playing out as expected and things which should be clever are just sort of annoying. Blizz all around seems to have dropped the ball on this one. </rant>