February 2016 – Page 6

Raiding and Judgment

February 19, 2016 by Belghast

Raiding Modes

I have a strange topic inside me, that I am going to try and let out this morning. It has been growing there for some time, but wasn’t exactly sure how it would take shape… that is until yesterday and a small conversation with some awesome folks on twitter. For years now I have seen a tendency to discount raid experience that is not in the hardest possible mode of a game. Now granted this is more of a World of Warcraft thing than any other game… because even in say Final Fantasy XIV folks unanimously agree that “Savage” anything is pure madness. Over the years I have seen so many statements to the equivalent of “but I am only raiding normal” and hell I have found myself doing the same, to underpin that my experiences might not be as intense or serious as those of others. When it starts to get under my skin however is when folks treat it in a way that individuals not raiding in the deepest end of the pool, or not raiding at all… are somehow poor players or otherwise flawed. I realize this is really strange timing considering I spent last night getting drug through Heroic Hellfire by some friends… who are genuinely awesome and very skilled players.

Where I would love to take the conversation when it comes to raiding is not towards a direction of player skill, but instead about one of personal preference and prioritization. It always feels like players expect to be either immediately and magically good at raiding… or to be forever relegated to the back burner of LFR. I would wager a bet that very few active raiders right now are in that “prodigy” territory, in that they were simply born awesome at video games… and never have to put in any work. Instead I would continue to wager that most active Mythic raiders got through through an extended sequence of learning their class and cutting their teeth on less difficult content until they developed the skill package necessary to reach their goal of raiding the highest difficulty. So when I see a server first or god forbid a world first…. I don’t immediately think “my god these are a bunch of naturally talented people”, I instead think “these are a bunch of folks that really put in a bunch of training and effort, and devoted a significant chunk of their life to completing this goal”. It becomes a matter of personal preference, and prioritization of their activities to meet those goals.

A Team Sport

The truth about raiding is that personal skill in itself doesn’t get you terribly far, especially as you escalate your way through the difficulty curve. Competing in difficult raid content, means you need to be effective as a group… not just effective as individuals. It becomes less about making sure you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing… and instead about making sure that you are doing what you are supposed to be doing and also at the same time supporting the goals of the team as a whole. Over the years I’ve personally raided at several different levels in this game… with everything from cutting edge progression, to casual Sunday afternoon romps in raid zones. In all cases… I was the same person playing behind the keyboard with the same skills and the same abilities. What changed between the various modes was the amount of focus I was forced to give the game experience, and at the same time the amount of time I had to spend outside of game doing research and planning. In my more serious forays into raiding, I would spend several hours a week pouring over logs… reading various theory-craft forums… all to see if I could squeeze a little bit more out of my game play to lower the margins on the next fight and make it that much closer to a victory.

Basically where I want to go with this is that I feel like as players we need to change how we talk about raiding. Each tier of raiding requires more commitment from the player, and quite honestly… you have to assess where your happy place is. Having experienced lots of different raiding difficulties over the years, I have come to realize that “serious” and “focused” raiding is not my thing. That does not mean I am some how defective, and that I lack the ability to do serious or focused raiding. It simply means that the risk versus reward equation of the amount of “stuff” that I have to do, and the amount of schedule prioritization that is required to make that serious commitment… is not worth the amount of “enjoyment” that I receive from it. I absolutely respect anyone who is raiding serious content, and I tip my hat to the awesome folks that drug me along last night, and I tried my best to stay focused and avoid doing bad things that would hurt the raid. Even though last night was very much a “roflstomp” occasion, since that group has long since moved on to Mythic raiding… it still required enough focus for me to simply not want to do it on a nightly basis.

The Commitment

Honestly I think the group I was raiding with last night is the perfect illustration that raiding simply takes a lot of hard work. While they have technically progressed past Heroic Hellfire Citadel, they are showing up and putting in time to help gear folks that are new to the team, knowing that the gear will be necessary to reach the performance levels needed to succeed in the later Mythic fights. It is not that they somehow magically transformed into Super Saiyans or somehow unlocked their “final raider form” between defeating Heroic Archimonde and starting Mythic. Instead they put in a lot of hard work, and time working through the content… time that they continue to put in trying to pull up the gear level of players to increase the performance. I would never want to somehow discount how important that hard work is, or how awesome the accomplishment of reaching that point as a raid is. What I do what to change is to somehow remove the judgement from the way WoW players in general talk about raid modes. It is a double edged sword, because for bad seed that is calling anyone not raiding what happens to be raiding a “Scrub” or “Trash”… there are dozens of people that well tell themselves that they are simply not “good enough” to do that content.

I would love us to reach a point where we can be okay with the choices of other players. Looking for Raid is awesome for example, because it allows you to see raid like content without putting in any effort. Normal mode is also awesome because it lets you see legitimate raid content without having to focus quite so hard on optimization, and is this great sweet spot when it comes to raiding with your friends. Heroic is also great because it ratchets up the difficulty significantly and requires both team coordination and personal focus to defeat it. Finally Mythic is that place where it requires you to take everything that you have learned and removes the margin of error to a point where you have to execute flawlessly as a team to really get through it. All of those modes have their places, and I don’t begrudge anyone for choosing to stop at a specific step on the ladder. I know personally the highest mode I would ever be willing to raid for example is Heroic, and I am perfectly comfortable with that decision. I am also perfectly comfortable with anyone deciding that the raid game simply isn’t for them… and that they would rather be crafting, or PVPing, or farming Transmog bits… because we all know the real end game is looking amazing. The best feature that World of Warcraft has going for it, is the simple fact that it has so many different things for players to be doing with their time. However it is you choose the spend your time is awesome, because ultimately it is you that needs to decide what makes you happy.

Like a Bandit

Lastly I wanted to thank once again Pugnodeum and the whole Praetorian Guard crew for letting me ride along last night. I had a blast, and made out like a bandit picking up the scraps that no one needed. These are folks who have worked hard to be able to make this content look so easy, and at the same time they are pretty chill about the whole experience or at least have been on the few runs I have now been on with them. This mornings post was not in any way a reference to my experiences last night, but instead something that had kinda been percolating for awhile in my brain… then was dislodged by some discussion on twitter yesterday. I have nothing but respect for the amount of devotion it takes to get where they are in the game, and last Saturday after getting my moose I stayed on the stream to quietly cheer them on in their Mythic Kilrogg attempts. I will continue to be excited for them as they move through the Mythic progression and am amped to know that several of my friends are there with them. As far as me last night… I made out extremely well…. which should help out our significantly more casual raid that we are in the process of pulling together. One that will once again see me return to tanking on the warrior instead of being the goofy gladiator dps thing that I have been doing up until this point.

This is all the cool shit I ended up with…

Where’ve you been, Tam?

February 18, 2016 by Tamrielo

It’s been a crazy few weeks. I started a new job (part-time, but I’m trying to ramp up quickly) while juggling full-time classwork and wrapping up some side projects. Then, the site goes belly-up and locks me out. A bunch of backend corruption caused me to have to reinstall and restore pretty much everything; we’ve been working from a cache for the last week.

The short version is, for the first time in a very long time, I haven’t had the spare energy to write, so the site worked through my post buffer and then, this week, ran out of material. At any rate, things should hopefully be calming down somewhat soon and we can return to regularly scheduled posts.

As for what I’ve been doing lately, game-wise, I’ve been playing a LOT of Warframe. The game really appeals to me once I found my niche in it, and I’ve been playing it more or less to the exclusion of all else recently. I have some thoughts percolating on it and also on MMOs, kind of the present and future of persistent online gaming (is there any other kind anymore?), but it’s all half-baked. I want to get a bit deeper into the game and see how various things hold up before I go blathering about one system or design philosophy or another.

On the business/management side, I’m doing a lot with finance and operations management lately, which doesn’t necessarily make for terribly compelling blog posts (it’s interesting for me, but I don’t know that I need to inflict it on other people).

At any rate, hopefully things will be calming down here soon and I can get back to regular posting. I don’t have Bel’s relentless devotion to posting even when he’s so sick he’s basically dying; I try to post only when I have something to say, and recently I’ve been listening a lot more than talking.

See you next week!

–tam

Hellfire and Gronnlings

February 18, 2016 by Belghast

Enter the Ramparts

Some things changed between yesterdays post and last nights festivities. Firstly I largely abandoned the notion of playing a Monk tank, because I got to thinking about what my actual “goal” was. That goal being helping Grace get a foothold on my server of choice, and prepping her for eventual raid shenanigans. My general theory was that still the fastest way to do that… would be to push hard on running the outland instances as a duo… with me largely just wrecking thinks with thunderclap. We however lacked the finesse to realize that it seems like the absolute best choice here is to hang out at Hellfire Ramparts until the person you are pulling is around level 65 and thus qualified to run all of the various Outland dungeon quests. Without a doubt, after having done all of the lower level Outland dungeons…. Hellfire is the fastest and in theory you could run it fast enough to push up another character extremely quickly. Sure it slowed down significantly after she reached sixty one, but I think the completion bonus would have been enough to keep pushing forward. Granted we probably would have hit the instance lockout of I believe 10 instances per hour… and had to take a brief break here or there. Still I firmly believe that had we actually stuck to this plan… Grace would have been in Wrath of the Lich King already instead of just on the cusp of it.

All told for the evening we managed to push her from 57 to 67 before I simply lost steam. With the recent illness, I have also largely weaned myself off of caffeine other than my morning coffee. This also seems to mean that my ability to stay awake and keep doing the same thing without getting drowsy… has also been adversely effected. I want to say we started up the dungeon train around 6pm and finished up around 8:30 so I guess 10 levels in that time is not that shabby. Essentially we ran normal and heroic versions of Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbogs, Mana Tombs, Auchenai Crypts, Sethek Halls, and finally Shadow Labyrinth. There was a period of time where we had to chain run Slave Pens for a bit… which is pretty much the point we realize that we should have been doing that with Hellfire Ramparts instead. Now we simply need to push a little harder to get out of Outland and into Northrend… though if WoWHead is correct we might not be able to do Utgarde Keep until 69. That is the big thing we are realizing through doing this is the strange quirks as to when you can zone into a specific dungeon. They don’t seem to make much sense, and it feels like at some point they just decided to pick random numbers that don’t actually relate to the quests you are receiving. Basically I am realizing that the older content has suffered greatly for all of the redistribution of crap that happened in Pandaria and Warlords.

Gronnback Riding

In other news I finally managed to get the Garrison mission that rewards the Coalfist Gronnling mount. I am honestly just not sure what I think about it… I mean ANY mount is a positive because it increases the total number of mounts I have and moves me closer to all of those achievements… but riding this thing…. it is ridiculously big. Warlords of Draenor has been the expansion of humongous mounts… from the Corehound mount from the 40 man Molten Core, to the Grinch Yeti… this is very much an expansion of irrational land yacht style mounts. As cool as I might think this mount is… I just cannot foresee myself ever riding it. When you ride around on it, the animation is in such a way as it feels like you are just about to fall off of the back… which strangely causes all sorts of anxiety in me. Regardless I am happy to knock another mount off the long list of mounts that I do not have. At some point I would love to get a group together and camp the various world mounts from Draenor, because as of right now I have ZERO of them.

Alas Troll Side

February 17, 2016 by Belghast

Changed Plans

Yesterday morning I had every intent of coming home last night and pretty much playing Street Fighter V the entire evening. During the day I did a bit of googling and found out that Game Stop apparently carries the Hori Fight Commander 4 controller for use with PS3/PS4/PC. The Game Stop website indicated that a store not terribly far from where I work had “limited” stock so I decided to pop by over lunch. I’ve been bitten by the whole limited stock thing before, but since this was a wild goose chase anyway… I didn’t really mind it much. The last time I was in a Game Stop was to snap up $5 physical copies of Wildstar to convert into play time and digital goodies. When I got there, it took me a bit to locate the controller… and they did in fact only have one. The goofy thing however is that it was being closed out for $20 unlike the almost $50 price tag on Amazon. This seems like some horrible timing, considering that Street Fighter V was just released… and that folks will be seeking out fight pads…. but whatever… their loss and my benefit. I have to comment that this controller is really damned comfortable… way more so than the default PS4 controller when it comes to dpad and face button feel. If you can find one anywhere near as cheaply as I picked mine up… I highly suggest grabbing it.

When I got home from work I hooked up the new controller and booted into the game, where I honestly was undecided what exactly to do. The game reports cross console play, but as of yet I have yet to find anything even closely resembling a friends list. There is the ability to create a custom lobby of sorts… and in theory that might be the compromise. I know you set up a Capcom ID when you first boot the game, and if anyone needs mine it is once again “belghast” but you will have to be smarter than me in figuring out how to actually friend someone because I could not. For the most part I started working my way through the story mode, which unlocks alternate costumes and color schemes for the various characters. I made it roughly halfway through this when my wife got home from work with a friend of ours… and the three of us decided that the priority was to go find food. After eating silly amounts of Mexican food, I never quite made it back upstairs once we got home. So in theory I will pick up tonight when I first get home and continue unlocking the various story modes. All in all I like what I have seen of the game… which admittedly is not a lot. The game feels more deliberate and less twitchy than many of the other Street Fighter entries, so if you are someone who cut your teeth on Marvel Vs Capcom… you might find the game a little sluggish. For me who started on the original Street Fighter, the less frenetic pace is a big plus.

The Mission

Last night once I got back from eating…. I was a man on a mission. The mission was actually something that evolved over the course of the day, but the goal was pretty simple. Help Grace catch up and level her druid on Argent Dawn. Originally my thought was…. lots and lots of Hellfire Ramparts because well… when I was dual boxing WoW this was pretty much the go to instance for me when it came to pouring on some quick levels. So the first step was to hop on my Mage and port her little druid to Pandaria so she could bind someplace with portals. From there we met up in Shattrath and I flew her on my Obsidian Nightwing over to Hellfire. The only problem… at level 50 she could not zone in… and this is the point at which I remembered that World of Warcraft instances have level caps. So we ported to Stormwind since apparently they closed off the Dark Portal… because our original thought was Sunken Temple. From there we flew over to Blackrock Depths because in theory she should have been able to pick up several of the quests. We proceeded to lay waste to the Dark Iron empire, and through the course of that one instance she managed to pick up three levels. When we got down to the Molten Core gate, on a whim we tried to zone in…. and sure enough she was able to. Thinking “surely a raid gives good experience” we proceeded to lay waste to the entire place, and I did some of my most careful pre-clearing of a zone ever… shockingly she did not die once. Bad news however… she made like 2/3rds of a level in there but did manage to pick up some “moggy bits”.

From there we did in fact head towards Sunken Temple… which is now a completely nerfed joke. Firstly we completely missed the entrance because apparently at some point they moved it up near the top of the sunken pyramid instead of deep down inside the base. We did two clears of the place, and I would say that both times it took well less than ten minutes to clear the entire place. They apparently jettisoned “Troll side” of Sunken Temple and all that is actually there is the Green Dragon Flight stuff upstairs. We also noticed that none of the events actually required you to do anything… like I remember summoning Hakkar required you to drag snakes into the braziers or something of that sort… but this was a simple “click the pile summon a boss” scenario. From there we flew over to Lower Blackrock Spire thinking she was right about the appropriate level, and on our first clear…. I screwed up and forgot to grab the pike… meaning we couldn’t actually summon the optional boss. So we went out, reset and I managed to get that sequence of events right the second time. All in all the night took a little less than three hours, and we got the druid a total of seven levels. In theory… dungeon finder might have gone quicker. I have another theory, that is my Panda Monk is just slightly lower level now than her Druid… so I am wondering if we would be better served with me going Tanky and her going Healy and getting pretty much instant queues all the way to 100. Regardless it was a fun night… there is something relaxing about curb stomping old content and venturing back down nostalgic avenues.