Monday, February 11, 2013

Monday Random Thoughts

- Writing the What If posts the last couple of days had me thinking about so many great What Ifs.

- You would need a lore person to write them, I think Rades over at Orcish Army Knife would be one of the people that would be great for them.

- Check out some of his lore based posts if you have the time, he has some great theories that are well written also.

- Things like why is the symbol for the scarlet crusade on the gate into the vale in pandaria?

- He would do the lore what ifs better than I but that does not stop me from thinking about them.

- Randomly of course.

- What if the Taurens left the horde after Cairne was killed?

- What if we did not stop algalon?

- What if we faced an old god at full power?

- What if us killing all these powerful beings on our planet was making it weaker because them being here is what kept something much worse from targeting us?

- What if we had not awoken Rag "too soon" and let him get to full power?

- What if the world really had gotten torn apart by deathwing?

- What if Arthas had made us his lieutenants?

- If I knew more about the lore of each of these to be able to play with it some and do some creative writing with it I would love to tackle those questions and so many more.

- What ifs can be fun.

- I guess I will keep my what ifs to more play based and not story based.

- Some good what if stories might be interesting however.

- I've always been interested in what ifs.

- Like what if you could level a toon naked, which I did back in wrath.

- What if you could level a toon without taking damage, which I started back in cataclysm and never got the time to finish but it was moving along nicely thank you very much.

- Too busy now with all we have to do to play around with that one now.

- My current question is, can you get a toon LFR gear level with no dungeons, no crafted items, and no valor gear?

- Do you think you can get to a 460 item level without those things?

- 454 so far and still working on it.

- Remember, no craftable gear, no valor gear and no dungeons at all.

- Also no having friends carry you through a current raid.

- I think I might be able to do it, I am getting really close and think I can probably push 456.

- I don't think I can get much higher than that however.

- Once a get exalted with the lotus and get the 489 neck I think I am out of easy options for gear.

- But I am not giving up just yet.

- That is the fun of what ifs, because you want to see if you can do it.

- I think I can get to 460.

- Sure, I have to buy some valor gear or I would waste valor and I won't do that, but I do not count that as part of my item level for this purpose.

- I like doing little challenges like that.

- Speaking of gearing, I have to bring all those alts that I have not done anything with into the love is in the air dungeon.

- Nice and easy 480 piece for them, can't beat that.

- Had a run yesterday that saw everyone over 100K.

- Even the tank almost reached that.

- Have to love that.

- Don't expect your dungeon trips to be like that.

- First day, only the people "in the know" even knew it started.

- Which means the better players were the only ones in it and that is why there was an awesome group to be had.

- Today you will be dealing with people doing 8K, I guarantee it.

- People that don't belong there.

- Many say that a comment like the previous is elitist.

- No, it is realist.

- If you can not do the content, you do not belong in it.

- In group content there is a minimum requirement for you and you should be able to reach it.

- What a person labels that requirement at would be the line on if it were elitist or not.

- If someone says, if you can't do 40K you shouldn't be doing it, that is elitist.

- If someone says, if you can't do 15K, you shouldn't be doing it, that is realist.

- I am in the realist camp.  Being 89s can do it as well and it is not designed to be too hard, 15K is more than ample for a damage dealer and basically any class should be capable of 15K in quest gear even at 89.

- 15K is not much to ask, even from a very bad player that is still a very forgiving number to expect of them.

- If you are doing 8K, you do not belong there.

- Simple as that.

- Get ready for "those" people in your run today, people that do not belong there.

- My rarely played monk is slowly moving upward, they are now in wrath content.

- I dread doing cataclysm content and knowing it is coming soon makes me want to stop leveling.

- I dread it with a passion as deep as can be.

- That bouncing all over the world to quest is horrible design.

- Even more so when you look at the humble beginnings of cataclysm.

- The old world was redesigned and two things were done in the redesign to help with questing.

- 1) Questing was made so you could move from one zone to the next smoother.

- 2) Quests that had you bouncing all over the world were removed, for the most part.

- This was announced with great passion from the folks at blizzard because they said that they wanted to make questing more of a straight path.

- Then you get to the 80-85 experience, which is part of the new design that they wanted a straight path for, and you have to go all over the world.

- Did someone miss the memo that they were not doing that any more?

- They redesigned the old world, spent to much time on it and that is part of the reason the expansion was dreadful, all so people did not need to bounce around and then made them bounce around.

- Talk about doing a job half assed.

- That is like hiring a person to paint your house and they do a beautiful job on 5 of the 6 rooms and then just throw paint on the walls and let it dry in clumps in the last room and say, don't worry, it is okay, the other 5 rooms are awesome, just look at those and ignore this.

- 80-85 is the badly painted room with clumps in some places, barren in others, and looking like a third grader did it instead of a professional.

- I never asked for a redesign of the old world and don't know even one person that did.

-  I was actually against it because it ruined the flow of the game.

- As you leveled it was like, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 3 years ago, present time.

- Cataclysm made it, present time, 5 years ago, 3 years ago, present time.

- Now that cataclysm is old it is 1 year ago, 6 years ago, 4 years ago, 1 year ago, present time.

- Am I the only one that things redesigning the old world to be cataclysm current was the worst idea ever in the massive amount of bad ides blizzard has had story wise?

- Should have just left the leveling process as you were moving through history to catch up to the present time and instead of spending all that time redesigning the old world they could have done something useful with it.

- Like make cataclysm better?

- Do it once more, redesign it back to the way it was, do it correctly and wipe any signs of cataclysm ever existing from the old world.

- Changing the leveling zone flow was fine.  Just lose the fact it was all tied cataclysm.

- Thank you, now get on it.

- I have yet to level a character through cata as old content yet, but it is coming soon.

- At least I always had a plan to getting through it that worked out perfect.

- I wonder if it will be messed up now with the experience increase.

- It surely would.

- I would go underwater just long enough to get to the cave where the quartermaster was.

- That way when you port in you will port right to him.

- I thought it was a smart move at least.

- Then hyjal until 82 and on to deepholm until I opened the port back from the stone guys, no matter what level I was at.

- Uldum to 84 and twilight highlands to 85.

- Doing this I had all factions at least at friendly to get the tabard and the port back and forth to the stone guys and everywhere else there was a port for.

- As it worked out, this also meant that all my characters had gone far enough to do the molten front dailies when they were later added.

- See, I like the flow of the zones, they were fine and allowed me to make a perfect leveling experience even if I was not fond of the linear questing.

- I just hated they were all over the place.

- And now I will most likely be messed up on my old pattern by the increased leveling speed.

- I will probably skip the underwater part completely now and not open all the way in deepholm and that should be enough changes.

- If they really wanted the zones to feel more connected, they should have had ports to all the areas from some central points in each area.

- Couldn't just fly from the highlands to uldum the way you can fly from valley to dread wastes.

- That is why one is good design and the other not.

- Guess which one was the bad one?

- Good guess.

- I was at the auction house the other day and there was this worgen sniffing for about 10 minutes, he would move once in a while so I knew he was there.

- I handed him a tissue, he said thank you.

- I got a laugh out of it and I bet he did too.

- Some times the best parts of the game, the ones that give you the most fun, are not designed by the developers.

- They are designed by the players.

- I think the next big patch should be more about developing a better community and not developing another raid.

- It would benefit the game long term better than any raid ever could.

- Have a great day.

9 comments:

  1. - I think the next big patch should be more about developing a better community and not developing another raid.

    Here, here! Too bad ghostcrawler doesn't read this blog.

    -roo "where's my bologna?"

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    1. I doubt he has the time to read things like this. But it would be interesting to see what he would say.

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  2. You don't need a plan really for cata questing, it goes absurdly fast now. I usually do the whole Hyjal zone (I just like it, but you can go to Deepholm at I think 81?) which gets me to 82 and change, then do about half of Deepholm to get to 83, then the cat people quests in Uldum to 84, then about 1/3 of Twilight Highlands to 85. The first time I did it after MOP I was amazed at how fast it went.

    The Cata zones aren't bad in and of themselves, but they definitely do lack any kind of cohesive theme. Even a zone like Zul'drak which was mostly self-contained fit within the theme of Wrath, but in Cata you go from fighting Ragnaros to fixing the world-pillar to running around a desert helping cat people and doing the Indiana Jones thing, then off to do...stuff...in Twilight Highlands. The whole experience is like: what?

    I remember them saying that the whole old-world revamp ended up suffering from mission creep, where they initially set out to clean up the edges some and eventually ended up redoing almost every zone. That definitely explains why Cataclysm was so crappy. But they actually made some aspects of the old world worse: the old old world had I think 4 different end zones (Winterspring, Silithus, EPL, Burning Steppes), the new old world only has 2, Silithus and Blasted Lands. And Silithus was apparently untouched for the most part, not even having enough quests to get you from 55-58. My warrior went through it and went from 55-56.5 or something. Got the achievement and everything. So I had to go to Blasted Lands, which has everyone else in that level range, + CRZ, and, well, I hope you like waiting for quest spawns. Thanks Blizzard!

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    1. I agree, they were not bad on their own except for the linear nature of them but they really did seem to lack cohesion as you mentioned. In the end, that is what makes them bad.

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  3. -Just finished the 6000vp part of the Legendary quest.

    -Got the two BG wins, luckily without too much trouble. Saw a lot of people talking about still trying after dozens of attempts.

    -Really annoying to include PvP in the PvE Legendary questline... You know, just sayin...

    -Blizz is also stupid if they think that the baseline 40% resilience does anything. I was better off in mixed 460-something pvp/pve gear than I was is full 488 pve gear. I still got killed super fast though.

    -Need to do the raid group quest now. Hopefully enough people in guild still need to do it. Need to setup a guild event for it.

    -Did a heroic 10man ICC run with 6 people over the weekend. Just seems pathetic how easily we can zerg things now. Those Shadowtraps will still knock you off the platform though.

    -Did a scenario yesterday to cap valor. I did 70% of the overall dmg. I was with two fresh 90s that could barely pull that 15K Grumpy mentioned above. One was a hunter. He was so bad that I didn't even know where to start. If he was on my server, I probably would have tried teaching him some things but I'm sure I'll never see him again so...

    -Patch is coming in two weeks?!?!? WTF?!!?!? WAY TOO SOON!!!! Still have tons of stuff to do.

    -Our guild just got Lei Shi last week and are working on Sha. They're not ready for a new raid tier... Personally, I haven't even stepped into a normal.

    -The way Blizz is handling valor gear this expansion is so screwed up... Valor gets converted to Justice but that's useless because the old Valor gear still costs Valor!!! Brilliant Blizzard! Just Brilliant! /rollseyes

    -It really seems like Blizzard is changing stuff just to make changes... "who cares if it's good for the game or not, just change things"

    -Guess I'll go do the Love dungeon. Still need the mount. Got lucky with the pet yesterday at least.

    -Hopefully, Blizz fixed the starting point so we aren't getting ported into the wrong room still...

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    1. Love Dungeon - wtf- where is that Jaeger?

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    2. I finished the 6K part a while ago, but can not get a group to beat that guy. Not like I have really tried, no sha touched weapon yet to even do anything with, so no rush.

      Can't believe the new patch is in 2 weeks and we have not finished normal mode raiding yet and I still have not got the sha weapon, even in MFR quality.

      It is way too soon to be released.

      As I always say, blizzard has no clue what balance is. They do things feast or famine. Now we are in feast mode, more than we can do. Don't worry, in due time we will be sitting around with nothing to do when the last raid comes out and we are stuck doing it for a year and the over nerf it over and over again to make it seem like we are getting something new. I have faith in them to totally abandon their faster release nature. That is too quality for them and they have proved they are anything but a good quality company.

      In the end, the raid being ready for release so soon is awesome design and shows a step in the right direction. However, actually releasing it when nearly no one has finished it on normal (percentage wise) is a failure to plan.

      @Roo

      Check your dungeon finder, under the drop down menu you will see chemical crown company, that is the love dungeon.

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  4. I like the revamp of the old zones that they did in Cata. They did make things far too linear, but I think the 1-60 zones are much better now than they were before. On the other hand, I don't know whether the revamp of that scale was really worth it. Many of the old quests were pretty unfun (very badly itemized rewards, traveling all over the zone or sometimes all over the world for little reason, etc), that's true. But maybe if they spent 20% of their effort on fixing just those things and redirected the remaining 80% to something else (like, we could have had pet battles, the farm, world bosses and maybe something else in Cata, and something new instead of these things today), it would have been better? It is, however, easy to theorize about all these things now, so I don't really blame them.

    On getting ilvl 460 without dungeons, crafting and valor: I take it you exclude PVP as well, because if you don't, it's a piece of cake (458 just from honor). :-)

    On the upcoming 5.2 and the holiday: I don't need anything from the holiday, so that's two weeks with little to do aside from PVP. I briefly thought about maybe getting my 85 DK to 90 and getting her to 460 in anticipation of the increased drop rates in 5.0/5.1 LFRs. Then, after 5 minutes of thinking about it, I wondered why I'd even contemplate doing such a thing since I already have a couple of characters that can do both LFR and normal raids, and I am rarely doing any of them any more as this just don't seem to be fun (not saying the raids can't be fun for anyone). That thought killed the temptation. It is amazing how deep the lure of gear sits, even though I know I don't need or even want it, my brain sometimes acts like I do. :-)

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    1. No PvP gear either.

      That is the key, if they spent some of their resources on developing something else, like pet battles instead of the old world remake, cataclysm might have been better.

      When it comes down to it cataclysm ended up being exactly what I said it was when it was first released. It was a patch they charged us for. Nothing more. It went on way to long and was not good enough to be an expansion on its own. Blizzard wanted to remake the old world so they did, put in some areas that had been in the game since vanilla, and called it an expansion just so they could charge us for it.

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