Monday Random Thoughts (On a Tuesday)

- I was not around yesterday to post my random thoughts but had so many of them I decided to make today monday.

- Hope you do not mind.

- I got a lot of play time in this weekend for the first time in a while and boy oh boy do I have a story to tell.

- A few even, but first I will start with an SoO wing 4 LFR that was, in a word, amazing.

- It was amazing it could be so bad (boss 1), amazing it could be so impressive (boss 2), and amazing that could be so backwards (boss 3).

- It took us 2 hours, well over 2 hours if you want to include wait time, to down seigemaster.

- When it comes to LFR nightmares it does not get worse than this.

- I sometimes question myself why I stay and people in guild kept telling me to leave.

- But I stayed and I am so glad I stayed because I have one fantastic story to tell because of it.

- After some more waiting we finally get a decent second tank and the entire run changes in a flash.

- We down blackfuse as if there were never any problems to begin with, but those stacks had to help right?

- I did not expect much from this group other wise but will willing to accept a few wipes on each boss just to get it done.

- This was one of my hunters, low gear (as in 500 item level), and I just wanted to get an LFR clear under his belt.

- Here is the setting for late fight paragons.

- The entire raid is dead except for 1 healer, me, and two other damage dealers.

- There are 30 seconds left to enrage.

- Yes, both tanks are dead and had been since there were 4 paragons left.

- We kill one of the three klaxxi 10 seconds before enrage leaving 2.

- We start on another one, the damage dealer the bug is on is getting brutalized, badly when enrage hits.

- He dies and it starts to come after me, the other damage dealer, also a hunter is pounding away at it.

- At about 2 minutes AFTER enrage hit he goes down at the same time I do.

- He catches up to me and I give him a kill shot to the face and he returns the favor, we fall on top of each other dead.

- One klaxxi left, enrage has been going on for a while, one hunter, one druid healer.

- It is rare, extremely rare, that I ever shout out a name on my blog but I have to give this guy some credit for making my day and making that 2 hour wait for seigemaster worth every second.

- The hunter, in not much better gear than I current had on that character, managed to down the last klaxxi.

- Just him and his friendly neighborhood healer.

- It took him a long time, as in I heard stampede go off twice during him doing it, and the raid never once told him "wipe it" or "just reset so we could get it done".

- They supported him , they were yelling in raid, you got this.

- It was only LFR but it was exciting and he entertained 23 dead people just watching him do it.

- I can only imagine his heart beating a mile a minute, him and the healer.

- I do not remember the name of the healer, sorry, but it really does not matter what the healers name was.

- See, the hunter never took one bit of damage.  It was enraged, if he got hit once he was dead, no healer was going to save him from that.

- When the fight was done I could only say one thing, a pun.

- "That was... wait for it... stunning.", was what I said.

- The Hunters name was Stunning.

- How appropriate.

- So we one shot klaxxi even if it took forever all thanks to the amazing heroics of a hunter.

- Go hunters!!!

- He gives us a good name.

- Funny part is someone said in raid early on when it was just him and the druid left and it looked bleak for a moment as it seemed like the bug was catching up to him but it didn't, "go huntard go."

- A few others in the raid were quick to point out, "If he manages this, he is most defiantly not a huntard.

- Okay, back to the rest of the raid and the amazing turn of events on garrosh.

- We one shot it with basically minimal explanation.

- The tank gave the basics real fast and said did I miss anything.

- I said MC is priority.

- He said, yeah, that, and pulled and we downed it with no problem.

- After the first boss taking hours, the second boss needing the above and beyond ability of a hunter that went on a good 10 minutes past the enrage timer, and we one shot the hardest boss in there?

- Weird.

- I am now trying to get the trinket off shaman in the LFR as well for my main.

- I had not done that and had not been trying for it there.

- When you could only upgrade 2 times my heroic ToT trinket was on par, if not better, than the trinket off shaman.

- But now that I can upgrade the shaman one from LFR 4 times and my heroic ToT one can still only be upgraded twice, it is worth trying for again.

- So I did shaman in LFR, flex and normal this week.

- I rolled in LFR, flex and normal this week.

- Just the same as I have on every shaman kill since, well, since we started killing them.

- And still no freaking trinket.

- To add insult to injury, the flex I was in, 2 hunters rolled, 2 hunters got it, both had the normal version and did not need it.

- "insert lots and lost of cursing the game here"

- I guess I can look at it as at least I have the best trinket I can have from the previous tier.

- There is always one piece that seems to give me hell, it is usually the weapon, head or shoulders, this time it is the trinket.

- I did some leveling on various toons this weekend.

- Started on a paladin, level 40.

- Pounded out 13 levels, to 53, with no issues, pulling massive packs with no heirlooms on it what so ever.

- I forgot about sending them over, whoops.

- But it was making quick work of things either way.

- When I moved to my warrior I sent over some heirlooms to that one.

- I did not have the weapon and the shield, never got them since they were added, kept forgetting about them and being we could not trade them across servers at first and I had no characters that needed them on my server after they were added, never considered getting them.

- I might consider it now.

- So my warrior, level 21, with most of the heirlooms except the ring, trinkets, shield and weapon, went out to level.

- He had the experience boosting things so that is really all that mattered.

- He could two shot most everything to begin with.

- He blew through his rested and got all the way to level 43 before it wore out and I finished up the quest line I was on.

- That was in two hours.

- Next up, a shaman, sent all my heirloom gear to it, including a weapon, the two handed staff but for leveling who cares.

- It was 23 and I only managed to get it to 28 before rested wore off and I finished the quest line I was on.

- It a bit over 2 hours.

- So how do two characters, roughly the same level, in roughly the same gear (shaman had more), have such a huge variation in what they were capable of doing?

- Oh, did I also mention they both have the same professions, they are both mining and blacksmith.  So that did not play into it either.

- One got 22 levels with no weapon in a little less time than the one that got 5 levels with a weapon did.

- I'll tell you how.

- If the warrior got a quest to kill 10 mobs, he went in, rounded up 10 mobs, killed them and went back.

- This meant he completed quests faster, so got more experience in a shorter time.

- It also meant he was killing exactly what was needed.

- The shaman needed to pull one at a time, even with all that gear.

- It took sometimes 15-20 seconds to kill a mob when the warrior would one or two shot everything.

- This meant that the shaman needed to kill everything going into a zone and everything coming out of the zone.

- It eats up time and rested experience really fast when you are killing a lot of stuff you really do not have to.

- So because of that it did not complete as many quests as the warrior did during the rested phase I was playing it in.

- Makes you wonder 2 things.

- 1 - How the hell does anyone level without heirlooms now, we have been spoiled.

- 2 - The warrior was a lot more fun to play than the shaman.

- Killing stuff, killing it fast, killing it in massive piles, rushing in and one shotting a mob, all those things are fun.

- Pulling one, fighting for a while, pulling another, fighting for a while, over and over, is just flat out boring.

- Makes me think perhaps blizzard should move the other way around with things.

- Instead of having 10 kill skeletons, make it kill 50 skeletons, and make them super easy to kill.

- Slaughtering them in massive piles would be a lot more fun than pulling them one at a time.

- And the higher requirement will mean it would still take the same amount of time to get done.

- At least in my opinion, it would be more fun if even my shaman were able to pull 10 mobs.

- Not sure if it is just my jaded opinion because I have done all this a million times by now or if it would be really better with some sort of a change.

- But like I said, killing is fun, killing massive piles all at once is even more fun.

- That is why my warrior leveled faster and I had more fun with it, at least at that level range.

- Sometimes I wish I could look at things from fresh eyes.

- But questing has always been weird.

- Ever feel bad when you are given a quest to rescue 3 captives when there are 20 in cages.

- You left 17 people behind you bastard.

- We are not the heroes of Azeroth.

- We are mercenaries out for ourselves only.

- Think about it, we rescue 3 out of 20 prisoners because we are not getting a reward for rescuing the other 17.

- We are no heroes, we are jerks, profiteers, only doing what we get paid to do.

- We let 17 people be held captive, possibly tortured, most likely killed, because someone wouldn't drop a few coins in our satchel to save them.

- We are the worse scum the world has ever seen.

- We are most definitely not heroes.

- How the hell do we have the balls to go around and call ourselves heroes is beyond me.

- I understand why there are extra there, so many people can do the quests at the same time, but the technology is there to change that.

- I would like to see it changed.

- I feel bad leveling people behind.

- Just like we had all the things around pandaria we could find and it is there for each person until they find it, but not after they do, prisoners and the like can be done that way too.

- If I did the quest when I pass by the area there are three empty cages but for someone that did not do the quest there are three people caught in cages.

- Now that would be much better quest design.

- Well, it would make me feel better at least.

- It would also make it feel like we are really impacting the world around us because we would see changes, even small ones, like that.

- I did lots and lots of heroic scenarios this week because valor is once again useful.

- Woohoo.

- It is amazing going back and doing them after not doing them for so long.

- I remember dark heart being a hard one when it first came out if you had the wrong make up.

- And even if you had the right make up it could be really hard if their numbers were low or they were not very good players.

- I had two adventures in there that I want to mention.

- One to show how freaking insanely easy it is now with characters with some gear on and one to show you even with crappy gear you still can do it.

- We got into dark heart with 2 people on well geared alts (me being one) and one on a main.

- We each did huge numbers.

- I was top with 580K, bottom was 520K.

- I said, I can't believe this used to be hard.

- It goes to show you the problem with gear inflation this expansion, that should never happen in a million years.

- Maybe, just maybe, if we went back to that scenario 2 expansion from now, we should have been able to treat it like the joke we just did.  Not one patch after they came out.

- And none of us were even fully geared or fully upgraded.

- Can you just imagine what it would have been like if we all had full heroic gear?  Heck, even if we all had full normal gear?

- Wrong, just wrong.  Blizzard really screwed up on the gear inflation this expansion.

- The item squish is needed because blizzard could not control themselves.

- However, on the other attempt we ran into it with three horrible alts.

- And by horrible I mean I was the best geared there at 494 on my lower geared mage.

- Not like my main mage is much better at 530.

- So we were pushing it to begin with, we figured our experience and ability to play intelligent would be able to compensate for anything we ran into.

- We ran into dark heart and all cringed because it is the most unforgiving for bad group make up and horrible gear.

- We had both, a bad group make up and horrible gear.

- We had me on my mage, a freshly dinged DK, as in just hit 90 that day a few hours ago, and a warrior with roughly the same item level as my mage.

- The first elemental boss was a nightmare.

- We managed it, but it took a year and a day to kill it.

- Did you know it keeps summoning adds forever even if there are no adds for it to call over?

- The fight went on that long, really.

- It went on so long that after we killed it the DK said they had to leave.

- He only had a half hour to begin with and we figured we would be done by then.

- That fight ended with the warrior and DK dead and me kiting the mob for the last 5%.

- I got lucky.

- We told him, park your character at the entrance and do not log out, at least if we manage it you will still get valor.

- But there was no way in hell, even if we had all 3 of us, would be making the timer.

- Now it was just a challenge mode thing for me and the warrior, to see if we could get it done.

- So me and the warrior talked about how we would handle this as we were killing the slimes.

- We decided we would try with him as arms to see if we can down it faster.

- I did 80K and he did 50K and we never came close.

- So we came back and he switched to prot, changed spec a little on my suggestion so he could kite better, and we went at it again.

- The fight took 11 minutes, but we killed it.

- Goes to show you that you did not need great gear, you just needed to be intelligent players.

- In the end, it was much more fun just blowing it up with everyone over 500K.

- Just like it was more fun killing all 10 mobs at the same time on my warrior.

- Killing is fun.

- Sure, there is some fun in doing it the way the warrior and I did, proving you do not need great gear, just your mind, which is the most powerful tool anyone has.

- But once you do it, and prove you can do it, why would anyone ever want to do it again?

- See, that is the problem with making content harder.

- It is fun for the first people that make it there, not so much for anyone that comes after them.

- Because anyone that comes after them is holding them back because they already beat the challenge, they just want to go in an spank it now.

- It is like that scenario, I already did it with only 2 people on 490 geared characters.

- I would not want to do that again.

- So if another 490 character said, but it can be done, I would say sure, but I am not doing it with you.  I already did it.

- Come back when you can do 500K and we can just blow it up, that is more fun.

- I did it, I proved I could do it, it was fun doing it, but why would I want to do that again?

- I guess that is the reason I would rather quests just be slaughter fests.

- Just like I would rather the scenarios be so as well.

- Once you do the challenge, there really is no fun to it any more for there to be a challenge.

- You just want to go in and have some fun mass slaughtering the baddies.

- You want to be the warrior, not the shaman.

- You want to pull 10 at a time and not take a scratch instead of one at a time and have to heal after every third one.

- With that sad, I guess the way quests are is fine, just need to work some on balance, so my shaman can pull like my warrior.

- So that way, it lets people have the challenge the first time, and we get out slaughter fest every time after.

- It must be hard to find the right balance to design for that.

- I give blizzard a lot of crap because they deserve it, but over all you have to admit they do a pretty damn good job.

- Can't please everyone all the time and it must be extremely hard to keep it balanced to any sense so everyone can enjoy it.

- It has to be amazingly hard to keep it so a new player that knows very little and is just learning can do it without it being too hard and still be engaging for someone like me on my warrior that can mow things down without even thinking about it.

- I do not envy the position they are in most of the time.

- Even more so when you have someone like me, many someones like me, to point out all the things they do not like.

- I was thinking I need to get my hunter in on some old raid kills.

- I did MV on my hunter but ever clear after that in the first tier was my druid tanking.

- MV heroic, my bear has the kills, my hunter none.

- Same with the other heroics.

- And my hunter only has some HoF normal kills and no ToES normal kills.

- Only my druid has them all.

- Just for the sake of completion I want to do them on my hunter.

- I know achievements are shared and I have the achievements, but I know who got them, so it matters to me.

- I also need to finish ToT heroic, only got up to animus, never downed it on heroic.

- Should be much easier now.

- I swear that fight was just, well, annoying.

- I think I am going to write a post on the raids of pandaira soon.

- It is over, we will not be getting more.

- But with 5 - 7 more months of this I do not want to blow through all of my looking back stuff too soon.

- Hopefully I will get a beta invite so I will have that to bitch, I mean, write about.

- Are you ready for those beta invites?

- They will be sent out sooner than you think. ;)

- Public service announcement time.

- Just check your loader, that is where they will be.

- The betas will not be a mail link you need to click, so do not fall for it.

- Have a great day.