Archive for the ‘Important Things’ Category

Patch 3.3 Impressions

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Extra Arena Points

The new change to the PvP daily quest is that it awards 25 arena points as well as the honor and gold that it previously did. While 25 points doesn’t seem like that many, it sure adds up quickly. You can potentially get 175 points per week through doing the PvP daily every day. That amounts to a decent rating increase you would have needed before to get those points per week.

I like that Blizzard is giving new avenues for gear. I also like that they are starting to breath new life into BG’s. I can say that, of the BG’s I have played since the patch went live, people have been trying harder to win. The competition seems stronger and my teammates in random PUGs seem to want to win. I haven’t run across an afk’er yet (not to say that they aren’t out there). This attitude was reflected when Isle of Conquest was the daily. There was some really fun battles that took place because both sides were trying. This makes it more fun for everyone.

Extra Arena Points

Extra Arena Points

LFG Tool

I decided to see what the new LFG tool was all about. I initially did not like how it doesn’t tell you any information while you are in the queue to find a random group, but found that it does not take long. I can see this being a problem down the road when the “new car” smell has gone. If I queue for a random dungeon and it is taking an average of 20 minutes to get groups together, I think that is information I would like to know. I was queued as DPS because I’m enjoying the changes to shadow priests and don’t really enjoy disc healing instances.

It randomly put me into Heroic Violet Hold and matched me with decently geared people. We had a paladin tank who had 40k health unbuffed and a ret pally alongside a marks hunter. Our healer (resto shaman) was the least geared in the group and his gear definitely wasn’t bad. After about 30 seconds in the instance, the hunter left and almost immediately another replacement was found. The rest of the instance went very smoothly and I had a fun time running an old instance with random people.

Overall, this is the LFG tool that should have been in the game years ago. It almost makes finding a group too easy. I can see how some people are worried about it breaking up a server’s community, but I still see a lot of premade groups using the tool to find that last person. As a healer, I usually wanted to heal groups just to help someone out, it was always a lot of work to find that group that was looking for a healer. Not anymore.

LFG Tool

LFG Tool

Gear Changes

One of the patch notes that I had missed during the many times that I read them was the change to the arena gear set bonuses.

Arena Set Bonuses: The two-piece set bonus for all Wrath of the Lich King Arena sets now provides 100 resilience and 29 spell power or 50 attack power. The current four-piece bonus will remain, however it also now provides 88 spell power or 150 attack power.

This change put my priest at 1214 resilience. I like to keep around 1150 resilience to help against cleave teams who try to burn me. This extra bonus not only added spell power by itself, but added extra resilience so that I was able to re-gem some of my gear to lose the extra resilience and trade it for spell power. I now have about 2700 sp as disc which is a big improvement over a number of weeks ago where I was barely breaking 2k due to the amount of resilience that I had to gem for.

New Set Bonus

New Set Bonus

Arena Changes

We haven’t been able to do any arena matches yet to see what affects any new changes have on our games. I know the WotF nerf will take some time to get used to, but won’t affect my team much since I am the only undead. I will have some feedback to those matches tomorrow and hopefully some footage that I can show you.

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Perceived Experts; Social Experiment

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Perceived Experts

I completed the final part of my honor grind for my battlemaster’s trinket (62,000 honor still makes me wonder why the cap is set to 75,000). I had some really good games and some really frustrating ones. Specifically the WSG where we had 5 players who had under 14k health and the next closest to me was 20k. During the grind this week, I see a type of player starting to crop up everywhere. The player that I would call a “Perceived Expert”.

You know the player. It doesn’t matter if you are winning or losing, this player needs to tell everyone else that they fail. They always share their plan of attack, but feel that nobody ever helps them. They are usually the ones who nerd rage during the final seconds of a loss. They are the ones who crack me up.

For example: I joined an Isle of Conquest match. When I joined, 30/40 of my team was dead and the Alliance were about to break through our walls. I checked the map and we literally had nobody at the Alliance base. It was a ghost town. I started healing the players around me when a ret paladin whispers me, “give me fort”. I usually do not oblige people who ask for buffs, but I was feeling generous. With fort, he had a grand total of 17.7k health (he was wearing 2 pieces of deadly, 1 furious, and the rest were blues). He was quickly stomped by the Alliance presence in our base which apparently made him angry. In the final minutes of the match, he let everyone know that we were scrubs, we didn’t know how to play, Horde always lose, and that he deserves better. It was hilarious.

Another example was in EoTS. We were handily winning the game and I was at BE tower defending with two DK’s. The DK’s were having a discussion on how PvP isn’t fair for them. “Rogues are so simple to play” said one to the other. “Yeah, they don’t even need gear”. I checked their gear and noticed a couple pieces of deadly and mostly PvE epics (Naxx level). Their discussion quickly turned to PvE and how they were experts at PvE. They felt that PvP was worthless and that it took no skill. Their view on how good they were at the game made me laugh.

I see this type of player show up more and more. It is the “expert” player who is very moody and has bad gear. There have always been players like this, but I think it is multiplied by the fact that it is getting late in an expansion and people have probably had time by now to level another 80. It is a big transition from being geared to having no gear.

This ultimately brings up the question, “Who really is an expert?”. Although there are exceptions to the rule, most “experts” in my experience are the unsung heroes. They are the ones who help out random people by answering questions in guild chat or trade chat. They are the ones who give friendly advice at the right times instead of just telling the other player how bad they are. They are the ones who know how to take a loss without whining. They are the ones who have been around a long time and have extensive experience with the game.

I think there is a fine line between “expert” and “elitist” and most WoW players fall in the latter category. I do know that the experts aren’t the ones barking orders in bad gear then nerd raging out of BGs.

Social Experiment

There is a fun social experiment you can try. I had a classmate who used to make up words and then say them over and over. He would say these words so many times around people that they would start to say them without thinking. We had a lot of fun making up new words and seeing who we could get to start saying them. You should do the same in World of Warcraft. Make up a short phrase or take an existing phrase and start using it a lot around guildies or friends. See how many of them you can get to start using that term.

Let me know if you are successful! We’d love to here those stories.

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PUGs; Arena Pacing

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

PUGs

We’ve all seen it; Someone is starting a PUG raid and needs a few healers, dps, or tanks. They say in LFG: “LF 2 healers, 3 dps, and 1 tank for VoA25. PST stats and achievement or no reply.” The key point they are trying to make is that they want only quality players who have experience at the fights.

You have been looking for that group all day. Finally you get a chance to join a raid to do that instance. Except there is a problem… You have never done the instance before on this character. Like me, you have done it dozens of times on other characters and know the fight backwards and forwards. You could contribute to the kill with your eyes closed. Your character has the gear and you have the experience but you will never get an invite because you don’t have the achievement.

The sad fact is that bad players ruin raids. Sometimes it only takes one bad apple to spoil an otherwise good raid. This causes a fear and a bad stigma of new players. Very few people want to invite a new player or help them out which makes new players lie to get groups. So the resounding solution is to make sure people have done the fights before, and the achievement is proof of this.

The problem with this thinking is that achievements are not an accurate measurement of how competent a player is. I have played WoW for almost 5 years and have 3 level 80’s, yet I can’t get invites on certain characters because I haven’t done those fights on that particular character. I have also seen people with the achievements stink up a raid because they were carried there by a guild or a random PUG.

IMO, a more accurate representation of how well a player knows his/her class is their gem choices/spec. It is pretty common for a bad player to not know how to gem/spec for their class. It just takes a bit of knowledge by the raid leader to see these mistakes and make a more accurate decision on who gets an invite. The main problem with this is that a lot of people don’t have this knowledge. They know how they themselves should gear and spec, but any other class is like a foreign language.

So is there a solution for new players, veteran players with new 80’s, and raid leaders alike? I would say the best option is for new players to work at getting gear with a guild. Blizzard always offers options for more casual ways of getting gear. So get in that Naxx PUG or get a few friends together and farm ToC. Raid leaders should be a little more generous with who they let come to their raids. Most players aren’t going to ruin your raid and if you aren’t capable of seeing which players will be a hindrance, leave the raid leading to someone else.

Arena Pacing

I have recently gotten my resilience up to an amount that is respectable for arenas (1063 on my priest). Just the increase of 200 points over last week is a night and day difference so far. I am able to stand my ground against faceroll comps and actually stand a chance even if Pain Suppression is on cooldown.

Overall, I am enjoying the changes to resilience for this season. With the new season of gear scaling and all the damage numbers higher than ever, it is nice to have a tool to reduce that dps. There have been very few situations where I get dropped in a GCD (it still happens once in a while). This allows us to play to our class strengths and makes skill and coordination ever more important in arenas. A very good change over previous WotLK seasons where cleave teams were dominant due to high burst damage.

For anyone who plays a healer class, if you have the time and resources, gather a high resilience set of gear and try it out in BGs. At times, you will feel like a raid boss because 4-5 players can’t kill you. It sure gives BGs a whole new dimension when you are tanking half the opposing team. If you happen to be one of the many who is trying to kill Ferngully, be sure to /salute and let me know you’re a reader.

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