[WoW] Gear, and Other Carrots

Does your gear matter? Kurn’s post Tech and the Devaluation of Gear shows how really, gear is effectively an illusion, a trick, a carrot to get you to keep playing even though the upgrades are effectively meaningless, becoming obsolete every time a new tier/expansion is released. It’s really with the introduction of Challenge Modes, and now Proving Grounds and Flex Raiding, that this has become too obvious to ignore: when the numbers on your gear and the enemies can be adjusted so readily, it leads to a questioning of why we bother to strive for improved gear at all.

Talk about a can of worms! This question can be split into two answers: levelling and endgame.

As the popularity of heirlooms has shown, players are fine with something that makes gear irrelevant whilst levelling – even the pieces that don’t provide an experience boost are used, and gear drops are mostly only used as a source of disenchanting materials. That the heirloom gear is generally equivalent to rare quality, thus is quite powerful, is an added bonus.

Levelling, though, is but a small part in the life of most characters: it’s often been said that endgame is where the ‘real’ WoW begins. Once you hit maximum level, whatever that might be at the time, you then need to start preparing your character for the Good Stuff: raiding (or battlegrounds or arenas; the goal is mostly the same). This, of course, means gearing up.

Grind My Gear

Prior to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, getting a newly-max-level character up to raiding standard was a tedious process if it started any significant time after most others had done it, both for the player of that character, and for any guildmates that had to go back and re-do content with the newbie, content they’d already cleared when it was current, and possibly never wanted to see ever again.

Thus did Blizzard introduce the concept of ‘tokens’, a currency that could be earned from doing dungeons and daily quests, and that could be used to buy previous-tier gear. This plus the introduction of automatic group-matching via the Dungeon Finder tool meant gearing up a new character to current-tier standards was a much quicker, if more mechanical, process, one that could be accomplished effectively ‘solo’, since the random, blitz-like nature of the Dungeon Finder groups made it easy to view the other people in your party as NPCs.

The ‘gear resets’ upon the release of The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were the first clues that the numbers on gear are mostly arbitrary. The tokens were the second: no longer was gear something magical that you looted from a boss after a hard-won victory. Instead, it became something you could buy – not a reward but a return on time invested.

Perhaps coincidentally, this was around the same time addons like Recount and Gearscore really came to prominence, further clarifying the feeling that WoW is about numbers above all, a pretty facade in front of a spreadsheet.

Zahlen Über Alles

The fact that WoW is so numerically transparent has led to some fascinating things. Simulationcraft, for example, can predict, to a high degree of accuracy, how your character will perform in a given situation. Sites like Ask Mr. Robot will look at your character, crunch the numbers, then tell you what gear to acquire, and how to gem and reforge it, in order to maximise your potential.

At risk of invoking the slippery slope fallacy, it’s getting easier to see how this focus on and automation of numbers is making those numbers irrelevant. It takes very little skill to become ‘raid-ready’, just time. And, for those of us with full-time jobs and families to look after, time is often at a premium ¹, meaning we can feel somewhat obligated to optimise our gaming, sometimes to the detriment of fun.

So what happens when acquisition of gear is no longer necessary?

For Great Justice!

I play Guild Wars 2 as well as WoW. If you’re not familiar with GW2, it has almost no gear progression: you get to max level (80), and any gear with the stats you need is available via several means, including the Trading Post (equivalent to WoW’s Auction House, more or less). In other words, you can directly buy pretty much the best stats in the game (not getting into the debate about Ascended gear, which is slightly more powerful but harder/more time consuming to acquire, and only available for trinket slots at present).

Guild Wars 2 also has dynamic stat scaling too: go into a low-level zone on your level 80 character and your effective level gets lowered to the maximum for that zone; enter World vs. World on any character below maximum level and you get up-levelled to 80. Structured PvP is interesting, too: not only are you boosted to maximum level, you are given a set of armour with no stats, plus a single trinket that gives you a completely standardised set of stats. You don’t have to spend any time or currency on this, resulting in a completely level playing field (class balance aside).

So what do Guild Wars 2 players strive for? The short answer: appearance, fun and victory. Like WoW, GW2 lets players alter the appearance of their armour and weapons by using other items as a source; hence, players run dungeons in order to acquire items they think look nice. Additionally, they do things because they are fun – the endgame is not like WoW’s at all, with no raids, no tiers and (for now) no expansions, so players are free to set more of their own goals.

Then of course there’s WvW/sPvP, where the goal is quite simple: to win. In both cases, gear plays no part in one’s chances of success, and is not a factor in the rewards.

Dark Simulacrum

I bring up Guild Wars 2 not as an example of what Blizzard should copy, but to show that it can be possible to have a successful game in which gear progression is not a factor. Of course, GW2 differs in many other significant ways, many of which are primarily there as an alternative to gearing up – most obviously, ArenaNet have committed to releasing new content every month, for free, and often for a limited time.

That’s not to say Blizzard shouldn’t copy anything from ArenaNet – if it’ll work in the context of WoW, it absolutely should be implemented; good ideas are good ideas, regardless of who comes up with them.

Vestments of Prophecy

So what rewards would be acceptable for killing an Instance boss, if not statistically superior gear?

Already, we have one answer: items for use in transmogrification. Some folks may see this as the domain of ‘socials’, but each to their own – having your character look the way you want is a perfectly valid goal in my book.

Then there’s Challenge Modes, which already do not provide any kind of numerical upgrade, instead awarding ‘prestige’ things like mounts, pets, titles and so forth. Furthermore, there are realm-wide leaderboards, giving really good teams bragging rights.

Both of these things are relatively small-scale, however, and may not work so well for raid-sized content. What to do there? There’s a complicating issue here: how will new tiers scale? Will they be at the same level, numerically, as current tiers? If that’s the case, it’d go a long way towards reducing the way tiers become obsolete as new ones are introduced, and I personally would love it if all raids of a given expansion could remain relevant throughout.

While adopting Challenge Mode’s stat-normalisation could work for raids, I don’t think the timed aspect would. In fact, it’s hard to think of something that would effectively offer the equivalent to the dungeons’ Gold, Silver and Bronze ‘medals’. There could be a ‘difficulty’ setting, but the problem there is having to complete the raid several times at ever harder difficulties, which may get tedious very quickly, although this could perhaps be alleviated if the difficulty was adjustable on a per-boss basis.

So far, so traditional, but what about something… more? To bring up Guild Wars 2 again, I think WoW could benefit from taking transmog even further with armour dyes and craftable ‘skins’, i.e. armour made purely for use in transmog.

I say that entirely with the realisation that such a thing would require extremely large-scale changes to the game. Obviously there’s no way to apply custom colours to armour in WoW at present, and implementing one would mean a lot of work to make it backwards-compatible with existing armour models. Perhaps at first, only new armour would be alterable, with older gear updated over time.

Expanding on the dye idea further, the colours could, like in GW2, be craftable, perhaps by scribes or alchemists, and recipes would be one of the new kinds of drops from instance bosses, with the colour’s rarity and difficulty of acquisition being based on its value to players (black = most valuable, guaranteed; it’s one of the most expensive on GW2’s Trading Post).

Naturally, tailors, leatherworkers and blacksmiths would craft the appropriate class of armour, and engineers and enchanters could even get in on the act by providing cool animations and glow effects and so forth.

Solar/Lunar

Blizzard maintains a very careful balance in WoW to ensure as many types of players enjoy the game as possible. They know better than any of us what motivates players, and they’ve had eight years to fine-tune things in a way that no other MMORPG can match, so obviously, removing a fundamental aspect of the game is not going to go down well with the type of player who likes downing raid bosses just for the sake of acquiring new gear and seeing bigger numbers.

Furthermore, although there’s plenty of complaining from a subset of players that dungeons are too easy and that everything’s a faceroll and boring, when the instances are actually challenging, another, larger subset of players complains that things are now too hard (or, in the case of a recent GW2 dungeon, they just don’t run it). The outcry over the initial difficulty of the Cataclysm expansion’s dungeons is evidence of this, although in that particular instance there were other important factors to consider, not least of which was that by the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the playerbase had become used to blitzing through even heroic, current-tier 5-player dungeons, area-of-effect spells out in full force, no brainpower required. Cataclysm‘s dungeons were like a bucket of icy water to the face, and only those bracing themselves for it could cope.

The issue if compounded by the greatly varying levels of skill within the playerbase – the main reason the Raid Finder tool, with its lower difficulty and simplified encounters, was introduced was so more people could experience the boss fights that Blizzard spent a lot of effort creating (alas it turned out to be a not so great solution, as anyone who’s used it can attest).

Designing encounters with varying levels of difficulty may mitigate the problem of a less-than-ideal number of people being skilled enough to experience the content, but it does little to entice players who are not solely motivated by overcoming the types of challenges that raids provide. Hence, carrots, especially ones designed to appeal to stereotypical ‘casual’ raiders: pets, mounts, armour dyes/recipes and other ‘collectible’ things.

Winter of This Content

I’m on the fence really as to whether I believe Blizzard could or would implement something like stat irrelevancy or armour dyes. WoW is growing old, and it won’t be long before its retirement comes, so expending significant resources to change the very core of the game after almost nine years seems unlikely; I suspect rather that we’ll see something like this in the fabled Titan project, whenever it makes an official appearance.

Still, it’s nice to dream, and perhaps might yet see some of these ideas in the World of Warcraft, albeit in watered-down form. Roll on 6.0!

1: As gainfully employed adults, many of us now have something else instead of time: money. What’s that, Blizzard are going to be selling a thing that lets players achieve something in less time? Well, fancy that. ↑

They all fall down

I’ve been levelling a rogue lately, when I’m not being required to tank raids for my guild. Initially I figured I’d go with Subtlety spec since it seemed to be the most suited to levelling due to lots of up-front burst damage; indeed, it’s quite nice being able to just Ambush-Eviscerate and have most regular mobs die there and then.

But. There was talk in the guild of forming an arena team or a rated battleground group, and, based entirely on hearsay, I’m under the impression that when PvPering, one should spec one’s rogue Subtlety.

Thus, I bought a secondary spec, and made it Assassination, because, um, Combat sounds boring? I don’t really know. So what if only Combat gets to use weapons that aren’t daggers too? Daggers are where it’s at, man. Yes. So little Daera is Assassination, and it’s quite fun too, especially now that she has the talent that makes Slice and Dice auto-refresh.

Onward to The Point: as I write this, she’s level 75 (Tricks of the Trade, woo!), and last night I got Violet Hold as a random dungeon. Now, I only started playing World of Warcraft about a week before Wrath of the Lich King came out, so I’m hardly a grizzled veteran. I do, however, distinctly remember doing Naxxramas as a guild, and having to really push the damage on Patchwerk because we all needed to be at around 1,500 DPS lest he reach Enrage. Some people were struggling to do that, at level 80, and only some of them were rubbish players.

Last night, though! Did Blizzard really change the damage output so much when the Great Stats Overhaul of 4.0 arrived, or is it normal for a partially-heirloomed rogue to do 3,400 DPS at level 75? OK, sure, I used Vendetta and the fight was over before that even ran out, but still, really? We got the ethereal dude who does the balls of light thing, and he died before his first orb got anywhere near us. Must have been down in like 15 seconds.

This isn’t fun, especially not for classes that take a while to get going, like shadow priests. Having completely trivial boss fights means they might as well not even be there, and it means new players are not prepared for raids or Cataclysm dungeons.

It’s quite a long time since I levelled my death knight up through those dungeons, but I really hope the bosses there last longer than 30 seconds each. I have a strong suspicion they will, in part just because most heirloom gear doesn’t scale past 80, so there will be fewer vastly over-powered players running around. I want to use the dungeon bosses as practice for when I get to 85 and can start raiding with the rogue, meaning I want to practice on fights that last a good couple of minutes at least (there’s only so much you can do on a training dummy).

Less WoT, moar WoW (and some L4D2)

I spent ages grinding XP for a nice shiny new KV tank. It took the best part of a week, scooting around in my T-28 boat tank, until FINALLY I had both enough XP to research the KV, and enough credits to actually buy one. Hooray!

Then I started to play with it. Good grief it’s slow, taking about half an ice age to turn 180°, and getting overtaken by SPGs. Plus, since it’s the stock KV and is a Tier 5 Heavy tank, I often get matched up against Tier 8 and 9 tanks against which the best I can do is fire puny 75mm HE shells and hope I don’t attract any attention, which is unlikely because even if the enemy tanks don’t spot me, the artillery certainly do. I imagine them rubbing their hands with glee as their aiming reticules slowly gather around my turret.

Now the KV is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth I will meet equally well armed, and probably better armed tanks. It will be a long grind.

In the meantime, I also managed to get myself an A-20, which is like the opposite of a KV: it appears to have armour made of cardboard, and a gun that might as well not even be there. Despite these flaws, it does have one thing going for it: it’s really really fast. Like, 72 km/h fast. This is greatly entertaining, zooming about on the battlefield being eyes for the tanks and artillery that have guns that can do more than ping uselessly off the enemy. It’s fun enough that I decided to go for a second light tank, the Leopard (from the German tech tree). It’s slightly slower than the A-20, but it turns more like a Tron lightcycle. Excellent for confounding one’s foes.

And then… and then I stopped playing. I think the prospect of the gigantic grind required to make the KV competitive is putting me off.

Left for dead tank

Just as I was trying to come up with an alternative to shooting tanks, I get an invite to a game of Left 4 Dead 2. Golly gosh that game is exciting! I am distinctly average at it (actually more towards the ‘crap’ end of the scale), but it’s the kind of game you can still have fun in despite that. It’s also completely lacking in grind: you start, you get good weapons, and you shoot zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies (including one called a Tank!).

I discovered I rather like the auto shotgun, even though the combat shotgun is ostensibly better (it definitely has a better sound, and looks more badass). Swinging a fire axe about is also tremendously fun.

Mine!

Just as I am starting to enjoy L4D2, I’m also reading people discussing Minecraft, and now I want to play that again! Man, so many games. I played Minecraft a while back, when it was v1.3, but not since. Now I am feeling the urge to dig and build in 1m³ blocks.

Overall effect

AND! I bought Mass Effect, after reading a blog post on FemSheps and then remembering that the game sounded interesting. It was only £10 on Steam, too, which was nice. I haven’t actually played it yet, though, because by the time it had downloaded it was about 1 in the morning.

Wow, seriously

Yes, srsly, I am playing WoW a bit more now too, still on Zoe’s account. I daren’t install the game on my own PC. Still, what limited time I play, I’m back to shamaning it up. The shaman originally had an Elemental spec, and a Restoration offspec that neither of us ever used. Then I read an blog post by someone talking about Enhancement and wanted to try it out, so we dumped the Resto spec and changed it to Enh, and hoo, it’s fun! Fists of flame!

So anyway, I then wrote/adapted/ripped off a Resto Shaman Guide and since I’d done a fair bit of Restoring in WotLK, I got curious, and 57 gold later the shaman re-acquired a Resto spec to replace the Elemental. I’m such a goblin.

I’ve not tried it in actual real instances yet, as I did the spec and associated paraphernalia (glyphs, UI setup, gear) on my lunch break. I’m gonna dive in tonight though, and since the shaman just hit 80 I’ll be trying to fill green bars in Cataclysm instances, of which I have somewhat limited experience. Fun times ahead. Still, at least shaman healing is fairly unchanged from Lich King, so at least I won’t be totally clueless as when I tried to heal Zul’Aman on Zoe’s Discipline-spec priest. That wasn’t fun.

Tanks and the world

I’ve been playing WoW quite a bit lately. A short time ago I got a DK to 85, and while he’s ostensibly main-spec tank, I haven’t actually tanked anything in a random in any of the Cataclysm dungeons. So, dual-wield Frost second spec it is.

I also levelled up a druid, in a cat-based Feral spec, which I’ve been enjoying quite a bit. The character was originally only supposed to be a bank character (hence the name ‘Morcasha’), but then Zoe and I wanted an enchanter, and so we needed to get Morcasha to a higher level. And I just kept going, because it was fun, and because I read a post on Gevlon’s blog about skinning crocolisks in Tol Barad or something for easy money.

Bear Necessity

As I was traipsing around Twilight Highlands in the last few bars of being level 84, helping out the dwarves with their wedding (best questline ever, btw, and also Keely Dunwald is kinda cute), I decided to see what it was like being a bear. This was not entirely out of the blue: I’d done a random a few days earlier wherein the tank abandoned us at the last boss, and one of the DPS asked me to tank. I was like “lol no” (paraphrasing here), because I had no idea what I was doing in bear form. So anyway, turns out it’s not really that hard! Certainly less buttons to push than cat form, although since my UI was set up specifically for cat, it didn’t work so well for bear.

So I bought dual spec and made the second spec pure bear. And lo! I am almost indestructible when taking on normal mobs! In cat form, when levelling, taking on more than 2 mobs at once is a risky thing, as you are rather squishy and your heals barely do anything (healing for ~4K out of 75K at level 84). In bear, though, with a proper bear spec: bring it on! Obviously it’s news to nobody that a tank-specced character can survive better, but it’s surprising just how much difference a few (really a few – maybe 5 or so) talent points in different places can make; going into bear form in a spec optimised for cat DPS doesn’t really help much: sure you can get aggro better, and are slightly tougher, but you’re missing the uncritability, damage-reduction and Pulverize talents that are pretty much the point of being a bear tank.

World of Tank

Now that I have this lovely bear spec, what could I do with it? I mean, it’s not like I tank much on my DK, despite being much more familiar with tanking that class because of my experience in Lich King. Then again, it might be precisely because of that familiarity that I’m reluctant to try it: I want to try new things. Bear tanking is something I’ve never done, and I’m curious to see how it plays.

Perhaps once I get more familiar with the Cataclysm instances I will try tanking them on my DK, too. He’s certainly better-geared than the druid, and like I said, I pretty much know how to play the class already (I even levelled him in tank spec). Honestly, though, I’m not sure. Before I stopped playing WoW last year, I had a warrior tank that I really enjoyed playing, much more thank a DK. I think it was something to do with the mobility, and the variety of abilities at my disposal, and from what I’ve read and in my limited time with the spec experienced, bear is quite similar.

Speaking of tanks…

If you’ve been reading Tobold’s blog lately, you’ll notice he’s been posting a lot about World Of Tanks, a free-to-play team-based tank warfare game. I don’t know much about it beyond what I’ve read on Tobold’s blog (and the occasional Rock, Paper, Shotgun article), but it does sound interesting. I imagine it as a sort of slower-paced Counter-Strike, although that may turn out to be laughably far from the truth. No matter, it’s definitely something I’m going to look into, perhaps to the extent that I forget about WoW for another four months. I shall report back here if/when I have anything interesting to say about the game.

Bytes To Bytes, Bits To Bits

I haven't played World Of Warcraft since the end of August, and I'm not sure what I want to do with my account. It's paid up until the end of March 2011, so it's not like there's any urgency, but it's been on my mind somewhat lately. I've considered logging in to give away all the stuff I can, including the gold, and I've considered just cancelling the account without doing this. I've considered playing again, too, as I still read some WoW blogs and the talk of the Shattering is quite interesting. And yet, the longer I go having not played, the less find myself caring about the game; at the moment, the only things that interest me are seeing the new Azeroth from a levelling perspective, and continuing my Worldview series (oh how optimistic I was that I would cover any significant amount of the world before it got Shattered!). Honestly, the main thing preventing me making a decision on the matter is the thought of having to download the various patches released since I last played.

I have almost no interest in raiding, least of all in Icecrown Citadel. I don't care about loot – this close to Cataclysm it's all pointless anyway. The only slight interest I have is seeing how my level 80 characters (and my 77 warrior) perform with the new talent trees. I also wouldn't mind going to Ulduar again, not to defeat bosses, but to do a Worldview post (or series) there, as it really is a fantastic place.

In some respects one of the things I miss most about WoW is gone forever: the exploration and discovery. Sure, the world is changed, and sure, there are and will be new zones and dungeons to see, but the game is no longer really new and strange and exciting to me. It's like Morrowind in that respect, a game I spent countless hours playing just because it was so big and there was so much to see – misty, rain-soaked swamps, ash-blighted mountains, a strange giant mushroom town, ethereal and dangerous Daedric ruins, and best of all the creepy steampunk Dwarf ruins, with their mysterious rumbles and clangs. However, because I have experienced all of that, it is of course no longer new, so the adventure of playing though the game again is but a shadow of what it was; very little is new but what I have since forgotten, and the dated, awkward mechanics of the game-play become foremost in my attention, particularly in the long beginning when your character is weak and lacking in the array of skills you acquire by the end of the game – once you've become used to leaping over mountains and covering the length of Vvardenfell in less than a minute, going back to being weak, earth-bound and slow is quite demoralising.

In contrast to games like Morrowind, World Of Warcraft does an excellent job of making you feel at least somewhat powerful right from the start – at no point are you in danger of being killed by a lone mudcrab, and when you try to hit something, you mostly do actually hit it, rather than flail uselessly around it (assuming it's roughly your level or lower). Of course, the memories of past glories are there, and many level 80 characters have seen things a newbie wouldn't believe: setting ghouls on fire off the shoulders of dragons, watching Moonfire glittering in the dark near the Wrathgate, many of these moments preserved in time by the umbrella of Achievements. But World Of Warcraft does a much better job of drawing you in so you see past the limitations of the gameplay mechanics, and moreover, there is just more: more terrain to explore, more variety of things to kill, more weapons to wield, more people to talk to, whether real or NPC. There mere fact that it offers twelve different ways to start the game, depending on the race you choose, and ten different ways to play through the game, depending on the class you choose, is another way Blizzard improves upon the much more initially linear approach Morrowind et al take.

I feel I'm very much an Explorer type – I love seeing what's over the next hill or through the next door. Seeing new things is largely what keeps me interested in a game, and when I've seen all there is to be seen, I start to lose interest. To some extent, I'm reluctant to cancel my WoW account now, with Cataclysm so close, because there really will be, for a time, lots of new things to explore. On the other hand, there are many, many other games that can offer a more completely new experience – Dragon Age, Guild Wars 2 and LoTRO are just three that come to mind right away, and that's just in the (MMO)RPG genre.

Beyond games, there's also my programming: right now I'm still pretty much a noob in the world of web-based software development, and it's still new and exciting. More importantly, it's more directly useful to my life, as it's something I feel I could really build a career out of, as opposed to the mostly stuck-in-a-rut jobs I've had up til now. And the best part is, software development will always offer new things to discover and learn about; innovation is integral to the enterprise. Programming is important to me, and I don't want to let a 'mere game' get in the way of making something of my life.

Perhaps once I'm more settled in a software development career I'll come back to WoW, if it's even still around by then. Or, perhaps I'll ride the wave of the Next Big Thing in MMOs, exploring along with everyone else.

Class Body

Chas' recent post at Righteous Orbs got me thinking about a few things (unsurprisingly—it's a thought-provoking post). The thing I want to write about here is about body shapes in games, and how they relate to the character's role in the game. I'm going to use World of Warcraft for my examples in this post as it's the game I'm most faimilar with.

In most role-playing games, the character you play uses the same basic model regardless of what class it is, and as Chas noted, they're invariably well-build musclemen if male, or "sexy" if female. Naturally there are exceptions: I don't think female orcs, trolls or tauren (or even dorfs) in WoW are supposed to be "sexy", and apparently Blizzard's artists consulted real actual women when designing the Horde females. Imagine that! Maybe it explains why the Horde women are able to stand upright, rather than walking around dragging their fists on the floor.

To use a rather extreme example of body-to-role mismatch, let's look at the male draenei:

Clearly one is a HULK SMASH melee fighter and the other is a sissy robe-wearing flinger of girly magic.

My first character in WoW was a rogue. Rogues are supposed to be sneaky-stealthy types who stab people in the back and then vanish if things get too confrontational. They do not take hits to the face very well at all. And yet, because my rogue was male and human, he was build like Conan the Barbarian, which really grates rather.

My second character was a priest, and this time I made it female. It took a lot of fiddling to come up with one that didn't look like an empty-headed bimbo.

I fully intended her to be a shadow priest, hence the serious face. Alas, her voice doesn't match her appearance in the slightest: she sounds like a bimbo in the same way that my rogue sounds like an 80s action movie character.

Coming from the other end of the spectrum we have the female characters in melee fighter or tank roles. Female blood elves are notoriously thin, and even kitted out in plate armour they look frail, so much so that they looks out of place up front getting smacked in the face by a boss. It's rather silly to imagine them being able to hit as hard, and take hits as hard, as someone three times larger and heavier than they are.

His forearms are thicker than her waist.

Make It Fit

So what could be done about this? I think it's quite simple, at least conceptually: make it so your character's body shape reflects the role it performs. Tanks and plate-wearing melee fighters would be stocky and strong-looking, regardless of whether they were male or female. Rogues and hunters would be lithe and agile, relying on stealth, subtlety and accuracy of attacks rather than brute force. And finally, spellcasters would be thin and physically weak-looking, reflecting their inability to do any meaningful physical damage. Hybrid classes like shaman, druids and paladins could simply have their body shape determined by their primary talent tree (although this may introduce oddness should a player re-spec, unless the body shape adjusted over a few days or something).

I imagine this might annoy some players (anything will annoy someone), so it could easily be made an option - some people might not like the idea of a tough-looking female character, or a thin and weak-looking male. Still, it would be nice to have the option to control a character that actually looks like they would be performing their role.

update:

A reply to Chas' post brought up another point related to my post: animations. As things are now, if you make a priest melee something with a mace, they'll do it in exactly the same way as a warrior, paladin or shaman. The jumping animation, the running animation, it's the same across all the classes for a particular race/gender set.

This, however, is not something I can get too worked up about, as it starts to wander into development constraints territory. Animation is expensive and time-consuming, and creating a different animation for every class, race and sex combination could well be prohibitively so given the relatively minor difference it would make. That's not to say I think it's a bad idea; in fact I'd love Blizzard to do something like that—it's not like they're short of money—but I just don't feel they'd see it as worth the effort, which is a shame. It's small details like that which can really help immersion, even if they're not immediately obvious.

Post Is Late

Good day! Well it is for me, as good as work days can be, which on balance is actually around average. 50% good. So, WoW then, eh? I've not stopped playing in the long time since my last post, but I've also not really had a lot I've felt like writing about. Drama happened with the guild (again), resulting in me pretty much losing interest in raiding altogether. I think I've been on one raid in the past 2 months, and that only because Zoe begged me to come and tank Patchwerk for the weekly. Tanking Patchwerk in a mostly 251-geared Blood-spec DK tank is kinda dull. Zoe did did 360 DPS on her Disc priest. I think she was the only healer, too.

And speaking of tanking! I might have mentioned in these hallow'd posts my orc warrior. He's called Sibher and he's a tank. He's also now level 77, and has been Prot spec from day one. Well, from level 10 at least, as much as a level 10 character can be said to have any spec at all with just one talent point. So warrior tanking. There's a lot more to it than DK tanking, that's for sure. Many more buttons to press, or at least that's how it feels. Definitely more dynamic, and zooming about like a bit spiky pinball of doom is great fun. I just seriously with you got Heroic Throw sooner, and not damn level 80.

I actually levelled all the way to 75 as Prot spec, and to be honest I think this is the best way to do it - you are really really hard to kill, and with DPS gear on you still do a pretty high amount of damage. Soloing elites of your own level or maybe 1 higher is often possible. Rounding up a bunch of 9 mobs and killing them all at once is routine stuff - they don't hit very hard individually, so while Shield Block is up you're more or less invincible. Unless there's more than one spellcaster in the mix, then you're stuffed. Hate spellcasters.

At level 75 I got him a Fury spec, then bought him another Bloodied Arcanite Reaper, and... well, did crap DPS to be honest. I don't really know what I'm doing wrong but other classes (hunters, warlocks and boomkins in particular) seem to do vastly more damage than me in dungeons. At 77 with full heirloom gear I can manage about 1300 DPS on a training dummy, but in instances it barely gets above 1000. I discovered that having enough Hit rating is essential, as not only do missed melee swings lower your DPS, they also generate no rage, with has an even bigger impact on your damage output.

And maybe I'm doing it wrong or something but Fury DPS is kinda... simplistic. All I seem to do is hit Whirlwind and Bloodthirst on cooldown, and Slam when it procs. Maybe Execute on a boss but they're usually dead by the time I notice their health is below 20%. Four buttons, then, none of which are spammable. I dunno, it just seems weird not to be constantly using GCDs for something. Maybe I should put Sunder Armor on my bars.

And Another Thing

I didn't play WoW at all last night. Instead, I worked on my new Project: learning how to program for the web. Specifically, Python. I didn't actually get much done, having managed to install Apache and Python, then Pylons, and I still need to get some kind of SQL going (Bob recommends PostgreSQL instead of MySQL so I'll give that a pop).

The purpose for all this is two-fold. Firstly, I need to wean myself off WoW. I am too easily tempted by distraction for it to be good for me, and I would be better off spending my time doing something with real-world benefits. Which leads into the second point: I want eventually to make this a career. I enjoy programming, having done a lot of Delphi, HTML, CSS, and lately at work some VBA (yuck), and I've dabbled a bit in Javascript. I believe web programming is going to be very important in the coming decades, so I want to make sure I'm prepared. Programming jobs are usually well-paid, so hopefully with Zoe becoming a teacher we'll have a comfortable life together :-)

Healers Are Overrated

Recount from Keristraza in heroic Nexus:

The druid was actually a tree until we downed Anomalous. After that, he apparently decided he'd be more useful as DPS, and… well, nobody died, so I guess he was right.

It Biggles The Mind

Whilst browsing MMO-Champion's Bluetracker RSS feed in Google Reader, I came across this excellent post. This is awesome! I have a bunch of critter bites on one of my characters, and now I can't wait for Noob'Rekhan (or any of the first-in-wing Naxx bosses) to be the weekly just so I can tame Mr. Bigglesworth :D

Wherein I answer questions

As seen on Kiss My Alas, I hereby present answers to questions:

1. Raider, farmer, PvPer, or altoholic?
Mostly raider, with a bit of altoholic thrown in when I get the time, which alas is quite rare these days.

2. Favorite raid or dungeon?
For raid, definitely Ulduar. I just love the style, the architecture and the lore. For dungeon it's gotta be Dire Maul, it's beautiful (and ogres are cool). I still want to do a Worldview on Dire Maul

3. Number one choice for a new playable race?
Before the Cataclysm announcement I would have said goblin, but now, umm... ethereals are pretty cool? A vrykul would be quite fun maybe, although they're a little tall.

4. Class you suck at the most?
At the moment, rogue. My first ever character, I levelled him to 55 then abandoned him to make a priest. Then a shaman. Then a DK. I recently went back to the rogue, kitted him out in full heirlooms, and got him to 58 and Hellfire Peninsula. And now he gets killed by hellboars one level higher than him.

5. Original UI or modded UI?
Modded, totally. The default UI is painful to heal with, I feel like I'm blind. For tanking it's not as bad, although all my UI layouts have my character and its target's health bars in the middle just below my character. When they're up in the corner they're too far out of the way, especially on a large-ish (21") widescreen monitor. Plus the default DK rune display is crap - especially when tanking, you need to be looking near the middle of the screen, not at some tiny round icons way off in the corner.

6. Profession you’ve never levelled past 200?
Engineering for one. My level 22 paladin is an engineer but my god it takes so much bag space. Alchemy and blacksmithing are another two, and I think that's it. All the secondary professions I've levelled to max, on various characters.

7. Favourite flying mount?
I'm quite fond of the red drake you can get from the Wyrmrest quartermaster - it's the first epic mount I bought, and I got another one for my DK even though he has the bronze one from Culling of Stratholme. I would quite like an ironbound proto-drake, though I doubt I'm ever likely to get one.

8. Nozdormu — friend or foe, you figure?
He seems like an okay kinda chap.

9. Useless item you have in your bank that you’ll never get rid of?
Got a whole pile of Tier 7 gear in my priest's bank, along with a Super Simian Sphere that dropped in a Naxx25 run ages ago. My DK also has the huge sword that drops off Hakkar in Zul'Gurub. I'm also bad at getting rid of old quest items - my various banks have stuff

10. Most expensive thing you’ve ever bought?
Epic flying, sadly.

11. Favorite starting area?
Definitely Mulgore, it's lovely and I love the tauren lore. The DK starting zone is alo really well-done, too. I also get a bit nostalgic whenever I find myself in Elwynn Forest as that was my first experience with the game, sneaking about on my rogue being a total noob. I didn't even know what "DPS" meant until I got to level 40 or so.

12. Inane goal you worked hardest to achieve?
Probably The Explorer, just cos Caera The Explorer kinda rolls off the tongue (though she's usually Ambassador Caera these days).

13. Darion Mograine VS Tirion Fordring, gloves off — winner is?
Darion. Tirion hits like a girl.

14. Game music or your own playlist?
I usually have the music off completely, and the ambient sound turned up. Sometimes I'll put the music on if I'm in the right mood, but not very often.

15. Particular option or setting that you always toggle on a new alt/server?
I always have to arrange my UI it's inevitably not set up properly for a new character. Luckily I have a few standard Pitbull profiles I use for most things.

16. Highest amount of levels gained in one play session?
I really couldn't say, though it was possibly my orc warrior in heirloom gear, who I think I got to level 14 in one go.

17. Thing you’d most like to experience or see in-game?
Algalon! I reeeaalllly want the Starcaller title :D

18. Worst PuG moment?
Ohhh where to start. The one that stands out is when I was a relativlely new 80 DK tank, still not completely comfortable in the role despite having levelled in that role/spec. It was in Forge Of Souls and I was being quite cautious, marking targets etc., only to have them mostly ignored by the impatient DPS who kept pressuring me to hurry up, and often pulled "for" me. This is despite me being 2nd on total damage for the instance, and the rogue still wearing heirloom gear. In the end they pissed me off so much with their elitist wanker attitude I pulled the last boss and dropped group, leaving them to it.

19. Best dungeon/raid moment?
Either finally getting Sindragosa down, or likewise Putricide. I think the Putricide victory felt better partly because for the last 20 seconds of the Sindy fight I was stuck inside an ice tomb and couldn't see what was going on - all I could see was her health bar gradually approaching 0 and everyone on Vent getting excited :D

20. Worst quest ever that you totally hate doing?
There's a quest in Tanaris that has you collecting Roc feathers or something. You only need 3 but they have such a low drop rate, and there aren't that many Rocs around.

21. First thing you do when you hit 80?
Visit the class trainer, then buy some gear if I have enough emblems.

22. Character (of yours) you would RP as if you had to?
Possibly my orc warrior, or maybe my priest. My priest is burdened with an idiotic voice :(

23. Keyboard, mouse, or both for using abilities?
Keyboard for anything important, mouse for stuff like drinking Noggenfoggers.

24. Thottbot or WoWhead?
Whichever comes up first on Google.

25. Acronym you’ve seen in chat but don’t understand?
I kept forgetting what "idd" meant for a long time. It's finally stuck now, indeed.

26. Plot point you’d like to see resolved someday?
Pass. I'm not familiar enough with the lore to be able to answer this.

27. Biggest thing you’re looking forward to in Cataclysm?
The world events leading up to it, hunters not using mana any more (and having infinite ammo), elemental shamans getting a proper AoE, the new zones, new instances being a challenge rather than an AoE grindfest… loads of stuff. Also really looking forward to 10- and 25-player raids dropping the same loot.

28. Guild event you’d like to see?
Full and regular 25-man raids.

29. Level range you hate being in?
Most likely 10-20, because you don't get the quick levelling as in 1-10, and you have to run further afield on foot more, and, at least as a priest, you're woefully underpowered. As a hunter it's not so bad. The Outlands level range wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the overwhelming number of bad DKs you have to group with in randoms.

30. Favorite map to quest in?
Possibly Feralas, because it's so pretty, likewise for Grizzly Hills. I also like Searing Gorge for some reason - I think it's because it's quite atmospheric, and not too large.

Heroic Difficulty

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when heroics were actually hard. I'm not talking so much about how they got nerfed for speed reasons (gogogogo no time to sit around waiting for Ionar to disperse three times, we get the idea, once is enough), but rather about a time when did them in mostly blue gear (kinda like how Gevlon and co raid ICC now), when the ilevel 200 epic at the end was a highly priced bit of loot. One of our tanks ran Utgarde Pinnacle twenty-six times before the Red Sword of Courage finally dropped for him, and this was long before LFD meant tanks could get a group at the drop of a hat. Back then, that sword was the best pre-raid tanking sword in the game, and even the ones from Naxxramas weren't a huge improvement, at least in 10-player.

I sometimes read about how the design of the Northrend instances is conducive to them becoming an AoE grindfest, and to be honest I'm not really convinced. The harder heroics were not like that in the beginning; tanks simply could not survive the constant high level of damage from a pack of mobs while they were all burned down at once - they had to be taken out one by one in order to reduce the incoming damage to a manageable level, much like in Halls Of Reflection now. People might even have used crowd control(!) to help out. Imagine that!

No, the problem I think is gear level inflation. When the highest level of gear was 213, all was fine, and nobody really over-geared heroics unless they were part of a 25man raiding guild that had Naxx on farm. Then came Ulduar, where 10 reasonably motivated people could get together and kill bosses and get 219 level stuff, or even 226/232 if they fancied a real challenge. Then came Trial of The Crusader, upping the gear level to 232 for 10man (245 for 10man heroic), along with the 5-man Trial of The Champion instance which dropped 219 gear on heroic mode. Aaaand again when Icecrown Citadel was opened: higher item level (251/264) and new 5-man instances dropping loot of the same level as that of the previous raid tier. Add to that the availability of a full Tier 9 Set of 232 armour just from the emblems that drop from the bosses designed for 200 blues, and you can see where the problem is.

Blizzard have got themselves into a bit of a bind here, with their desire to make the latest tier of raiding accessible to everyone. That's all very well, a noble goal, but the side effect has been to make the previous tiers more or less obsolete. The only reason people raid Ulduar, Naxx or Obsidian Sanctum these days is for the achievements, and their associated titles and mounts (or, rarely, just because it's fun, but let's not get into such esoteric concepts here).

So, what's an MMO maker to do? Well, one solution would be to reduce the disparity between the first tier of raid gear and the projected last tier. It really shouldn't be possible in 4th tier gear to output over eight times the DPS you can in first tier. I think the merging of 10- and 25-man loot tables in Cataclysm will go some way towards this, as there no longer needs to be the leapfrog where 10-man gear needs to be better than the prievious tier's 25-man stuff. Reducing loot inflation may also mean fewer loot whores, who only raid for teh shinies. If the next tier's gear isn't vastly better than the current stuff, there'll be less incentive to raid just for loot's sake. Instead, people might raid for (shock horror) the fun and challenge of facing new content. Furthermore, there'll be less of a reason for Blizzard to introduce "wellfare gear" available from emblems: since the differences in gear level won't be so important, it won't be so necessary to have the latest and greatest just to stand a chance in the new raid (although as Gevlon's proved already, that isn't even the case now).

I have no experience with the transition between two expansions, so I'm unsure what to expect when Cataclysm hits.I remain hopeful, however, as despite the problems WoW has now, it's still a damn good fun game and if Blizzard can make it better, I'll be there, trying to bring Deathwing down with 9 or 24 other folks.

Uphill Both Ways, In The Snow

A couple of recent posts (well, one is a link from a recent post), by Larísa and Klepsacovic, reminded me of a couple of times I've had similar experiences of having to fight carefully through an instance and actually use quite a bit of teamwork and communication in order to proceed. They've also got me thinking about another thing but I'll get to that later.

In both of their posts, Larísa and Klepsacovic talk about how they've suddenly been left in the middle of a low level instance missing one or two players, and how they carried on regardless, and most importantly, enjoyed it.

I Like It Hard

I arrived at Klep's lowbie instance post via another of his where he advocates reducing the number of people in a regular dungeon to four. It's an interesting idea, especially since in my experiences levelling my hunter, warrior and rogue the low level instances have mostly been facerolls assuming everyone in the party is at least somewhat competent. Throw in heirlooms and you end up with almost comically overpowered characters.

Take, for example, one of my own sub-five experiences. I'm levelling an orc prot warrior, and a short while back, level 28 or so, I put myself in the queue for a random instance and we get Razorfen Kraul. Almost immediately one of the DPS, a hunter, appears to disconnect. The healer, a shaman, seems to be a bit slow on the uptake too, so I pull a bit more carefully. After a while I notice he's not actually healing at all, because he's also disconnected. That leaves a rogue, a (presumably frost spec) mage, and me. Not sure about the rogue but I am almost fully heirloomed (missing the bow to go in my ranged slot).

We to see how far we can get until they come back, except five minutes later neither have returned. We then votekick them both and wait for replacements, and in the meantime continue further, because hey, it's actually not going so badly. And so we continue, for about half an hour, managing to kill (I think) two more bosses, with none of us dying. Sure, I had to stop quite a lot to bandage and eat, but with my heirloom gear and their DPS things were dying too fast to do any life-threatening damage. The rogue was sapping, the mage was sheeping, increasing the odds in our favour whenever possible. It was, as Klep and Larísa discovered, a lot of fun. For me, it's how five-man instances should be played: crowd control, careful pulls, and actually having to worry about wiping. It's fun, in my opinion, whereas the speed-pull AoE-everything method in today's five-mans (the ICC ones excluded) is really quite boring for most of the party (it's still an interesting challenge when I'm tanking).

The fun didn't last forever, or even until the end of the instance, for we did eventually get a replacement healer and DPS, and from there on things went downhill. The new DPS was a rogue, and since he was similarly heirloom'd up, apparently decided he was capable of tanking stuff, and rather than let me pull, did so "for" me. I considered asking him to maybe let the tank do the pulling, and thought about asking the healer to maybe not heal him, but in the end I decided to go with the flow and just pull quicker, not giving the rogue a chance to get aggro. This is not easy as a rage-starved level 28 prot warrior, incidentally. Luckily we were near the end so the gogogogo didn't last too long.

Back In My Day

I really don't want to come across here as a nostalgic know-it-all pining for the golden days of vanilla WoW and how it was all so much better back then. Hell, I only started playing a week before Lich King came out, so I don't even know what it was like back in the day. I have, however, experienced challenging five-man content: when Naxx and OS were the only level 80, places like Old Kingdown or Utgarde Pinnacle were a real challenge. Patchwerk was a tough boss, reqiuring a level of DPS that now seems like a joke (you needed six damage folks each doing a massive 1,500 DPS to beat his enrage timer). These days you can almost treat Naxx like a very big five-man, certain bosses notwithstanding (Four Horsemen, for instance, or Razuvious).

What can Blizzard do to avoid people facerolling level 85 content? They've already said they don't like the current round-em-up-and-AoE mentality, and plan to introduce more crowd control in Cataclysm. I really really hope this comes true. As Reversion said:

It might be a nightmare at first. Forcing people to use CC (as they have said will happen more) means fights are going to be harder and more complicated. Tanks will have to do more than just AOE spam. Also healers are going to have to get better at triage instead of just ‘topping people off’. All this means instances runs may well be a rude awakening for many. Personally I am hoping for it. I am hoping it will blow away the current level of stagnation in randoms and get people think more and do more. I only hope that overgeared morons will not be able to steamroll their way to 85. I want to see them slam hard into the wall and learn to play again.

The other problem I see is the degree of gear inflation present in Wrath Of The Lich King. As I said above, Patchwerk was considered a serious DPS check in the early days of the expansion, and yet you now have classes capable of almost ten times that level of damage output. Tanks in the Naxx days would be lucky to reach 30k health with raid buffs, yet now they prance around with 55k unbuffed. Moreover, avoidance has become so high that Blizzard had to reduce dodge by 20% across the board in Icecrown Citadel or face some serious balancing issues with boss damage.

So is the solution simply harder instances and smaller increments between gear/raid tiers? I doubt it's that simple, but I for one would like to see such things. I would like challenging content that isn't only based around raids (or PvP but that's a whole other ballgame). Perhaps too with the proposed changes to the emblem system, people won't just run heroic instances for the Cata equivalent of frost emblems, but instead do them because they're a fun challenge.

OMG IT LOOKS DIFFERENT

Yeh so the green design was kinda dull, and Blogger seduced me with its fancy new template designer, and I saw the "picture window" design with the rain and thought "that kinda looks like Storm Peaks, vaguely".

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL

No indeed, for I along with fellow guildie Scootz have been experimenting with video, ostensibly for the recording of boss kills. Here is an example:

You may notice a distinct lack of sound in this video. I did upload it with Dry Kill Logic's Rot in the background, and had it timed wonderfully so that the song ends (suddenly, as it does) just as the boss dies. Alas, Warner Music Group being the bunch of 19th century copyright holdout fails they are, have decided that OMG THIEF YOU MUST PAY FOR USING OUR MUSIC FROM NINE YEARS AGO IN YOUR MINOR VIDEO THAT PROBABLY ONLY FIFTY PEOPLE WILL WATCH. Bet you that's what their automatic ban-machine was thinking. Maybe I should turn it black-and-white and add a jaunty piano soundtrack to go with the speeded-up visuals.

Also note that it's in glorious high definition. Well, sort of. I recorded it with WeGame, and WeGame's definition of HD is "640 pixels high", as opposed to the usual "720 pixels high". Still, it's better than 320 pixels high which just reduces on-screen text to meaningless dots.

Chain Pulling

There's a post at Kill Ten Rats that mocks the somewhat absurd nature of pulling groups of enemies in an MMO. Basically, no matter how you pull, any other enemies outside a set distance, whether they be in the same room or not, will completely ignore you, even if you pull with a honking great big flashy exploding fireball of doom.

But one of the comments (the first one, by NBarnes) puts forth an interesting idea: what if, upon pulling the first group, the entire instance was alerted to your party's presence, and began to make its way toward you?

If done right, this could make an instance really exciting, as you'd be racing against the tide, desperately trying to reach an objective before becoming overwhelmed. If there were multiple paths through an instance, you could perhaps employ some tricks to divert enemies away from you, although you'd then have them racing to catch up behind you, adding to the pressure.

This sort of mechanic is already in the game to some degree in instances like Violet Hold, or the Thorim fight in Ulduar: waves of enemies come at you and you have to fend them off. The problem here is that the location is more or less static: you basically stand in the same room and take what's thrown at you. Culling Of Stratholme and Pit Of Saron, on the other hand, have a "gauntlet" section, where enemies keep on coming at you until you get all the way through it. It's still a relatively small area of the zone, but the important difference is you have to make your way from point A to point B whilst fighting off enemies (or in the PoS case, rounding them up then fighting them all at once).

Boss fights in such a place could differ from the norm in that you'd be quite pushed for time - perhaps the party would enter the boss's room and the doors would lock for a time, keeping the approaching enemies at bay. You'd then have a clearly defined (thus controllable, from an encounter mechanics point of view) area in which to do battle. Defeating the boss could then throw up some kind of permanent obstacle to the enemies, and you'd have to leave via a newly uncovered (and also enemy-free, for now) route.

As with the boss encounters, there could be sections where you're allowed a brief reprieve, restore mana, top people off, then away you go again, into the fray!

It's obviously impossible to say how well this kind of dungeon would work in practice, and how hard it would be to balance. I also think it should be reserved for the higher levels, since by then tanks would have more experience (barring those who levelled as DPS then respecced once they reached the level cap) and would be better able to cope with the constant pressure to move forward, better able to round up enemies whilst on the move.

Really, there are many possibilities for this kind of encounter, and whether it's fun or not really depends on how well it's balanced, or the timing of enemies. Perhaps they wouldn't come in "waves" as such, but instead more randomly, with different mixtures: at one point you might encounter a large, tough monster on its own, other times weaker but more numerous ones grouped together.

The element of randomness would, I think, add to the experience, as otherwise you'd get into a situation where people could simply learn the sequence and dance their way through it, eventually narrowing it down to one optimum path. I've read in various places that at least some people would prefer more dynamic encounters (unless they're PvP-like, where the rules are completely different), and I believe this sort of idea could work well and allevieate some of the grind if it offered enough variety.

Worldview: Felwood

Felwood, the green unpleasant land bordering Darkshore, is a sickly, diseased place. The wildlife is rabid, with large gashes and weeping sores covering the bodies of the wolves and bears, and many of the trees have been altered to feature twisted "faces", complete with dripping green ooze for saliva. Even the elven lanterns that light the road are corrupt. For certain, questing in Felwood is an uncomfortable experience, with most of the objectives based on cleansing the demonic taint. It's no surprise that the questgivers here are members of the Cenarion Circle.

Unlike Feralas, the green of Felwood is far from lush – rather it is the green of poison and decay and worse. In spite of all this, however, there are a few plants still remaining free of the illness which has soaked into the land, and the owls of the region likewise seem untouched.

Approaching Felwood from Ashenvale in the south; the air is not so bad here.

Two furbolg clans in the area, the Deadwood and the Felpaw, have been corrupted and are hostile to players, and to the Timbermaw tribe in the north.

The thick forest canpopy rarely offers an unobstructed view of the sun, placing almost the entire region into a murky gloom.

Ancient elven ruins mark the entrance to the demonic enclave of Jaedenar in the west of Felwood, where the Shadow Council go about their business.

A large portion of Jaedenar is underground, accessible through this building.

A change from the rotten green outside, the demons' lair is a mixture of red and blue.

Warlocks of many races inhabit the caverns along with the demons.

The red tinge permeates the air surrounding demonic dwellings.

Dead and dead: elven ruins and rotting trees.

The lake in at the bottom of Bloodvenom Falls, which then flows into Bloodvenom River.

Bloodvenom River overflowing the cliffs that separate Felwood and Darkshore. From here the river flows down numerous waterfalls and eventually becomes Wildbend River.

Shatter Scar Vale. The burnt patches were caused by infernals and fire elementals landing here during the invasion of the Burning Legion

A diseased bear, its wounds seeping openly, heads towards the road in northern Felwood.

The northern parts of the zone aren't quite so heavily canopied, although the thick, tainted air still occludes much of the light.

Occasionally, though, the sun does manage to reach the forest floor, resulting in a few patches of light here and there.

In Irontree Woods, in the north of the zone, these three Ancients – Hastat, Stoma and Vartrus – have been permanently petrified.

Corrupt treants also wander Irontree Woods.

More open areas near Irontree Woods.

A furbolg of the Felpaw tribe stands watching his camp in northern Felwood.

Looking along the road heading south back into Felwood.

Along the eastern edge of Felwood, the massive cliffs of Mount Hyjal soar, protecting the World Tree Nordrassil.

As you can see, Felwood is by no means a pretty place, but nonetheless I feel is quite interesting, particularly in the effect is has on players questing there.

Photography and Screenshots

As I mentioned in my first Worldview post, one of my hobbies is photography. I've been doing it for around 8 years now (it seems weird saying that, as it doesn't feel anywhere near that long. Makes me feel old) and I've used assorted different types of camera from basic point-and-shoots with no manual controls, up to DSLR+lens combos that cost more than my car (which is to say, about £1100. I have an old car).

However, despite the differences in technique when using these various cameras, certain important things remain constant: you are looking out fully immersed in the environment, with all your senses in use, feeling the world around you. The process of capturing a two-dimensional image in such a situation generally involves looking at a small rectangle onto which is projected said image, then waiting for the right moment at which to trip the shutter, freezing and storing that small slice of time.

Photography also has some common physical constraints across the board, though they vary in extent depending on the camera and lens (and film) used. Contrast can be a problem, especially on sunny days or in dark rooms with few light sources. Low light levels generally mean slower shutter speeds, which can mean blur due to camera shake or subject movement.

One of the biggest constraints is also the one that for many people inspires the photography in the first place: you have to actually be there in the right place at the right time (and looking in the right direction). Depending on the person, photography falls somewhere on spectrum that ranges from "snapshot of where I was" to "work of art" (and a picture can be both at once, but let's not complicate matters). In other words, for many people the photography is secondary to the experience of going somewhere, a record to remind them of the time. For some, the photography is the whole point of going to a place; the journey there is a relatively minor thing. And, of course, there are all the shades in between.

The point is, to take a photo you have to go to a place, and once there you experience it with all your senses. Naturally, people emphasise various sensory aspects differently - my brother, for example, is more likely to remember the sounds of things than what they look like. He is also a far better musician than I'll ever be.

And so we come to Screenshots, and given the above, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Azeroth and Outland are virtual worlds (no, really), meaning the physical limitations of photography don't apply to them. In fact, to get the effects of long shutter speeds, contrast exceeding the limitations of the capture medium, or artefacts like film grain, these things have to be deliberately simulated. Limitations in camera focal length are arbitrarily fixed. Heck, even the mathematically perfect rectilinear projection used in pretty much every 3D game ever is a simulation of how things look in photographs.

Then of course, in WoW, you generally experience the world visually through a rectangle 17-24 inches diagonal, and aurally through either small desktop speakers, or through headphones. You cannot feel, smell or taste Azeroth. You are not there. Furthermore, the real world is really rather large, meaning long travel times, meaning time, effort and, often, money, is required to get around. As a result, you have a strong emotional investment in the place you are going to.

By contrast, Azeroth is tiny. Travel from one end of the world to the other takes half an hour at most, and is mostly a passive experience (sitting on a mythical flying creature while you go and make a cup of tea). When you do have to manually direct your avatar in the world, you don't get tired or out of breath, your legs and back and shoulders do not ache, and you can summon a mount out of thin air and move far faster than anyone on foot, or, if you're in Outland or Northrend, fly without the hassle and limitations of an aeroplane or other unwieldy real-life flying machine.

The upshot of this is much less emotional attachment to places in the game. You spent no effort to get there, so getting and being there means less. You don't feel the world anywhere near as fully, so it's less memorable. The latter point is compounded with the re-use of assets in the game, so once you've seen the caves in Elwynn Forest, you've more or less seen the caves in the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms, and they all kind of blur together into one meta-cave. Even within a zone, most of the landscape features will have few variations, so you end up seeing the same four trees everywhere you go in Azshara. The real world, on the other hand, is of course infintely variable – every place is totally different to every other place.

Lest I seem overly critical of the world Blizzard have created, I should make it clear that this weaker emotional attachment to places is can arguably be a positive thing for creating interesting screenshots. If you climbed Everest and took some pictures from the summit, those pictures would mean a lot to you regardless of whether they were "good" or not: you put an enormous amount of time and effort into getting there, and the simple act of standing on the summit of the world's highest mountain is quite achievement enough. In your euphoria and exhaustion your state of mind would be much less conducive to making good pictures, as you'd have so many other things to think about (even the simple act of breathing would require some concentration). As a result, you might well come home with what to anyone else look like rather generic pictures of some mountains. It's a common mistake of beginning photographers to assume that a picture that was hard to get, such as one taken from the summit of Everest, is one that people will want to see. On the whole, people don't care, and rightly so – all they can respond to is what's in front of them.

Since in WoW getting to places is so comparatively easy, you're much more free to concentrate on what things look like. Moreover, you are basically looking through a camera's-eye view of the world the entire time, so there's no disconnect between what you eyes see and what the virtual camera sees. There are far fewer distractions, too – although the world only fills a quite small portion of your overall field of view, everything outside the bounds of your monitor screen is fairly static, so your brain pretty much ignores it. With headphones on, music off and ambient sounds turned up, you can indeed become quite immersed in the world, just in a different way to how you are immersed in the real world. With the UI turned off ( [Alt] + [Z], if you didn't know), the world is almost pure visual stimulus, so your response to it is likewise going to be highly visual; you enter a peculiar state of mind where you are focussed near-exclusively on the appearance of that rectangle in front of you. So long as you are comfortable with movement and camera control in game, you barely need to think about such things, and it's only when the game forces you to concentrate on them, like when you get stuck on a low fence, that you ever think about them.

I don't know whether this state of mind comes as freely to others as it does to me. Perhaps my years of photography have trained me to enter it more easily. It's actually quite similar when I do street photography: senses other than sight are pushed to the back, and I see the world much more as shapes, compositions and contrasts. When I'm wandering around a zone in "screenshot mode", I try to dampen any thoughts about quests and lore and such, and instead just see.

When it comes to pruning, again, it is easier to separate the good images from the merely ok ones, as there aren't really any feelings attached to any of them regarding the effort involved to get them, since they were all easy to get (usually – there are exceptions, like if I was to do a Worldview on Ulduar or Icecrown Citadel or other high-level instance. I couldn't very well run about merrily taking snaps until the place was cleared first, which would of course require a lot of time and effort).

That's not to say it doesn't take a long time, incidentally – when you've spent two hours waltzing around Azshara pressing the screenshot key whenever you see something even a little interesting (occasionally multiple times with slightly different framing), you end up with 150 images to sort through and try to reduce down to 25 at most. Then they need to be arranged into as cohesive an order as possible so that they look more like a collection and less like a disjointed array of vaguely similar-looking pictures. Still, this point applies just the same to photography as it does to screenshots, particularly with photoshoots.

In the end, photography and making-screenshots-in-WoW (fairly rolls of the tongue, doesn't it?) are quite different activities. You still need the same sense of aesthetics for both, as for any visual medium, but the actual processes each have their own challenges and benefits.

Worldview: Feralas

The lush green forest of Feralas lies in stark contrast to the adjacent dry, baking zone of Thousand Needles. It is a lush forest home to a wide variety of wildlife, including harpies, hippogryphs, gorillas and bears. It is also the location of Dire Maul, one of the great level 60 5-man instances.

The border between Feralas and Thousand Needles.

The characteristic tall rock spires that give Thousand Needles its name also continue some way into Feralas.

The small lake below the Tauren village of Camp Mojache.

The Lariss Pavillion, north-east of Camp Mojache.

In the distance, a village of the Grimtotem tribe of Taurens, who are not part of the Horde.

A waterfall cascading down the mountains that separate Feralas and the Tauren starting area of Mulgore.

The entrance to Dire Maul, guarded by ogres.

Looking west along the outer wall of Dire Maul.

Moving further west, we approach the cliffs overlooking the sea.

On the path leading to northern Feralas, a bridge over another waterfall.

There are more ruins in northern Feralas, many of them occupied by harpies. Northern Feralas is more open than the rest of the zone, and not so gloomy.

The blazing sun makes quite a difference compared to the darkness one emerges from when travelling north.

Ruins around Oneiros.

Some more ruins. There are many patrols of level 62 elite dragonkin in this area…

…and in the centre of Dream Bough sits (occasionally) Taerar, guarding one of the entrances to the Emerald Dream.

Looking north up the lake surrounding Dream Bough.

The Ruins of Ravenwind. These also are infested with harpies - their nests are the rough ball shapes hanging from trees and parts of the ruins.

Heading south again, looking down on the dock where one may catch the boat to Feathermoon Stronghold, a Night Elf town on Sardor Isle.

Looking back up at the cliffs from the coast.

Heading west towards the dock at Feathermoon Stronghold.

Looking south at Sardor Isle, with the Isle Of Dread in the background.

Looking north towards Sardor Isle from some ruins on the Isle Of Dread. These ruins are occupied by a tribe of Naga, whilst the central valley of the island is full of wandering level 60-62 elite chimaera.

The ruins on the south coast of Sardore Isle.

Heading back into southeastern Feralas.

The Ruins of Isildien in the High Wilderness area, populated by ogres.

And that's Feralas! As you can see, it's very green and lush (except for the southern part of Sardor Isle, which is more grey and sickly), and one of the first zones I discovered that really made me stop questing and just look at it. In fact, the zone has affected me so much the colour scheme of my blog is inspired by it (and the header image is a crop of the Lariss Pavillion image).

I briefly skirted around Dire Maul in this post, and I do plan to do a full session(?) on it soon – there really are a lot of interesting things to see in the instance!