A while back before I had ever even experienced or read anything about farms I had a dream about player housing being added in 6.0. You can read it here. Now, having played around with my farm I am 100% certain that I was right, player housing is coming so hold on to your hats everyone, it is less than 2 years away now.
There are a few things that need to be done if they are going to make player housing work.
1) Move the Farm:
First off, they need to update farming after this expansion is over and give it the love that it deserves. They need to make it world wide and not just something confined to the valley. I guess we can get farms on our personal property after we "learn" how to farm in MoP. The Tillers could give us a quest after best friends and exalted where they teach us how to start a farm on our own property after we leave the area.
This way they can phase it that once you do the quest that moves the farm to your house you can no longer farm in Pandaria. Or make that that anything you do on one happens to both, so you do not double dip on farming. Like I said, they need to give it some love. They really messed up tying farming to only MoP, it should have been done much better and tied into the game as a whole and not just one expansion.
2) Cross Realm Footlocker:
Have you ever played diablo 3? That one footlocker that all your characters share. Well, with player housing they need to add a footlocker, it could be at the foot of your bed in your bedroom or out back in the barn, or wherever, but it needs to be somewhere.
The footlocker should be for bind on account items only. Nothing else can be put in it. That locker would be able to be accessed by any character that is tied to your account no matter what server they are on. And it needs to ignore their stupid bag limits. If there are 600 BoA items, you can put 600 BoA items in there. Simple as that. Have it expand as needed.
Even if it is only a 20 slot footlocker and they charge you 500 gold for each additional 20 slots and that would work fine. Just make it so that there is no way you can exceed the number of BoA items you own to the available space. It should always be upgradeable to the point where if you managed to collect every BoA item in the game, and multiples thanks to things like archeology, it can still hold them all.
3) Other Shared Storage:
Anyone that is farming lately and leveling cooking knows that you will be overwhelmed with food. It has happened so much so to me that I have one of my characters as a catch all for food now and she has her entire bank, with all the largest bags in the game, almost completely full.
They are adding cooking bags next patch but that does not solve the problem because that food is still clogging up space bigger bags or not. The whole bag thing is an antiquated idea and needs to change, big time.
So with our new homes and their desire to share tons of things now between characters let us have some space in our home for food items. It would not be cross realm like the footlocker, only tied to realm, but an icebox for meats and a pantry for vegetable or anything where we can keep cooking supplies and let everyone have access to it.
Not only would it make it easier instead of having to make a catch all for food because lets face it, not everyone is an alt-a-holic like me with that option, there is just too much food needed at least at the MoP level.
Have all those storage options be expandable, like the same 500 gold per 20 slots, and make it have no limit, or a high one at least, like a maximum of 20 of those 20 slot options. Even increase the cost per addition as a gold sink if you must but something like this is needed, even more so if they want to keep cooking as it is in MoP and not make it one simple level up system and something that requires massive amounts of food all the time. Our player housing is a great place for this.
4) Add Content to Player Housing:
As I mentioned in my dream. Adding content to player housing with new professions can really add more to the idea than just a place to chill out when you are done with your questing and waiting for raid time. Let you build your land, get more plots for farming over time, add furniture to your liking so you can style it to look like you want it to.
So much can be done with it to make your player housing more than just a place to hang out and to make it worthwhile to add to the game they will need to make it more than just a place to chill.
How about raising chickens for eggs, cows for milk, yaks for milk, etc. Remove things like that as drops from mobs and sales from vendors and make the community make them. We have a farm, lets raise things on it and let the community supply itself. Make them weekly things or even bi weekly or monthly to control the market from being flooded with it. Monthly might be best, at the beginning of each month you go collect from all your animals.
Make dailies to care for them, the more dailies you complete the more return you get from your animals each month. Let say for example you get 2 milk from each cow each month, you would get 10 from each if you kept them fed and clean by doing at least 1 daily each week. Not much more, you do not want to penalize people that do not log on daily but having people log on once a week to get the maximum should never be a problem for most players, even the most casual of casual ones.
Of course there would be a limit to how many cows and chickens and yaks and other things you can have. Perhaps a maximum of 20 animals of any sort at one time. This would make the player have to make a choice on what to raise on their farm. Do they want to make new ingredients, or older ones, that adds to the game dynamic.
In time they could raise the cap of how many and what type of animals with some other type of reputation they add in future expansions or by having new pens built for small upgrades of 2 animals and such. This would make player housing actual content. Each expansion you would need to do a quest line to learn how to care for the new animals you might want to raise from that expansion before you are allowed to add them to your home.
You could also add a breeding area, as a friend in my guild that I mentioned this to said. He used to play pokeman and he said the wow version needs breeding like that. I have never played that so I have no frame of reference but he said you can breed two animals together to get different animals and sometimes get really rare, or even epic, animals that have the best abilities of both. Something like this could only be done with a fully upgraded area in your personal housing area, which would of course require some serious work if you used the ideas in my other post to upgrade it.
Blues said that they would not add player housing until they could figure out a way to make it actual content and not just a place to hang out. I believe I have given more than a few ideas that will make it actual content.
5) Visitors:
They would need to add a way to allow people to visit your housing area. Perhaps if grouped with others when they went into the phased area they would always go to the leader of the groups housing. Not ideal and it would need some work but I do believe that for player housing to take off as an actual idea that they will add to the game they would need a way to allow people to visit one another at their home.
For role play servers the importance of this is a lot greater than anywhere else I am sure but for social people or people that just want to show off how they decorated their home there needs to be some way to do it in game.
I remember when I finished decking out my farm I said to a few people what was on it and they said, I want to see it, but I could not show them. That will be a huge key to making player housing a reality and that is the next and last step that needs to be worked out before we see how simple farms turn into a more complex player housing system.
Endnote:
So while we are really no closer to player housing than we were before I think the farms and there amazing success thus far prove that there can be a way to allow us all the have a phased area we would call player housing. I would be more excited if farming was not linked only to one area and is not game wide, as it would make player housing even more believable if it were, but you can not escape the fact that they have proved that housing can be done. Now to make sure we get it in 6.0 and make that dream I had come true.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Monday, October 22, 2012
Monday Random Thoughts
- I have another level 90 now.
- My priest is 90 joining my druid and my hunter.
- Wow, an expansion that actually went as I planned before it came out.
- So now I have the holy trinity at max level and can fill any role.
- After I gear up the priest that is.
- I leveled as shadow so I do not have healing gear, will most likely deck myself out in 450 PvP gear for healing to start.
- The beauty of it now is that you are not wasting stats with PvP gear, if anything PvP gear is better.
- They are dirt cheap to make.
- Two 450 items will have the same main stats and secondary stats.
- The only difference with PvP gear is they have bonus PvP stats on them, for no cost to the item level.
- So that should be good enough for me to gear up the priest and get a nice starter healing set.
- I must say I got used to shadow, compared to being a hunter it is super easy.
- I did a heroic as DPS last night and was pulling between 26K-33K on bosses with my massive 438 item level and only needed a few buttons and a simple rotation to do it.
- Much easier than a hunter.
- If I can pull around 30K on single target with no gems, no enchants, low item level and nothing reforged with a mix and match of whatever gear I could find I can easily see doing 80K once heroic geared and all decked out.
- For little or no effort when it comes to a rotation.
- Man did hunters get the shaft huge when seeing how easy other classes have it.
- I guess that gives me a reason to be proud when I do well, because you know not many will be able to.
- So far all the hunters I have seen in randoms suck and I do not mean suck as in just not doing well, I mean suck as in they really suck.
- Had a hunter doing 23K in my run yesterday, looked at the top three abilities on recount and could not tell what spec he was.
- Pet did 4% of the damage so he was not BM.
- Opening recount I see explosive shot down at number 6, he fired 5 over the course of the boss fight.
- Damn, I can see not understanding all those new cooldowns or not being able to keep up with them because there is so much to handle now, but not even hitting explosive shot means user error, not a gear thing.
- So I inspect, he has every single piece heroic or better, a few LFR pieces and three 489 pieces.
- They are all gemmed, enchanted, and reforged.
- And doing 23K?
- I know hunter rotations are harder now, much harder, but there is no excuse for doing 23K in his gear in a random with the 15% buff.
- 33K maybe in starter gear..
- 43K minimal acceptable with heroic gear.
- 63K decent for his gear.
- He was doing almost half of what would be acceptable in gear less than his.
- He was not the saddest one I ran into this weekend.
- Running randoms with my tank and seeing the only person that was able to beat me was someone from my guild.
- If I bought two DPS from guild we steamrolled every dungeon.
- If I took one, they became harder.
- If I took none, they were all hell.
- Had one DK that kept bitching about everything, the tank (me), the healer (a guild mate), and even tried to kick the healer.
- A tank, a healer and a damage dealer in a dungeon, all in the same guild, do you really think a kick would make it?
- The healer kicked him after that vote to kick him failed.
- The mage put in a shot before he was kicked however.
- We had wiped with the boss having less than 300K three times in a row.
- So the mage posted recount which looked something like this, mage 68K, shadow priest 54K, me as tank 38K and the DK that was saying we were all bad at 18K.
- The mage said, if you could at least beat the tank we would have downed this three attempts ago.
- Don't blame a healer trying to gear up if you are doing less than half what the tank is doing on single target.
- Don't blame the healer if you die on every single fight because you do not know how to move.
- He died, near instantly, to a frontal attack that makes the mobs not move. Multiple times.
- When the mob started it I moved, and I am the tank, why didn't he move?
- Better question, what the hell was he doing in front of the mob to begin with?
- I've said it once and I will say it again.
- If you are going to talk trash please be sure you are the best player there.
- Or better yet, just shut the hell up and do your job.
- Either help or leave or kick, but no reason to blame your failures on everyone else.
- We got another person, one shot it, because they were doing 45K and not 18K, and it was super easy.
- Like I think I said once before, 30K would be what people should aim for minimal there, every bit more just makes it easier.
- Not saying it can not be done with less, I did a few just me and the healer and I was top DPS every fight.
- Not one person was over 30K, heck, not one person was over 25K.
- We had no problems in a couple because everyone followed mechanics and did things appropriately.
- Doing things right does lower the DPS requirements, because it does not put additional pressure on the healer creating a sort of enrage timer based on healers mana.
- People don't seem to put enough emphasis on doing thing right.
- I think doing things right should rank before DPS.
- If you are doing 20K and doing everything perfectly, I can deal with it, your DPS will get better.
- If you are doing 100K and standing in everything making the healers life hell, I'd just as soon kick you.
- Most randoms without and DPS with us however were nightmares, 12K DPS and standing in everything.
- Yeap, every single group had at least one of those 12K DPS and stand in everything people.
- How the hell did you make it to 90 being that bad?
- I bet you can not tie your shoes because tying shoes is a lot more difficult than randomly hitting damage dealing abilities.
- Even hitting random damage dealing abilities will net you more than 12K at level 90.
- How is it humanly possible to do that low?
- The healer was third place on the DPS charts while keeping everyone alive on most of the fights healing as disc.
- The healer even doubled up one of the damage dealers a few times.
- Started getting my paladin into leveling now, not rushing that one.
- My damage output on it is horrible, doing 6K-9K, so things take forever to die.
- I found a way around that however, pull more mobs.
- The more mobs I have the higher my DPS goes and the faster they all die.
- I made few pulls of 20+ mobs and they went down in roughly the amount of time it would have taken me to kill three single target.
- I have a nice BoA 450 level 86 two handed sword, will go ret after I reach 86.
- I love being able to pull entire zones, but I would rather be able to power through even if it is with only one mob at a time, and in prot single target killing is too slow.
- Will have to switch my warrior to DPS as well when his time comes.
- My druid had no issues leveling as a tank and my DK won't either, but warrior and paladin damage output is just not there.
- My druid was doing triple the damage my paladin was at level 85.
- My DK, quadruple.
- So who will be my next 90?
- My rogue most likely.
- I have my ranged, a hunter, my tank, a druid, my healer, a priest and just need my melee, a rogue.
- My warrior, paladin and DK are all tanks and will always be tanks.
- Might level as DPS if need be, but they will always be tanks.
- I don't think that anyone but a tank should ever be that close to a mob.
- Rogues are okay, because I like to see them die.
- Even if I am the rogue.
- Have I mentioned I hate rogues?
- They deserve to die.
- They wear leather and get right up on a mob.
- Shows they are a little brain dead.
- Letting them die is a good thing, it is natural selection, thinning out the pack, removing the lowest common denominator from the gene pool.
- Anyone that wants to get face to face with some mobs blazing fists while only wearing leather as protection needs to get their head checked.
- For PvP they rock, otherwise, I can live without rogues or any melee class for that matter.
- Being my main is at least revered with every one of the big four it allows me time to play with my alts now being I do not have to press dailies any more for reputation.
- I will still do them for some valor at the beginning of the week each week, but that is about it.
- They need to double the amount of valor you get on everything.
- 10 per quest, 120 per dungeon for the first run and 60 each additional, stuff like that.
- Capping takes way to long now and someone that has a lot of alts they like to gear up will not be able to do it.
- And casual players will never cap.
- Heck I know a bunch of people I would even call semi hard core and they can not handle capping two characters because they have a life.
- If you can not spend at least 5 or 6 hours a day at the game you can not effectively cap multiple characters.
- I would guestimate I spend roughly 3 hours a day on my main and I can barely get everything done.
- Then again, I do like to fart around a lot being it is the beginning of the expansion.
- I fly by every rare spawn point, all rare item points, etc.
- It takes me three times as long to get to the shado-pan dailies than it does to do them.
- I can do them in 20 minutes, I spend an hour getting there.
- My own fault I guess.
- As soon as I find all the rare finds and I got all the goodies I can get from rare kills I am sure my traveling will go a lot faster.
- I love the white tiger dailies, they are quick and easy.
- That is what I am expecting the brawlers club to be like.
- That has hunter written all over it, could be lots of fun.
- For hunters at least.
- I can not solo like I do on my hunter with any other class in the game.
- Perhaps if I spent as much time on the other classes I would get better at them.
- But I still think hunters have an immediate advantage over other classes thanks to their pet.
- I can solo every single rare, without a problem and even with 6 or so adds on them, before I was geared on my hunter.
- I can not kill one freaking panda solo on my priest.
- Even people that do not like pet classes have to respect that anything is easier when you do not have something beating on you.
- Hence the reason hunter pets rule.
- Finished up the shado-pan achievement for not taking any damage from certain quests.
- Did them all with protector yi.
- That guy is a walking aggro magnet.
- But he did give me the best laugh I've had so far this expansion.
- I was looking through my achievements while flying when one of those guys sent those purple swirls at me in the air.
- I moved right, it hit protector yi who was to my left.
- He made his battle cry announcement, dismounted, and instantly fell to his death.
- It was awesome.
- Even typing this and thinking of it just made me laugh again.
- Now if only I can get credit for doing the quests with him.
- Still not working.
- Being I made it to revered on my main and wanted to take a break and not get right into to many dailies with the others I played around with pet battles some this weekend.
- It is addictive.
- I kept saying, just one more, just one more.
- Before I knew it three hours had passed and I had to force myself to stop.
- I needed to get to bed.
- But I did not want to.
- I was having fun battling trying to get rares of every single type of mob I could find.
- Some pets are near impossible to find.
- I went through one area and saw a pet that was poor and killed it, 2 hours later I never saw another of the time type.
- So there is rare in quality and rare finds.
- So you need to get double lucky to find stuff.
- I keep leveling new pets so as not to kill ones I want to catch by accident.
- While in the low level areas I can level to 5 easily.
- Just to give you an example of how hard it was to find rares of some things, I leveled up 18 pets to level 5 just farming areas hoping to find at least one rare of each pet.
- And still did not get them all.
- I guess in a way it is a good thing, as I level up no matter who I come across I will have the appropriate pets at the appropriate level to fight them.
- I am going to keep rotating while trying to catch everything in each area.
- Should mean I will easily have 75 leveled when all is said and done.
- If I remember correctly, that is exactly what I will need to get all the achievements.
- Maybe there is one for 100 and I missed it.
- 75 just seems like an odd number.
- Either way, as I get more free time I can see myself really wasting a lot of time with these.
- Pet battles can be a fun way to pass the time.
- And you can do it while falling asleep at the keyboard, like I almost did last night before I forced myself to get off.
- Damn pet battles are addictive.
- Have a great day all.
- My priest is 90 joining my druid and my hunter.
- Wow, an expansion that actually went as I planned before it came out.
- So now I have the holy trinity at max level and can fill any role.
- After I gear up the priest that is.
- I leveled as shadow so I do not have healing gear, will most likely deck myself out in 450 PvP gear for healing to start.
- The beauty of it now is that you are not wasting stats with PvP gear, if anything PvP gear is better.
- They are dirt cheap to make.
- Two 450 items will have the same main stats and secondary stats.
- The only difference with PvP gear is they have bonus PvP stats on them, for no cost to the item level.
- So that should be good enough for me to gear up the priest and get a nice starter healing set.
- I must say I got used to shadow, compared to being a hunter it is super easy.
- I did a heroic as DPS last night and was pulling between 26K-33K on bosses with my massive 438 item level and only needed a few buttons and a simple rotation to do it.
- Much easier than a hunter.
- If I can pull around 30K on single target with no gems, no enchants, low item level and nothing reforged with a mix and match of whatever gear I could find I can easily see doing 80K once heroic geared and all decked out.
- For little or no effort when it comes to a rotation.
- Man did hunters get the shaft huge when seeing how easy other classes have it.
- I guess that gives me a reason to be proud when I do well, because you know not many will be able to.
- So far all the hunters I have seen in randoms suck and I do not mean suck as in just not doing well, I mean suck as in they really suck.
- Had a hunter doing 23K in my run yesterday, looked at the top three abilities on recount and could not tell what spec he was.
- Pet did 4% of the damage so he was not BM.
- Opening recount I see explosive shot down at number 6, he fired 5 over the course of the boss fight.
- Damn, I can see not understanding all those new cooldowns or not being able to keep up with them because there is so much to handle now, but not even hitting explosive shot means user error, not a gear thing.
- So I inspect, he has every single piece heroic or better, a few LFR pieces and three 489 pieces.
- They are all gemmed, enchanted, and reforged.
- And doing 23K?
- I know hunter rotations are harder now, much harder, but there is no excuse for doing 23K in his gear in a random with the 15% buff.
- 33K maybe in starter gear..
- 43K minimal acceptable with heroic gear.
- 63K decent for his gear.
- He was doing almost half of what would be acceptable in gear less than his.
- He was not the saddest one I ran into this weekend.
- Running randoms with my tank and seeing the only person that was able to beat me was someone from my guild.
- If I bought two DPS from guild we steamrolled every dungeon.
- If I took one, they became harder.
- If I took none, they were all hell.
- Had one DK that kept bitching about everything, the tank (me), the healer (a guild mate), and even tried to kick the healer.
- A tank, a healer and a damage dealer in a dungeon, all in the same guild, do you really think a kick would make it?
- The healer kicked him after that vote to kick him failed.
- The mage put in a shot before he was kicked however.
- We had wiped with the boss having less than 300K three times in a row.
- So the mage posted recount which looked something like this, mage 68K, shadow priest 54K, me as tank 38K and the DK that was saying we were all bad at 18K.
- The mage said, if you could at least beat the tank we would have downed this three attempts ago.
- Don't blame a healer trying to gear up if you are doing less than half what the tank is doing on single target.
- Don't blame the healer if you die on every single fight because you do not know how to move.
- He died, near instantly, to a frontal attack that makes the mobs not move. Multiple times.
- When the mob started it I moved, and I am the tank, why didn't he move?
- Better question, what the hell was he doing in front of the mob to begin with?
- I've said it once and I will say it again.
- If you are going to talk trash please be sure you are the best player there.
- Or better yet, just shut the hell up and do your job.
- Either help or leave or kick, but no reason to blame your failures on everyone else.
- We got another person, one shot it, because they were doing 45K and not 18K, and it was super easy.
- Like I think I said once before, 30K would be what people should aim for minimal there, every bit more just makes it easier.
- Not saying it can not be done with less, I did a few just me and the healer and I was top DPS every fight.
- Not one person was over 30K, heck, not one person was over 25K.
- We had no problems in a couple because everyone followed mechanics and did things appropriately.
- Doing things right does lower the DPS requirements, because it does not put additional pressure on the healer creating a sort of enrage timer based on healers mana.
- People don't seem to put enough emphasis on doing thing right.
- I think doing things right should rank before DPS.
- If you are doing 20K and doing everything perfectly, I can deal with it, your DPS will get better.
- If you are doing 100K and standing in everything making the healers life hell, I'd just as soon kick you.
- Most randoms without and DPS with us however were nightmares, 12K DPS and standing in everything.
- Yeap, every single group had at least one of those 12K DPS and stand in everything people.
- How the hell did you make it to 90 being that bad?
- I bet you can not tie your shoes because tying shoes is a lot more difficult than randomly hitting damage dealing abilities.
- Even hitting random damage dealing abilities will net you more than 12K at level 90.
- How is it humanly possible to do that low?
- The healer was third place on the DPS charts while keeping everyone alive on most of the fights healing as disc.
- The healer even doubled up one of the damage dealers a few times.
- Started getting my paladin into leveling now, not rushing that one.
- My damage output on it is horrible, doing 6K-9K, so things take forever to die.
- I found a way around that however, pull more mobs.
- The more mobs I have the higher my DPS goes and the faster they all die.
- I made few pulls of 20+ mobs and they went down in roughly the amount of time it would have taken me to kill three single target.
- I have a nice BoA 450 level 86 two handed sword, will go ret after I reach 86.
- I love being able to pull entire zones, but I would rather be able to power through even if it is with only one mob at a time, and in prot single target killing is too slow.
- Will have to switch my warrior to DPS as well when his time comes.
- My druid had no issues leveling as a tank and my DK won't either, but warrior and paladin damage output is just not there.
- My druid was doing triple the damage my paladin was at level 85.
- My DK, quadruple.
- So who will be my next 90?
- My rogue most likely.
- I have my ranged, a hunter, my tank, a druid, my healer, a priest and just need my melee, a rogue.
- My warrior, paladin and DK are all tanks and will always be tanks.
- Might level as DPS if need be, but they will always be tanks.
- I don't think that anyone but a tank should ever be that close to a mob.
- Rogues are okay, because I like to see them die.
- Even if I am the rogue.
- Have I mentioned I hate rogues?
- They deserve to die.
- They wear leather and get right up on a mob.
- Shows they are a little brain dead.
- Letting them die is a good thing, it is natural selection, thinning out the pack, removing the lowest common denominator from the gene pool.
- Anyone that wants to get face to face with some mobs blazing fists while only wearing leather as protection needs to get their head checked.
- For PvP they rock, otherwise, I can live without rogues or any melee class for that matter.
- Being my main is at least revered with every one of the big four it allows me time to play with my alts now being I do not have to press dailies any more for reputation.
- I will still do them for some valor at the beginning of the week each week, but that is about it.
- They need to double the amount of valor you get on everything.
- 10 per quest, 120 per dungeon for the first run and 60 each additional, stuff like that.
- Capping takes way to long now and someone that has a lot of alts they like to gear up will not be able to do it.
- And casual players will never cap.
- Heck I know a bunch of people I would even call semi hard core and they can not handle capping two characters because they have a life.
- If you can not spend at least 5 or 6 hours a day at the game you can not effectively cap multiple characters.
- I would guestimate I spend roughly 3 hours a day on my main and I can barely get everything done.
- Then again, I do like to fart around a lot being it is the beginning of the expansion.
- I fly by every rare spawn point, all rare item points, etc.
- It takes me three times as long to get to the shado-pan dailies than it does to do them.
- I can do them in 20 minutes, I spend an hour getting there.
- My own fault I guess.
- As soon as I find all the rare finds and I got all the goodies I can get from rare kills I am sure my traveling will go a lot faster.
- I love the white tiger dailies, they are quick and easy.
- That is what I am expecting the brawlers club to be like.
- That has hunter written all over it, could be lots of fun.
- For hunters at least.
- I can not solo like I do on my hunter with any other class in the game.
- Perhaps if I spent as much time on the other classes I would get better at them.
- But I still think hunters have an immediate advantage over other classes thanks to their pet.
- I can solo every single rare, without a problem and even with 6 or so adds on them, before I was geared on my hunter.
- I can not kill one freaking panda solo on my priest.
- Even people that do not like pet classes have to respect that anything is easier when you do not have something beating on you.
- Hence the reason hunter pets rule.
- Finished up the shado-pan achievement for not taking any damage from certain quests.
- Did them all with protector yi.
- That guy is a walking aggro magnet.
- But he did give me the best laugh I've had so far this expansion.
- I was looking through my achievements while flying when one of those guys sent those purple swirls at me in the air.
- I moved right, it hit protector yi who was to my left.
- He made his battle cry announcement, dismounted, and instantly fell to his death.
- It was awesome.
- Even typing this and thinking of it just made me laugh again.
- Now if only I can get credit for doing the quests with him.
- Still not working.
- Being I made it to revered on my main and wanted to take a break and not get right into to many dailies with the others I played around with pet battles some this weekend.
- It is addictive.
- I kept saying, just one more, just one more.
- Before I knew it three hours had passed and I had to force myself to stop.
- I needed to get to bed.
- But I did not want to.
- I was having fun battling trying to get rares of every single type of mob I could find.
- Some pets are near impossible to find.
- I went through one area and saw a pet that was poor and killed it, 2 hours later I never saw another of the time type.
- So there is rare in quality and rare finds.
- So you need to get double lucky to find stuff.
- I keep leveling new pets so as not to kill ones I want to catch by accident.
- While in the low level areas I can level to 5 easily.
- Just to give you an example of how hard it was to find rares of some things, I leveled up 18 pets to level 5 just farming areas hoping to find at least one rare of each pet.
- And still did not get them all.
- I guess in a way it is a good thing, as I level up no matter who I come across I will have the appropriate pets at the appropriate level to fight them.
- I am going to keep rotating while trying to catch everything in each area.
- Should mean I will easily have 75 leveled when all is said and done.
- If I remember correctly, that is exactly what I will need to get all the achievements.
- Maybe there is one for 100 and I missed it.
- 75 just seems like an odd number.
- Either way, as I get more free time I can see myself really wasting a lot of time with these.
- Pet battles can be a fun way to pass the time.
- And you can do it while falling asleep at the keyboard, like I almost did last night before I forced myself to get off.
- Damn pet battles are addictive.
- Have a great day all.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Does When and How Much You Play Matter?
I am sure some will say yes and some will say no and I can already tell you which will say what before they even would post. It is simple because those people that play on off hours will nearly always say it doesn't matter when you play and those that play during prime time will almost always say it does.
People, all of us, have a problem with perspective. We only see things as we know them and it is a rare case when people truly have an open mind. I admit I see it from my perspective and from that perspective it really sucks to play in prime time.
It is like I always say that one of the reasons I do not PvP is because it is harder to gear up and have fun as alliance because we never win. Admittedly gearing up for PvP is a million times easier than gearing up for PvE because you still get something when you lose but it gets frustrating to lose all the time.
A guild mate said to me one day that he doesn't understand what my problem is, he usually wins at least half the battlegrounds he goes into and sometimes even well more than half. He did not grasp the concept that he plays in the middle of the day and I play during prime time. Two totally different groups of people are playing at those different times.
One day while home early from work I entered some battlegrounds and won 6 out of the 7 I was in. It was a good 6 hours earlier than I am normally on. Usually if I would try when I got home from work I could do 10 and win none. Actually that is why I quit even trying in cataclysm.
Three days in a row I tried to do some battlegrounds, did 12 on day one and only won 1. On day two I did 8 and lost all 8. On day three I did 10 and lost all 10. So that is 30 battlegrounds with 1 win as alliance during prime time and 6 wins out of 7 when doing it earlier in the day as alliance. So from my perspective, when you play really matters. These experiences are not isolated, I have noticed this for many years and am just pointing out this one stretch in cataclysm.
It is not only PvP that when you play matters in my opinion it is for PvE as well. When you do dungeons during prime time they always seem to be worse. Not marginally worse, much worse. I wake up early on weekends because I am used to waking up early during the week and sometimes run a dungeon then. I have never had a bad run doing them between 5AM and 8AM my time on a saturday or sunday morning. Not one bad run and even the runs there were wipes in the people were decent about it. Yet if I do them when I come home from work, or around that prime time, any day of the week even with a perfectly smooth run there will be someone that will do their best to try and make the run hell.
It is as if a completely different class of player plays during prime time and that really does effect the game of everyone around them. As someone in my guild loves to say, I play when all the kids get home from school and that is why I have such bad experiences when I play.
Now with the daily grind going on, when you play even matters more even when doing them. I have a friend of mine that does his dailies when he gets home from work which is roughly three hours before me. He says there is very little competition and the quests go fast and easy while when I do them there seems to always be at least 10 people camping spawn spots for mobs to kill because nothing is alive. There are most likely a lot more but I only see 10. His doing dailies is faster, more enjoyable and less stressful than mine based on a three hour difference.
The real kicker is that when he does dailies he says that people seem to be decent. If they see you fighting on top of an item for a quest they move along and let you finish your fight and get it. Maybe on the rare occasion he might see someone land and take it but if that happens once a week it is a lot he says. Whereas I see that at least a dozen times every single day I do dailies. There are even people that camp the relic for the golden lotus quest waiting for others to step on the lights and open it so they can can attempt to take it. I saw someone yelling at another person in say about it. I felt bad for them, decent people do not steal, even in a video game. I saw this twice yesterday alone and when I mentioned it to him he laughed and said he had never seen anyone do that before.
One of my guild mates, after seeing me get the glorious achievement and I told him about all the little goodies I got, decided he would start rare hunting too. He is a late night player, so he is always on during the really off times. I came home from work to him saying that he found 11 of the rare items and killed over 60 rare spawns in 3 hours that night. I do not even have 11 rare items and I look for them every single day multiple times since the expansion came out.
He does this every night now and gets so many baggies and pets and other goodies from rares it is insane, he is making over 20K per day just hunting rares and selling the things that he gets from the bags. I see nothing usually, I get three of four kills a day, if that, playing the same amount of time he does but I play in prime time and he plays late night. That is the difference.
At least he realizes why it is while many don't. He said it to me, he is lucky because there are less people out there looking for them and he can get all the rare items and spawns he wants because of it.
So when asking does when you play make a difference I would have to place myself firmly in the camp of yes it does. It makes a huge difference.
But does how much you play make a difference? That might be a lot harder to find any definitive answers for because each person is different and that might lead people to have different opinions based on how they play.
As someone on my blog once posted, they play more than I do but do not seem to be able to accomplish everything I do each day. We went back and forth in comments for a bit and he realized that it is because of how I use my time that makes the huge difference.
I am the type of person that plans everything out and because of that I am usually quite efficient in doing what it is I do. If I were to say I did all the dailies in 1 hour it would have taken him 3. Not because of anything other than the way I went about it. I would do quests in an order that were not necessarily be one at a time but working on a few at once so as to not wait for spawn timers and such, kill the three that are there and move on and when I head back kill three more. I would not wait for the respawns. This changes what I am able to accomplish in the time I play.
So saying does time make a difference is a little harder to judge because each person plays differently to some extent. My one hour of play time does a lot more than his three hours. Even with that, I do believe that time available plays a huge part.
While I play a fair deal and accomplish a lot I am still not able to get it all done, not to the extent some people do. I can not gear up more than one character now when doing my dailies and the other little things, it takes all my play time each day during the week. So having more than 1 geared character at the moment becomes impossible. Yet there is someone in my guild that already has 4 90s all at least 470 item level already. I've got one that fits that description.
He does not move as fast as I do, not even close, when he is doing dailies at the same time I am I can finish all of them in the time it takes him to do just two hubs, but it is the fact he is retired and has nothing to do all day but play, so he does most days of the week.
So playing more gives him a gear advantage for sure and gives them the ability to get raid ready faster with multiple characters but not only that, more time gives him more time to make gold, play the auction house, gather, hunt those rares, and the ability to choose when he does things so he can do them at times where it is better to do them as I mentioned when you play makes a difference as well.
So I would have to say that when you play and how much you play does effect your game play and your capability to play at a higher level but I don't think there is anything wrong with that, well most of it.
There is nothing wrong with people that put more into the game getting more out of it. If anything, that is the spirit of RPGs and it has always been that way and should always be that way. That is what the grind is all about and that is one of the reasons I like the grind. While it might place me way behind some of my guild mates because I do not have the time to invest like they do there is nothing wrong with that. I just have to make the time I do have matter more.
Those who put more into the game should get more out of the game. That is fair, that is how it should be. That is why I fully support gating and grinds. I think RPGs should always have a need for time investment. If you are not willing to spend the time to get what you need you don't deserve to have it.
It is also the reason I believe all gear should be locked behind grinds and not be based on the RNG in a dungeon group. Bosses should all drop currency and you should buy all your gear with that currency. It would make people earn their gear and not just luck their way into it. Want raid pants you will need to down 10 raid bosses to get enough raid currency to buy them. No matter what, no luck should ever be involved when it comes to gear. I support the time aspect being an important part of gaming even if I do not have the amount of time others do.
I have no problem with someone having more gear than I do because they worked for it but it irks the every living hell out of me that some people luck into everything. It feels as if they did not deserve it, they did not earn it, they did not work for it, they just got lucky. Luck should never play a part in any RPG when it comes to things like gear. Gear should always be earned, it should never be lucked into. If someone plays more than me and puts in more effort then me they deserve more gear than I have. Simple as that.
So while I do not mind time being such a huge factor in the game I really must admit I am extremely jealous of the when you play issue. I am jealous that I have to do 10 battlegrounds to even hope to win one when someone else can win 3 in a row every single day. I am jealous of the people that can be home during server resets so they can just park themselves at any rare spawn point in the game and get it the second the game comes back on. I am jealous that people can do dungeons with decent people that help each other when I get stuck with asshats who insult everyone, even if they are the ones doing badly.
Just the other day I was talking to someone about switching my main server for that reason alone. I want to get home from work to play and have that time be in the middle of the day on the server, so I can have good groups, so I can win battle grounds, so I can get any rare spawn I want. I want to know what it feels like to have the fun they have being able to be around decent people and get things accomplished without any fuss. Perhaps it is a grass is always greener thing, but playing on off hours does sound so nice.
I wish there were a way blizzard could fix it but there isn't. There is no way to fix when people play most.
So agree with me or not, as I see it, when you play has a huge impact on the game and how much you play has an impact but not as much as it should.
People, all of us, have a problem with perspective. We only see things as we know them and it is a rare case when people truly have an open mind. I admit I see it from my perspective and from that perspective it really sucks to play in prime time.
It is like I always say that one of the reasons I do not PvP is because it is harder to gear up and have fun as alliance because we never win. Admittedly gearing up for PvP is a million times easier than gearing up for PvE because you still get something when you lose but it gets frustrating to lose all the time.
A guild mate said to me one day that he doesn't understand what my problem is, he usually wins at least half the battlegrounds he goes into and sometimes even well more than half. He did not grasp the concept that he plays in the middle of the day and I play during prime time. Two totally different groups of people are playing at those different times.
One day while home early from work I entered some battlegrounds and won 6 out of the 7 I was in. It was a good 6 hours earlier than I am normally on. Usually if I would try when I got home from work I could do 10 and win none. Actually that is why I quit even trying in cataclysm.
Three days in a row I tried to do some battlegrounds, did 12 on day one and only won 1. On day two I did 8 and lost all 8. On day three I did 10 and lost all 10. So that is 30 battlegrounds with 1 win as alliance during prime time and 6 wins out of 7 when doing it earlier in the day as alliance. So from my perspective, when you play really matters. These experiences are not isolated, I have noticed this for many years and am just pointing out this one stretch in cataclysm.
It is not only PvP that when you play matters in my opinion it is for PvE as well. When you do dungeons during prime time they always seem to be worse. Not marginally worse, much worse. I wake up early on weekends because I am used to waking up early during the week and sometimes run a dungeon then. I have never had a bad run doing them between 5AM and 8AM my time on a saturday or sunday morning. Not one bad run and even the runs there were wipes in the people were decent about it. Yet if I do them when I come home from work, or around that prime time, any day of the week even with a perfectly smooth run there will be someone that will do their best to try and make the run hell.
It is as if a completely different class of player plays during prime time and that really does effect the game of everyone around them. As someone in my guild loves to say, I play when all the kids get home from school and that is why I have such bad experiences when I play.
Now with the daily grind going on, when you play even matters more even when doing them. I have a friend of mine that does his dailies when he gets home from work which is roughly three hours before me. He says there is very little competition and the quests go fast and easy while when I do them there seems to always be at least 10 people camping spawn spots for mobs to kill because nothing is alive. There are most likely a lot more but I only see 10. His doing dailies is faster, more enjoyable and less stressful than mine based on a three hour difference.
The real kicker is that when he does dailies he says that people seem to be decent. If they see you fighting on top of an item for a quest they move along and let you finish your fight and get it. Maybe on the rare occasion he might see someone land and take it but if that happens once a week it is a lot he says. Whereas I see that at least a dozen times every single day I do dailies. There are even people that camp the relic for the golden lotus quest waiting for others to step on the lights and open it so they can can attempt to take it. I saw someone yelling at another person in say about it. I felt bad for them, decent people do not steal, even in a video game. I saw this twice yesterday alone and when I mentioned it to him he laughed and said he had never seen anyone do that before.
One of my guild mates, after seeing me get the glorious achievement and I told him about all the little goodies I got, decided he would start rare hunting too. He is a late night player, so he is always on during the really off times. I came home from work to him saying that he found 11 of the rare items and killed over 60 rare spawns in 3 hours that night. I do not even have 11 rare items and I look for them every single day multiple times since the expansion came out.
He does this every night now and gets so many baggies and pets and other goodies from rares it is insane, he is making over 20K per day just hunting rares and selling the things that he gets from the bags. I see nothing usually, I get three of four kills a day, if that, playing the same amount of time he does but I play in prime time and he plays late night. That is the difference.
At least he realizes why it is while many don't. He said it to me, he is lucky because there are less people out there looking for them and he can get all the rare items and spawns he wants because of it.
So when asking does when you play make a difference I would have to place myself firmly in the camp of yes it does. It makes a huge difference.
But does how much you play make a difference? That might be a lot harder to find any definitive answers for because each person is different and that might lead people to have different opinions based on how they play.
As someone on my blog once posted, they play more than I do but do not seem to be able to accomplish everything I do each day. We went back and forth in comments for a bit and he realized that it is because of how I use my time that makes the huge difference.
I am the type of person that plans everything out and because of that I am usually quite efficient in doing what it is I do. If I were to say I did all the dailies in 1 hour it would have taken him 3. Not because of anything other than the way I went about it. I would do quests in an order that were not necessarily be one at a time but working on a few at once so as to not wait for spawn timers and such, kill the three that are there and move on and when I head back kill three more. I would not wait for the respawns. This changes what I am able to accomplish in the time I play.
So saying does time make a difference is a little harder to judge because each person plays differently to some extent. My one hour of play time does a lot more than his three hours. Even with that, I do believe that time available plays a huge part.
While I play a fair deal and accomplish a lot I am still not able to get it all done, not to the extent some people do. I can not gear up more than one character now when doing my dailies and the other little things, it takes all my play time each day during the week. So having more than 1 geared character at the moment becomes impossible. Yet there is someone in my guild that already has 4 90s all at least 470 item level already. I've got one that fits that description.
He does not move as fast as I do, not even close, when he is doing dailies at the same time I am I can finish all of them in the time it takes him to do just two hubs, but it is the fact he is retired and has nothing to do all day but play, so he does most days of the week.
So playing more gives him a gear advantage for sure and gives them the ability to get raid ready faster with multiple characters but not only that, more time gives him more time to make gold, play the auction house, gather, hunt those rares, and the ability to choose when he does things so he can do them at times where it is better to do them as I mentioned when you play makes a difference as well.
So I would have to say that when you play and how much you play does effect your game play and your capability to play at a higher level but I don't think there is anything wrong with that, well most of it.
There is nothing wrong with people that put more into the game getting more out of it. If anything, that is the spirit of RPGs and it has always been that way and should always be that way. That is what the grind is all about and that is one of the reasons I like the grind. While it might place me way behind some of my guild mates because I do not have the time to invest like they do there is nothing wrong with that. I just have to make the time I do have matter more.
Those who put more into the game should get more out of the game. That is fair, that is how it should be. That is why I fully support gating and grinds. I think RPGs should always have a need for time investment. If you are not willing to spend the time to get what you need you don't deserve to have it.
It is also the reason I believe all gear should be locked behind grinds and not be based on the RNG in a dungeon group. Bosses should all drop currency and you should buy all your gear with that currency. It would make people earn their gear and not just luck their way into it. Want raid pants you will need to down 10 raid bosses to get enough raid currency to buy them. No matter what, no luck should ever be involved when it comes to gear. I support the time aspect being an important part of gaming even if I do not have the amount of time others do.
I have no problem with someone having more gear than I do because they worked for it but it irks the every living hell out of me that some people luck into everything. It feels as if they did not deserve it, they did not earn it, they did not work for it, they just got lucky. Luck should never play a part in any RPG when it comes to things like gear. Gear should always be earned, it should never be lucked into. If someone plays more than me and puts in more effort then me they deserve more gear than I have. Simple as that.
So while I do not mind time being such a huge factor in the game I really must admit I am extremely jealous of the when you play issue. I am jealous that I have to do 10 battlegrounds to even hope to win one when someone else can win 3 in a row every single day. I am jealous of the people that can be home during server resets so they can just park themselves at any rare spawn point in the game and get it the second the game comes back on. I am jealous that people can do dungeons with decent people that help each other when I get stuck with asshats who insult everyone, even if they are the ones doing badly.
Just the other day I was talking to someone about switching my main server for that reason alone. I want to get home from work to play and have that time be in the middle of the day on the server, so I can have good groups, so I can win battle grounds, so I can get any rare spawn I want. I want to know what it feels like to have the fun they have being able to be around decent people and get things accomplished without any fuss. Perhaps it is a grass is always greener thing, but playing on off hours does sound so nice.
I wish there were a way blizzard could fix it but there isn't. There is no way to fix when people play most.
So agree with me or not, as I see it, when you play has a huge impact on the game and how much you play has an impact but not as much as it should.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
The Daily Review: My Opinion of the Mist Hubs
There are a lot of daily hubs out there and they all seem to have a personally of their own with the quests, rewards, and amounts they give. Everyone will have their opinions of which hubs they like and which they hate. These, are mine.
Tillers:
When it comes to daily hubs this one is my favorite, or at least one of them. They are usually neatly grouped up so you can do all of them at the same time and even piggy back them, for example getting the stolen goods and killing monkeys. Just kill the monkeys in front of the stolen goods and you are getting two quests done at the same time. Does it really get much easier than that?
There are a few fun quests that are like side quests not part of the pack that you get sometimes. And I would not be surprised if there are some you have not even seen yet. Just yesterday I got a quest I had never seen before and I have been doing them every day since day one. Makes me wonder if there are more. Be it killing weeds, watering crops, jumping on critters or looking for chickens, even the one side quest that is not part of the pack is not a great diversion.
The tiller quests are quick and easy and just as rewarding gold and valor wise as any other quests, plus one will give you an ironpaw token, so what is there not to like? Nothing. When it comes to doing dailies, these are the tops. Well designed and something you will do even after exalted for a few valor, a little gold and an ironpaw cooking token of course.
As for achievements related to questing for the tillers there are none directly but there are some indirectly. You will get them all just by doing your farming. No effort really required to get them. The cooking achievement for getting each cooking skill up are not listed under the quests section but you could consider them part of it if you wanted to and you can use your farm, your tokens or the auction house to get them all done rather easily. If you are after gear only, you can completely skip this one but I think that would be a mistake as this is one of the most enjoyable quest hubs right now.
Anglers:
This is another nice and easy quest hub. You only get three quests per day from it and they are not tied as tightly together as the tiller ones are but being there are so few and they are so easy it makes for a quick and painless hub. Unless of course you get one of the few quests that actually require fishing and you have low level fishing, then it could be a while. I suggest getting the best lure you can get if you do not have max level skill. Even with max level skill you will still catch junk from time to time so under that you can expect to catch junk a lot. Even with that, the angler quests would still be something I consider nice and easy.
If you are an achievement hunter, just do the quests, there is really nothing that you would need to plan to get here, just doing the quests will get you the only related achievement which is for doing all the quests. Easy enough right?
I can see this being a nice little hub for your characters that are alts with low fishing. It is low stress, gets you three fishing skill points a day, and 15 valor and some gold. So it is win all the way around for a rarely played alt. Like the tiller ones however, if gear is what you are after, you can skip this completely but as easy as it is to do I can't see why you would unless you are really pressed for time.
Cloud Serpents:
Everyone seems to want to ride a cloud serpent and you will need to get them exalted if you want to learn the skill to do so. Like the anglers and tillers this faction has no gear and is a purely cosmetic faction so to speak. It is about your riding skill only really.
There are two types of dailies they offer. One is a hub based thing that seems to be nicely batched most of the time and is somewhat easy with the exception of one hub. If you get the one hub to go into the cave I must warn you that you are going to be fighting, a lot. Those monkeys scream and bring friends all the time. Even if as a hunter I can handle them easy I had started to get into the habit of hearthing back when I finished the quest because I just did not want to work my way back out. Outside of that all the hubs seem super easy.
The other type of quests are secondary professions quests. If you do not have a high level of that profession you can not get them done and even if you do they do not offer valor and offer a small amount reputation. So while doing them will get you to exalted a fair bit quicker they are not required and it will not set you further back than just a few days if you do not do them. You could also try to find some eggs to turn in for reputation to speed it up, but it goes fast enough as it is that there is no real need to. Even without doing it every day it was the first faction I got to exalted not even finding one egg, outside of the fish and lorewalker factions.
As far as achievements go this faction has a few of them and none are really difficult. Paying catch with your baby serpent might be the hardest one if a lot of other people are around, but once you realize how the bounces work and can find a time when 25 other people are not bouncing around you will get it with little effort. The good thing for this is you do not have to be perfect, just close and you will bounce it.
The race achievements are easy and while you might not get first place in the race the first time you do it if you follow the pack and notice all the checkpoints you will win first the second time no problem. Getting the 10 rings achievement should come without even trying as you should always try to keep 10 rings on you anyway, so that one is a gimme. You will also get a bag that gives you valor based on where you end the race.
As far as how fun these are to do I will leave it at this, the second I hit exalted I never went back and have no intention to ever go back. Maybe some day I will do a few just to get 999 of exalted, but I am in no rush. While they were mostly quick and easy they were not fun in any way. The profession ones do not offer valor and the gold is less, so that means less rewarding quests. The only time I might ever consider doing them is if the august celestials send me to the temple of the jade serpent one day and I am bored, just becuase that is close but I have been sent there 3 times and never once had the desire to do the cloud serpents any of those times. Once exalted there is no need to ever even consider doing the profession ones, like I said, they offer no valor and a smaller amount of gold effectively making them useless. You will make more gold selling the fish instead of cooking them and selling the cloth instead of making bandages out of them and using them.
Klaxxi:
How do I love thee, let me count the ways. There are tons of rare items in the area. There are tons of rare mobs in the area. There are massive packs of mobs for mass carnage. They seem to have the highest drop rate of motes I have seen. I have got more 476 BoEs and 450 equitable at 85 BoEs while questing there than you can count. My JC gets patterns from there more than any other place. The quest hubs are tight and there are different ones to keep things mixed up some. And add to that there are more than a few achievements you can get there. All that and more.
I love doing the klaxxi area and it is one of the hubs I can see myself doing long after exalted if I have the time and am looking for something to do. I won't get into the achievements deeply as there are many, I will save that for my quest achievement guide, but there are a few that will require you do to quests a few times making them replayable.
You will get one of four different hubs and one of two different mass kill quests. All hubs are tightly tied together so it makes it easier for you to get them done. A few of the quest however have bad drop rates which is the one draw back I would give this as a quest hub but because of the exceptional drop rate of BoEs and motes having to kill a few extra things is not really all that bad even if it does get annoying that you have to kill 20 mobs to get four things sometimes.
This hub is needed for reputation for one of the four gear giving factions but it should not be a problem. Even having skipped more than a few days after I hit revered it will still be the first of the big four I get to exalted. They offer a fair deal of quests which in turn gives you a fair amount of reputation, valor, and of course gold.
When it comes to the big four the Klaxxi hubs are the most rewarding in my opinion based on how nicely they are grouped and the area they are in and what it has to offer.
Golden Lotus:
This will be the second of the big four hubs you will work with and like the Klaxxi it has a fair deal of achievements to offer and some are actually very hard to get if you do not plan them out, I will get into them more in depth with my quest achievement guide one day, but you will find yourself doing this often to try and get the random number generator to give you the quests you need to do to get the achievements.
In a way that is one of the reasons I dislike this quest hub a lot. While they are grouped nicely and they do seem to send you from one to the next in a fluid motion they never seem to send me where I want to go and it is annoying. There are a few hubs with a lot of achievement based quests that I did not do the first time I got there and they never send me back there.
So one of the best things about the golden lotus quests, the fact there are so many different ones, is one of the worst, because it seems like you rarely get the hubs you like doing. I seem to always get the one when I need to get the barrels from those sprites and I hate them with a passion. They are easy enough to kill but they are annoying and you can easily find yourself over whelmed by them and the worst part is it happens to everyone and some people can be real jerks and it seems in that area more than any other people will try to pass their packs on to you if they see you doing AoE. I have often found myself with 20 of them on my pet and only 3 were mine all because people would run their mobs past my pet seeing as I have a per that does an AoE.
Besides the fact of the random nature of the quest hubs is the fact they feel like you get nothing from them at 100 reputation each, 110 with faction, 120 if human. Sure, it adds up and there are so many of them so it does go up nicely but it just seems like you are shoveling shit against the tide doing them. You get more angler rep doing three quests than you do when you do what feels like 100 golden lotus quests each day.
If you are after valor there is no better quest hub than the golden lotus quests. It is a long quest line that jumps from hub to hub a few times each day and in the end you will get a fair deal of valor and gold for your days work but the fact you do not choose which hubs you do takes some of the fun away from it in my opinion as you might have some hubs you like and you never get to do them because there are so many of them.
Each hub has a few different quests it can offer and there are five different hubs each with at least two sets of dailies, so that is a lot to offer. Too bad it never offers the ones you want. It would be nice to have a little more control over the hubs being there are so many different options here for this one.
If there was ever one hub you would use as an example of a bad daily quest hub design that went way to far over board, this is it. I have not done it since I hit revered and probably won't unless I am really bored and want to go achievement hunting and I hope and pray that I get the hub I need to get the achievements done.
Shado-Pan:
They have a few different quest hubs all in one area basically. Nice and simple and easy. The shado-pan quests are a good hub and it is one of the required ones for gear so it is nice to have a good hub when it is something you feel you need to do.
However, the achievements, and there are many for this hub, seem to be what makes this hub horrible. They are almost all broken. The achievement to do 15 quests with each companion does not work, I've done more than 15 with 2 of them and neither of them shows up. So that means you need to do three hubs with each of the players if it worked and it doesn't and basically that means you will still be doing these, just for that one achievement, long after you get to exalted. Much longer if you are like me and not getting credit for doing them with companions when they are there.
Those helpers being there is what makes the quest hub horrible. If all you want to do get some reputation, some valor and some gold, do them solo and the shado-pan is one of the best daily hubs in the game right now behind the tillers and anglers and close to the klaxxi. Take a companion and you would be better off sticking hot needles into your eyes as that would be less painful.
As a fun side note to one of the achievements, to take no damage while doing the quests, I thought of it like my hunter challenge I made before the end of cataclysm. To level without taking any damage. Now, as a hunter I thought the achievement was way to easy so I took one of the companions with me, protector yi, and if you have ever traveled with him you would know what I mean when I say it is completely impossible to not take damage with him around, he pulls entire zones. So it was challenge accepted. About 30 minutes later of careful dancing and lots of kiting, moving, and planning and yi pulling way more than he or I could handle on multiple occasions and dying on nearly every single pull it was mission accomplished. I did all the quests, with protector yi, without taking any damage at all. Top that baby, now that is a challenge.
But seriously, keep the helpers at the camp unless you are going for the achievement, they are not worth it. The mages are the only ones you should ever take, they even CC things, which is awesome seeing an NPC do that. Do not take any of the others, they are all horrible and make a good quest hub into a horrible one.
August Celestials:
These are nice and easy dailies. Always sending you to one of four hubs around the map. You can always go downstairs in your main city to get the lead in daily that tells you were you need to go today from the august celestial representative down there.
You will be sent to the wilds, the summit, the forest or the steppes. Always one of those four. There are some achievements for these guys as well as gear which makes them worth doing. Add to the fact the hubs are nicely tied together and it makes them quick and easy too. Two of the four hubs do have minor annoyances with them however.
The ones in the forest, at least for me, seem to always keep me in battle even when I am not fighting. Even if I feign death I will be in battle the second I pop up even if there is no mob anywhere to be seen. I always have to run my way back to turn in the quest and once I even needed to force close the game and start back up to get out of battle because it would not let me go, even after doing the trick of killing a critter to get yourself out of battle because that did not work. The one in the wilds sucks because nothing there drops loot. No big deal really but I like loot, don't we all? Having to kill things and get nothing from them sucks. At lest it is quick and easy and doesn't keep me stuck in battle.
The one in the steppes seems more like a quest line than others do. A standard kill, blow up, or collect type of hub. The one in the summit is my favorite, perhaps because it is so super easy or perhaps because I am a hunter and challenge quests are what I do best. You just face a series of challenges and beat some big baddies and collect your gold, valor and reputation. What is there not to like about that one. Nice and easy, as a daily quest hub should be.
So in a run down, from best to worst, here are how I see the hubs.
1) Tillers
2) Anglers
3) Klaxxi
4) Shado-Pan (without helpers)
5) August Celestials
6) Cloud Serpents
7) Golden Lotus
8) Shado-Pan (with helpers)
Which hubs do you love or hate?
Tillers:
When it comes to daily hubs this one is my favorite, or at least one of them. They are usually neatly grouped up so you can do all of them at the same time and even piggy back them, for example getting the stolen goods and killing monkeys. Just kill the monkeys in front of the stolen goods and you are getting two quests done at the same time. Does it really get much easier than that?
There are a few fun quests that are like side quests not part of the pack that you get sometimes. And I would not be surprised if there are some you have not even seen yet. Just yesterday I got a quest I had never seen before and I have been doing them every day since day one. Makes me wonder if there are more. Be it killing weeds, watering crops, jumping on critters or looking for chickens, even the one side quest that is not part of the pack is not a great diversion.
The tiller quests are quick and easy and just as rewarding gold and valor wise as any other quests, plus one will give you an ironpaw token, so what is there not to like? Nothing. When it comes to doing dailies, these are the tops. Well designed and something you will do even after exalted for a few valor, a little gold and an ironpaw cooking token of course.
As for achievements related to questing for the tillers there are none directly but there are some indirectly. You will get them all just by doing your farming. No effort really required to get them. The cooking achievement for getting each cooking skill up are not listed under the quests section but you could consider them part of it if you wanted to and you can use your farm, your tokens or the auction house to get them all done rather easily. If you are after gear only, you can completely skip this one but I think that would be a mistake as this is one of the most enjoyable quest hubs right now.
Anglers:
This is another nice and easy quest hub. You only get three quests per day from it and they are not tied as tightly together as the tiller ones are but being there are so few and they are so easy it makes for a quick and painless hub. Unless of course you get one of the few quests that actually require fishing and you have low level fishing, then it could be a while. I suggest getting the best lure you can get if you do not have max level skill. Even with max level skill you will still catch junk from time to time so under that you can expect to catch junk a lot. Even with that, the angler quests would still be something I consider nice and easy.
If you are an achievement hunter, just do the quests, there is really nothing that you would need to plan to get here, just doing the quests will get you the only related achievement which is for doing all the quests. Easy enough right?
I can see this being a nice little hub for your characters that are alts with low fishing. It is low stress, gets you three fishing skill points a day, and 15 valor and some gold. So it is win all the way around for a rarely played alt. Like the tiller ones however, if gear is what you are after, you can skip this completely but as easy as it is to do I can't see why you would unless you are really pressed for time.
Cloud Serpents:
Everyone seems to want to ride a cloud serpent and you will need to get them exalted if you want to learn the skill to do so. Like the anglers and tillers this faction has no gear and is a purely cosmetic faction so to speak. It is about your riding skill only really.
There are two types of dailies they offer. One is a hub based thing that seems to be nicely batched most of the time and is somewhat easy with the exception of one hub. If you get the one hub to go into the cave I must warn you that you are going to be fighting, a lot. Those monkeys scream and bring friends all the time. Even if as a hunter I can handle them easy I had started to get into the habit of hearthing back when I finished the quest because I just did not want to work my way back out. Outside of that all the hubs seem super easy.
The other type of quests are secondary professions quests. If you do not have a high level of that profession you can not get them done and even if you do they do not offer valor and offer a small amount reputation. So while doing them will get you to exalted a fair bit quicker they are not required and it will not set you further back than just a few days if you do not do them. You could also try to find some eggs to turn in for reputation to speed it up, but it goes fast enough as it is that there is no real need to. Even without doing it every day it was the first faction I got to exalted not even finding one egg, outside of the fish and lorewalker factions.
As far as achievements go this faction has a few of them and none are really difficult. Paying catch with your baby serpent might be the hardest one if a lot of other people are around, but once you realize how the bounces work and can find a time when 25 other people are not bouncing around you will get it with little effort. The good thing for this is you do not have to be perfect, just close and you will bounce it.
The race achievements are easy and while you might not get first place in the race the first time you do it if you follow the pack and notice all the checkpoints you will win first the second time no problem. Getting the 10 rings achievement should come without even trying as you should always try to keep 10 rings on you anyway, so that one is a gimme. You will also get a bag that gives you valor based on where you end the race.
As far as how fun these are to do I will leave it at this, the second I hit exalted I never went back and have no intention to ever go back. Maybe some day I will do a few just to get 999 of exalted, but I am in no rush. While they were mostly quick and easy they were not fun in any way. The profession ones do not offer valor and the gold is less, so that means less rewarding quests. The only time I might ever consider doing them is if the august celestials send me to the temple of the jade serpent one day and I am bored, just becuase that is close but I have been sent there 3 times and never once had the desire to do the cloud serpents any of those times. Once exalted there is no need to ever even consider doing the profession ones, like I said, they offer no valor and a smaller amount of gold effectively making them useless. You will make more gold selling the fish instead of cooking them and selling the cloth instead of making bandages out of them and using them.
Klaxxi:
How do I love thee, let me count the ways. There are tons of rare items in the area. There are tons of rare mobs in the area. There are massive packs of mobs for mass carnage. They seem to have the highest drop rate of motes I have seen. I have got more 476 BoEs and 450 equitable at 85 BoEs while questing there than you can count. My JC gets patterns from there more than any other place. The quest hubs are tight and there are different ones to keep things mixed up some. And add to that there are more than a few achievements you can get there. All that and more.
I love doing the klaxxi area and it is one of the hubs I can see myself doing long after exalted if I have the time and am looking for something to do. I won't get into the achievements deeply as there are many, I will save that for my quest achievement guide, but there are a few that will require you do to quests a few times making them replayable.
You will get one of four different hubs and one of two different mass kill quests. All hubs are tightly tied together so it makes it easier for you to get them done. A few of the quest however have bad drop rates which is the one draw back I would give this as a quest hub but because of the exceptional drop rate of BoEs and motes having to kill a few extra things is not really all that bad even if it does get annoying that you have to kill 20 mobs to get four things sometimes.
This hub is needed for reputation for one of the four gear giving factions but it should not be a problem. Even having skipped more than a few days after I hit revered it will still be the first of the big four I get to exalted. They offer a fair deal of quests which in turn gives you a fair amount of reputation, valor, and of course gold.
When it comes to the big four the Klaxxi hubs are the most rewarding in my opinion based on how nicely they are grouped and the area they are in and what it has to offer.
Golden Lotus:
This will be the second of the big four hubs you will work with and like the Klaxxi it has a fair deal of achievements to offer and some are actually very hard to get if you do not plan them out, I will get into them more in depth with my quest achievement guide one day, but you will find yourself doing this often to try and get the random number generator to give you the quests you need to do to get the achievements.
In a way that is one of the reasons I dislike this quest hub a lot. While they are grouped nicely and they do seem to send you from one to the next in a fluid motion they never seem to send me where I want to go and it is annoying. There are a few hubs with a lot of achievement based quests that I did not do the first time I got there and they never send me back there.
So one of the best things about the golden lotus quests, the fact there are so many different ones, is one of the worst, because it seems like you rarely get the hubs you like doing. I seem to always get the one when I need to get the barrels from those sprites and I hate them with a passion. They are easy enough to kill but they are annoying and you can easily find yourself over whelmed by them and the worst part is it happens to everyone and some people can be real jerks and it seems in that area more than any other people will try to pass their packs on to you if they see you doing AoE. I have often found myself with 20 of them on my pet and only 3 were mine all because people would run their mobs past my pet seeing as I have a per that does an AoE.
Besides the fact of the random nature of the quest hubs is the fact they feel like you get nothing from them at 100 reputation each, 110 with faction, 120 if human. Sure, it adds up and there are so many of them so it does go up nicely but it just seems like you are shoveling shit against the tide doing them. You get more angler rep doing three quests than you do when you do what feels like 100 golden lotus quests each day.
If you are after valor there is no better quest hub than the golden lotus quests. It is a long quest line that jumps from hub to hub a few times each day and in the end you will get a fair deal of valor and gold for your days work but the fact you do not choose which hubs you do takes some of the fun away from it in my opinion as you might have some hubs you like and you never get to do them because there are so many of them.
Each hub has a few different quests it can offer and there are five different hubs each with at least two sets of dailies, so that is a lot to offer. Too bad it never offers the ones you want. It would be nice to have a little more control over the hubs being there are so many different options here for this one.
If there was ever one hub you would use as an example of a bad daily quest hub design that went way to far over board, this is it. I have not done it since I hit revered and probably won't unless I am really bored and want to go achievement hunting and I hope and pray that I get the hub I need to get the achievements done.
Shado-Pan:
They have a few different quest hubs all in one area basically. Nice and simple and easy. The shado-pan quests are a good hub and it is one of the required ones for gear so it is nice to have a good hub when it is something you feel you need to do.
However, the achievements, and there are many for this hub, seem to be what makes this hub horrible. They are almost all broken. The achievement to do 15 quests with each companion does not work, I've done more than 15 with 2 of them and neither of them shows up. So that means you need to do three hubs with each of the players if it worked and it doesn't and basically that means you will still be doing these, just for that one achievement, long after you get to exalted. Much longer if you are like me and not getting credit for doing them with companions when they are there.
Those helpers being there is what makes the quest hub horrible. If all you want to do get some reputation, some valor and some gold, do them solo and the shado-pan is one of the best daily hubs in the game right now behind the tillers and anglers and close to the klaxxi. Take a companion and you would be better off sticking hot needles into your eyes as that would be less painful.
As a fun side note to one of the achievements, to take no damage while doing the quests, I thought of it like my hunter challenge I made before the end of cataclysm. To level without taking any damage. Now, as a hunter I thought the achievement was way to easy so I took one of the companions with me, protector yi, and if you have ever traveled with him you would know what I mean when I say it is completely impossible to not take damage with him around, he pulls entire zones. So it was challenge accepted. About 30 minutes later of careful dancing and lots of kiting, moving, and planning and yi pulling way more than he or I could handle on multiple occasions and dying on nearly every single pull it was mission accomplished. I did all the quests, with protector yi, without taking any damage at all. Top that baby, now that is a challenge.
But seriously, keep the helpers at the camp unless you are going for the achievement, they are not worth it. The mages are the only ones you should ever take, they even CC things, which is awesome seeing an NPC do that. Do not take any of the others, they are all horrible and make a good quest hub into a horrible one.
August Celestials:
These are nice and easy dailies. Always sending you to one of four hubs around the map. You can always go downstairs in your main city to get the lead in daily that tells you were you need to go today from the august celestial representative down there.
You will be sent to the wilds, the summit, the forest or the steppes. Always one of those four. There are some achievements for these guys as well as gear which makes them worth doing. Add to the fact the hubs are nicely tied together and it makes them quick and easy too. Two of the four hubs do have minor annoyances with them however.
The ones in the forest, at least for me, seem to always keep me in battle even when I am not fighting. Even if I feign death I will be in battle the second I pop up even if there is no mob anywhere to be seen. I always have to run my way back to turn in the quest and once I even needed to force close the game and start back up to get out of battle because it would not let me go, even after doing the trick of killing a critter to get yourself out of battle because that did not work. The one in the wilds sucks because nothing there drops loot. No big deal really but I like loot, don't we all? Having to kill things and get nothing from them sucks. At lest it is quick and easy and doesn't keep me stuck in battle.
The one in the steppes seems more like a quest line than others do. A standard kill, blow up, or collect type of hub. The one in the summit is my favorite, perhaps because it is so super easy or perhaps because I am a hunter and challenge quests are what I do best. You just face a series of challenges and beat some big baddies and collect your gold, valor and reputation. What is there not to like about that one. Nice and easy, as a daily quest hub should be.
So in a run down, from best to worst, here are how I see the hubs.
1) Tillers
2) Anglers
3) Klaxxi
4) Shado-Pan (without helpers)
5) August Celestials
6) Cloud Serpents
7) Golden Lotus
8) Shado-Pan (with helpers)
Which hubs do you love or hate?
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Steady/Cobra/Barrage Now Usable While Moving
Holy crap, is this update for real? What is fox going to be used for now if we can do cobra and steady shot while moving?
I know it is just the PTR but the idea that it is on there means it has a chance, a real chance, of making it live.
This would be awesome but we would now have no real use for fox, ever, will we get another aspect to replace it? If so what type of aspect do you think should replace it.
I would love to see aspect of the beast make a return in some way, maybe where it increases pet damage by 10% instead of our damage like hawk does effectively giving beast mastery a different aspect they would want to be in. Might not be the best idea but would be an interesting one I think.
What aspect should replace fox? Make one up.
I know it is just the PTR but the idea that it is on there means it has a chance, a real chance, of making it live.
This would be awesome but we would now have no real use for fox, ever, will we get another aspect to replace it? If so what type of aspect do you think should replace it.
I would love to see aspect of the beast make a return in some way, maybe where it increases pet damage by 10% instead of our damage like hawk does effectively giving beast mastery a different aspect they would want to be in. Might not be the best idea but would be an interesting one I think.
What aspect should replace fox? Make one up.
Do This, Don't Do That, Can't You Read the Signs
Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs. If you are old enough to remember that song you are older than I or just like that genre of music as I do but what does music have to do warcraft? The entire concept of signs we see in game now made that song pop into my head. That is what it has to do with it.
Blizzard has gone through great lengths to add signs to the game, signs for everything it seems and I am a big fan of it. Some of, if not all, of the mobs you run into in the world that do effects also leave you signs to tell what area that effect will hit.
A shockwave shows the outline at least two seconds before it happens. That is a sign. A rain of fire leaves a circle showing the area which the rain of fire will hit. That is a sign. All the mobs you fight seem to leave you signs. Signs signs everywhere there's signs and it is a great thing if you ask me.
Not only does this teach players what the true dimensions of an area of effect spell reaches but it makes them actually get a feel for it. So that at some point people will begin to instinctively know that they need to move X amount even without looking at the little circle on the ground.
In the months and years to come new raiders will become used to it and expect it and even wonder how we raided without it. Well, we wiped, a lot more than new players will now. We wiped until we learned on our own what the area effect would hit. We used our own minds and eyes to figure out how far we needed to move, we did not have some nice neat little sign to tell us how far to move out.
It might sound like I am going to say it is simplifying the game too much as if it is a bad thing but I am not. I think it is a fantastic thing. The game is drawing in a lot of new players that are not fantasy gamers. Any fantasy gamer, or any type of gamer for that matter, never needed the signs, it is what we did, we knew how to move, when to move and how far to move because we like this type of thing and we understand how it works. Those new players are not that type of player. They need the signs and it is a good thing they are there.
If you do not believe me that the average person needs signs for everything just take a look around your house. Check your iron that has a sign, also known as a warning label, that says do not iron clothing while it is on your body. Or check your hairdryer and notice it says do not use while in shower. There is a reason that signs like these are needed and that is because the majority of people we have the dishonor of being related to as part of the human race are stupid. Really stupid. The type of people that would iron their clothes while they are still wearing them type of stupid.
In terms of game play ironing your clothing while you are wearing it is roughly the same as standing in a rain of fire. It will hurt, perhaps a hell of a lot, but it isn't likely to kill you because as soon as you notice the pain you move/stop. Standing in a shockwave might be like using your hairdryer while still in the shower. It will likely kill you and even if it doesn't you will be left in need of serious immediate medical attention.
These new signs are a great for teaching people, but only if they learn. That is one problem where the signs do not go far enough. It still allows people to make mistakes, if you can even call them that. Where the person ironing their clothes on their body will stop roughly round the same time as they start screaming in pain, and you do not need intelligence for that one, in the game you still need someone to have some intelligence.
While the raid of fire might hurt it does not really hurt them, they will try to kill whatever they are fighting without moving hoping to beat the thing before it beats them or if they are in a group they will just think the healer will heal them. So while these signs are great, the penalty is not enough. Human nature of stupidity, the same one that requires us to put these warning labels on things, will always win out.
Doesn't mean having these things is a bad thing. Some people can learn and it is a lot easier to teach them with these signs all over the place. Hey, see when that boss puts that spell on you that there is a big blue circle around you? Well, make sure no one else is in the circle. See. A lot easier than trying to tell people when the boss casts the spell on you to get away from everyone. The circle around them gives a definitive guide of what away from everyone means. It no longer leaves it up to the person to learn how far away is far enough. I like that.
I have had many types of raiders over the years from good to bad to everything in between and most, even the bad ones, can learn. The difference is the bad ones take longer to learn and having that little tool teach them what away from everyone means will make a world of difference, so much so that even when that circle is not there they will have some sort of frame of reference from something else they did that will teach them what the standard distance of a spell is. This makes teaching people so much easier.
There is a line in the song that does keep ringing in my head however.
You ain't supposed to be here.
Now this is something signs are really good for. In the song it was referring to some place where membership was needed to get in, the sign said, members only basically.
See, signs tell us things. Like the signs on the warning labels or the sign that says members only. They tell us information we need. If we do not follow those instructions we are effectively stupid as in it is stupid to use the hairdryer in the shower after you were directly advised against it.
These signs help us noticed the truly bad players over the seemingly bad players. Many times, even more so when someone is new to something, it takes them some time to adapt, to understand. Signs can help those people that seem bad but just don't understand.
Like I mentioned with the blue circle around someone. A bad player might not move being they do not know what it means even after being told or just do not care. A seemingly bad player, once told how to act, will usually never made the mistake again because they have this huge blue circle sign all around them. When it happens they read the sign and the sign says, makes sure no one else is in this circle. A truly bad player will continue to screw it up, even if the sign is as bright as day under their feet.
How is that for making things easier to decide who can learn and who is a lost cause? There will be giant signs all over the place and the people that can not read them, even after they have been explained to them, are the bad players, the 100% truly bad players. Either because they don't get it or they don't care. Either way, they are bad. Nothing else needs to be said about it. There will never be a need for debate about it, never someone saying I thought I was far enough away, or I thought I was out of the AoE. There is a huge sign right there in game that tells them how far away is far enough or if they are standing in something.
Bad is no longer a subjective term when it comes to mechanics like that, it is a real thing that can be measured. Bad is no longer an opinion it is a yes or no thing thanks to signs.
Yes, in many other cases it can still be subjective. Is 40K DPS bad for someone? Some might say yes and some might say no but when it comes to ground effects there is a true bad, one that can not ever be debated. All thanks to signs.
The people that can not read the signs, even after having them explained to them, are bad players. Like many in the looking for raid last night. It was funny seeing half the raid wipe to obvious mechanics like the line of warriors walking across the room. Things like that are signs in and of themselves, you see them coming, you move, simple right. When explained to the raid, after the wipe of course, and seeing a few people that died the first time to it die a second time to it shows the good players from the bad ones. Signs. All thanks to signs.
Some might say these changes are dumbing down the game but I just say it is the opening of doors. It is opening the doors to the type of player that did not play this type of game before and might not understand. For me, you and many like us, the gamers, it is simple, we understand it not because we are better but because we have done it before in other games and been doing it for years in this game. For new people, they can really benefit from those signs.
If I enter a new raid I know nothing about and am told if I get arcane something-or-other on me I need to get away from everyone I know roughly how far that means. I do not need a sign to tell me because I have done that mechanic what feels like a million times before. For a new player, seeing how far is far enough makes the learning curve smaller for them, they will adapt faster, if they are not one of the truly bad players. It is not dumbing down, it is just saving time. Instead of a new group wiping 30 times when teaching something like that, they might wipe once because of it.
In the constant effort of the game to allow us to spend more time playing and less time wiping these signs are a great way for new people to get their foot in the door. They basically tell them do this, don't do that.
In time they too will know how far away is far enough and will not even notice the blue outline on the ground any more, as they become better players, more adaptive. Then, and only then, will they move to the next step of game play. Job performance. How well you tank and rotate your cooldowns. How well you heal and manage your mana. How much damage you do while also handling all the little things that are thrown at you like adds or interrupts.
That is where the games difficulty should be. It should be on how well you do your job. I've always said that mechanics like move out of the fire or be away from everyone else were annoying because for knowledgeable players it was just an inconvenience and for new players it was a roadblock while they learned.
Mechanics like that are not fun, never have been and never will be. Adding all those signs just helps remove having to teach every new player these things we mastered long ago. I think that is the main reason they added them. They added them so the newer people to raiding can catch up with the people that have been raiding forever.
The only way to keep the older raiders interested was to keep stepping it up but if you keep stepping it up you make it impossible for many new players to jump in. All these signs make it easier for them to jump in and I think it is a great addition to the game.
What are your feelings about the new effect signs?
Signs, signs everywhere there's signs. The song spoke of them as bad things but in this case I think they are good things.
Blizzard has gone through great lengths to add signs to the game, signs for everything it seems and I am a big fan of it. Some of, if not all, of the mobs you run into in the world that do effects also leave you signs to tell what area that effect will hit.
A shockwave shows the outline at least two seconds before it happens. That is a sign. A rain of fire leaves a circle showing the area which the rain of fire will hit. That is a sign. All the mobs you fight seem to leave you signs. Signs signs everywhere there's signs and it is a great thing if you ask me.
Not only does this teach players what the true dimensions of an area of effect spell reaches but it makes them actually get a feel for it. So that at some point people will begin to instinctively know that they need to move X amount even without looking at the little circle on the ground.
In the months and years to come new raiders will become used to it and expect it and even wonder how we raided without it. Well, we wiped, a lot more than new players will now. We wiped until we learned on our own what the area effect would hit. We used our own minds and eyes to figure out how far we needed to move, we did not have some nice neat little sign to tell us how far to move out.
It might sound like I am going to say it is simplifying the game too much as if it is a bad thing but I am not. I think it is a fantastic thing. The game is drawing in a lot of new players that are not fantasy gamers. Any fantasy gamer, or any type of gamer for that matter, never needed the signs, it is what we did, we knew how to move, when to move and how far to move because we like this type of thing and we understand how it works. Those new players are not that type of player. They need the signs and it is a good thing they are there.
If you do not believe me that the average person needs signs for everything just take a look around your house. Check your iron that has a sign, also known as a warning label, that says do not iron clothing while it is on your body. Or check your hairdryer and notice it says do not use while in shower. There is a reason that signs like these are needed and that is because the majority of people we have the dishonor of being related to as part of the human race are stupid. Really stupid. The type of people that would iron their clothes while they are still wearing them type of stupid.
In terms of game play ironing your clothing while you are wearing it is roughly the same as standing in a rain of fire. It will hurt, perhaps a hell of a lot, but it isn't likely to kill you because as soon as you notice the pain you move/stop. Standing in a shockwave might be like using your hairdryer while still in the shower. It will likely kill you and even if it doesn't you will be left in need of serious immediate medical attention.
These new signs are a great for teaching people, but only if they learn. That is one problem where the signs do not go far enough. It still allows people to make mistakes, if you can even call them that. Where the person ironing their clothes on their body will stop roughly round the same time as they start screaming in pain, and you do not need intelligence for that one, in the game you still need someone to have some intelligence.
While the raid of fire might hurt it does not really hurt them, they will try to kill whatever they are fighting without moving hoping to beat the thing before it beats them or if they are in a group they will just think the healer will heal them. So while these signs are great, the penalty is not enough. Human nature of stupidity, the same one that requires us to put these warning labels on things, will always win out.
Doesn't mean having these things is a bad thing. Some people can learn and it is a lot easier to teach them with these signs all over the place. Hey, see when that boss puts that spell on you that there is a big blue circle around you? Well, make sure no one else is in the circle. See. A lot easier than trying to tell people when the boss casts the spell on you to get away from everyone. The circle around them gives a definitive guide of what away from everyone means. It no longer leaves it up to the person to learn how far away is far enough. I like that.
I have had many types of raiders over the years from good to bad to everything in between and most, even the bad ones, can learn. The difference is the bad ones take longer to learn and having that little tool teach them what away from everyone means will make a world of difference, so much so that even when that circle is not there they will have some sort of frame of reference from something else they did that will teach them what the standard distance of a spell is. This makes teaching people so much easier.
There is a line in the song that does keep ringing in my head however.
You ain't supposed to be here.
Now this is something signs are really good for. In the song it was referring to some place where membership was needed to get in, the sign said, members only basically.
See, signs tell us things. Like the signs on the warning labels or the sign that says members only. They tell us information we need. If we do not follow those instructions we are effectively stupid as in it is stupid to use the hairdryer in the shower after you were directly advised against it.
These signs help us noticed the truly bad players over the seemingly bad players. Many times, even more so when someone is new to something, it takes them some time to adapt, to understand. Signs can help those people that seem bad but just don't understand.
Like I mentioned with the blue circle around someone. A bad player might not move being they do not know what it means even after being told or just do not care. A seemingly bad player, once told how to act, will usually never made the mistake again because they have this huge blue circle sign all around them. When it happens they read the sign and the sign says, makes sure no one else is in this circle. A truly bad player will continue to screw it up, even if the sign is as bright as day under their feet.
How is that for making things easier to decide who can learn and who is a lost cause? There will be giant signs all over the place and the people that can not read them, even after they have been explained to them, are the bad players, the 100% truly bad players. Either because they don't get it or they don't care. Either way, they are bad. Nothing else needs to be said about it. There will never be a need for debate about it, never someone saying I thought I was far enough away, or I thought I was out of the AoE. There is a huge sign right there in game that tells them how far away is far enough or if they are standing in something.
Bad is no longer a subjective term when it comes to mechanics like that, it is a real thing that can be measured. Bad is no longer an opinion it is a yes or no thing thanks to signs.
Yes, in many other cases it can still be subjective. Is 40K DPS bad for someone? Some might say yes and some might say no but when it comes to ground effects there is a true bad, one that can not ever be debated. All thanks to signs.
The people that can not read the signs, even after having them explained to them, are bad players. Like many in the looking for raid last night. It was funny seeing half the raid wipe to obvious mechanics like the line of warriors walking across the room. Things like that are signs in and of themselves, you see them coming, you move, simple right. When explained to the raid, after the wipe of course, and seeing a few people that died the first time to it die a second time to it shows the good players from the bad ones. Signs. All thanks to signs.
Some might say these changes are dumbing down the game but I just say it is the opening of doors. It is opening the doors to the type of player that did not play this type of game before and might not understand. For me, you and many like us, the gamers, it is simple, we understand it not because we are better but because we have done it before in other games and been doing it for years in this game. For new people, they can really benefit from those signs.
If I enter a new raid I know nothing about and am told if I get arcane something-or-other on me I need to get away from everyone I know roughly how far that means. I do not need a sign to tell me because I have done that mechanic what feels like a million times before. For a new player, seeing how far is far enough makes the learning curve smaller for them, they will adapt faster, if they are not one of the truly bad players. It is not dumbing down, it is just saving time. Instead of a new group wiping 30 times when teaching something like that, they might wipe once because of it.
In the constant effort of the game to allow us to spend more time playing and less time wiping these signs are a great way for new people to get their foot in the door. They basically tell them do this, don't do that.
In time they too will know how far away is far enough and will not even notice the blue outline on the ground any more, as they become better players, more adaptive. Then, and only then, will they move to the next step of game play. Job performance. How well you tank and rotate your cooldowns. How well you heal and manage your mana. How much damage you do while also handling all the little things that are thrown at you like adds or interrupts.
That is where the games difficulty should be. It should be on how well you do your job. I've always said that mechanics like move out of the fire or be away from everyone else were annoying because for knowledgeable players it was just an inconvenience and for new players it was a roadblock while they learned.
Mechanics like that are not fun, never have been and never will be. Adding all those signs just helps remove having to teach every new player these things we mastered long ago. I think that is the main reason they added them. They added them so the newer people to raiding can catch up with the people that have been raiding forever.
The only way to keep the older raiders interested was to keep stepping it up but if you keep stepping it up you make it impossible for many new players to jump in. All these signs make it easier for them to jump in and I think it is a great addition to the game.
What are your feelings about the new effect signs?
Signs, signs everywhere there's signs. The song spoke of them as bad things but in this case I think they are good things.
Adding to the 10 vs 25 Debate
I just read an excellent post over at Sacred Duty, link, and while it did consider all of the available data it did have some assumptions. The assumption of equal skill, the assumption of time spent, so forth and so on. Can't fault him for that because in most cases like this we can only go with assumptions. It is a great read and I suggest it for those that are interested in this type of stuff.
I would like to make some assumptions myself on the topic.
My personal opinion on the matter is that any of the 25 man guilds would have done the same with 10 man as paragon did and not because 10 mans are easier but because of the simple fact that they have more skilled members ready to go.
Given that serious raiders will have their main and perhaps even three or four alts geared up means that there is always the option of class stacking, should it be needed for any fight. However, even considering skill, some people are better at some things than others are.
Lets say for example an affliction warlock is extremely powerful on a fight and you have a 10 man guild where three people have raid ready alts they can bring in that fit that spec for the fight. So you will, of course, do so to speed progression would you not? Those three, because that class and spec are great for the fight, will be in the mix regardless of their own ability to play the class as you know they will still do well as they are great players.
Now if you just happened to have been a 25 man guild that just went down to a 10 man guild you might have 7 or 8 people that have raid ready warlocks. If you switched to 10 man, like paragon has, you could easily fill all the DPS roles with just affliction warlocks and even have the benefit of being able to chose the 5 best ones and not just the only three you had if you were a strict 10 man before hand. Like I said, skilled players might be skilled but there are always some that will be better at certain things than others. So now you have the option to take the best 5.
This is one of the reasons I believe paragon had the larger lead over other 10 mans, as mentioned in his post, that is being used as a reason to think 10 mans are easier. They were coming from a 25 man into a 10 man and as such it might leave them with a few more options than the average 10 man guild that has always been a 10 man guild has. Choosing the best 5 locks out of 7 will of course leaves you with a better 10 man team than just taking the only three locks you have regardless of how well they play the class, don't you think?
Again, I am making my own assumptions. My assumptions here are that they still have a lot of extremely skilled players hanging around that have not left for a 25 man guild yet or were hoping to squeeze in and/or were willing to wait for a second clear to remain part of a world first guild.
If my assumption is true, which we can never know for sure, this means that on any given fight they have the ability to better adapt or stack or adjust on an encounter by encounter basis than any other 10 man that had always been a 10 man would have. This the reason for the huge gap between them and the second closest 10 man. They had a larger pool of skilled players to choose from.
I do believe that if any of the 25 man guilds did progression as a 10 man team they would have seen it move along faster as well for the exact reason I mentioned above. The ability to pick and choose the best of the best of a stable of exceptionally skilled players and choose which classes to use on an encounter by encounter basis undeniably gives you a huge advantage when you are trying to get things done first.
Paragon did not finish first because 10 mans are easier, they finished first because they had more tools available to them to do so. That is my assumption and if my assumption is true that throws all the data out of the window because you can not compare a 10 man to another 10 man when one 10 man has basically almost a 25 man raid teams worth of exceptional players at their disposal and the other doesn't.
That is just assumption one. Assumption two is the history of 25 mans being where the action is and where the world first race is. It has been that way as far as I can remember but do not take my word for it, take the word of anyone that has been around, 25 is where the action is.
This is assumption number two. The best of the best, or at least the ones that attempt to be the best as it means something to them, all join 25 man guilds. This means there are not that many hanging around in 10 mans waiting to be subbed in if needed. The majority of the better players will be in 25 man guilds to begin with. Not to mention many really great players that could be in 10 mans are sitting on the sidelines in 25 mans just for the chance to get into the group and be on a world first team.
This does not mean there are not any skilled players in 10 man guilds because saying that would be a flat out lie. It is just saying that the ones whom world first and progression matter to most usually gravitate to a 25 man guild. This is why, in part, you see so many 25 man guilds finishing before 10 man guilds, they attract the better more serious players based on history.
This is another reason for the gap between #1 and #2 in 10 mans. It has nothing to do with 10 mans being easier and it has everything to do with the majority of people that world first matters too are in 25 man guilds.
So what does all this have to do with 10 vs 25 man difficulty? Not much really. People are just putting paragon down because they are 10 man saying it doesn't count and I think that is wrong. First is first and any of the 25 man guilds that wanted world first could have done the exact same thing paragon did and ran it 10 man if they thought it was easier and they thought it would get them worlds first.
I have always stood by the belief that there is a reason all world first guilds are 25 man, at least since cataclysm came out as before that 25 was without doubt the one that mattered most. The reason, since cataclysm, why 25 man guilds are always worlds first is because 25 mans are easier. It is as simple as that.
Look at all the cheating that has gone on over the years that people got caught and didn't get caught with? Every single one of these world first guilds takes any advantage they can to become worlds first. They will cheat and hope they do not get caught, they will game the system every chance they get, they will class stack to take advantage of something that went unnoticed.
Lets face it people, if 10 mans were easier they would be doing 10 mans because first is first and that is all that matters. People that will lie, steal and cheat to be world first would not stick to their guns and play 25 man raids if 10 mans were easier. If 10s were easier they would do it to get world first, just like they would abuse a mechanic or cheat in an effort to be world first.
Now that is my final assumption, the assumption that any guild that wants to be world first will always take the easiest route to accomplish it. We have seen it. Maybe it is true, maybe 10 mans are now easier and maybe paragon was just the first one to notice it. Unless all guilds do it in the same format we will just have to live with world first over all, world first 10 and world first 25.
So lets ask the question that begs to be asked. If 10s are really easier why are more competitive groups not moving to doing 10 mans just to win?
The true test will be if paragon keeps getting worlds firsts when they do not have as much depth as they did right now changing from a 25 down to a 10. Can they still remain number one? Only time will tell. Will more guilds follow suit? Only time will tell. As far as I am concerned, whichever format most guilds are playing on is the easier one because like I said, people that want to be #1 will do anything to get there and that means following the path of the least resistance.
In the end this is what it comes down to...
If you are a 10 man raider, 10s are harder.
If you are a 25 man raider, 25s are harder.
The grass is always greener on the other side my friends.
I would like to make some assumptions myself on the topic.
My personal opinion on the matter is that any of the 25 man guilds would have done the same with 10 man as paragon did and not because 10 mans are easier but because of the simple fact that they have more skilled members ready to go.
Given that serious raiders will have their main and perhaps even three or four alts geared up means that there is always the option of class stacking, should it be needed for any fight. However, even considering skill, some people are better at some things than others are.
Lets say for example an affliction warlock is extremely powerful on a fight and you have a 10 man guild where three people have raid ready alts they can bring in that fit that spec for the fight. So you will, of course, do so to speed progression would you not? Those three, because that class and spec are great for the fight, will be in the mix regardless of their own ability to play the class as you know they will still do well as they are great players.
Now if you just happened to have been a 25 man guild that just went down to a 10 man guild you might have 7 or 8 people that have raid ready warlocks. If you switched to 10 man, like paragon has, you could easily fill all the DPS roles with just affliction warlocks and even have the benefit of being able to chose the 5 best ones and not just the only three you had if you were a strict 10 man before hand. Like I said, skilled players might be skilled but there are always some that will be better at certain things than others. So now you have the option to take the best 5.
This is one of the reasons I believe paragon had the larger lead over other 10 mans, as mentioned in his post, that is being used as a reason to think 10 mans are easier. They were coming from a 25 man into a 10 man and as such it might leave them with a few more options than the average 10 man guild that has always been a 10 man guild has. Choosing the best 5 locks out of 7 will of course leaves you with a better 10 man team than just taking the only three locks you have regardless of how well they play the class, don't you think?
Again, I am making my own assumptions. My assumptions here are that they still have a lot of extremely skilled players hanging around that have not left for a 25 man guild yet or were hoping to squeeze in and/or were willing to wait for a second clear to remain part of a world first guild.
If my assumption is true, which we can never know for sure, this means that on any given fight they have the ability to better adapt or stack or adjust on an encounter by encounter basis than any other 10 man that had always been a 10 man would have. This the reason for the huge gap between them and the second closest 10 man. They had a larger pool of skilled players to choose from.
I do believe that if any of the 25 man guilds did progression as a 10 man team they would have seen it move along faster as well for the exact reason I mentioned above. The ability to pick and choose the best of the best of a stable of exceptionally skilled players and choose which classes to use on an encounter by encounter basis undeniably gives you a huge advantage when you are trying to get things done first.
Paragon did not finish first because 10 mans are easier, they finished first because they had more tools available to them to do so. That is my assumption and if my assumption is true that throws all the data out of the window because you can not compare a 10 man to another 10 man when one 10 man has basically almost a 25 man raid teams worth of exceptional players at their disposal and the other doesn't.
That is just assumption one. Assumption two is the history of 25 mans being where the action is and where the world first race is. It has been that way as far as I can remember but do not take my word for it, take the word of anyone that has been around, 25 is where the action is.
This is assumption number two. The best of the best, or at least the ones that attempt to be the best as it means something to them, all join 25 man guilds. This means there are not that many hanging around in 10 mans waiting to be subbed in if needed. The majority of the better players will be in 25 man guilds to begin with. Not to mention many really great players that could be in 10 mans are sitting on the sidelines in 25 mans just for the chance to get into the group and be on a world first team.
This does not mean there are not any skilled players in 10 man guilds because saying that would be a flat out lie. It is just saying that the ones whom world first and progression matter to most usually gravitate to a 25 man guild. This is why, in part, you see so many 25 man guilds finishing before 10 man guilds, they attract the better more serious players based on history.
This is another reason for the gap between #1 and #2 in 10 mans. It has nothing to do with 10 mans being easier and it has everything to do with the majority of people that world first matters too are in 25 man guilds.
So what does all this have to do with 10 vs 25 man difficulty? Not much really. People are just putting paragon down because they are 10 man saying it doesn't count and I think that is wrong. First is first and any of the 25 man guilds that wanted world first could have done the exact same thing paragon did and ran it 10 man if they thought it was easier and they thought it would get them worlds first.
I have always stood by the belief that there is a reason all world first guilds are 25 man, at least since cataclysm came out as before that 25 was without doubt the one that mattered most. The reason, since cataclysm, why 25 man guilds are always worlds first is because 25 mans are easier. It is as simple as that.
Look at all the cheating that has gone on over the years that people got caught and didn't get caught with? Every single one of these world first guilds takes any advantage they can to become worlds first. They will cheat and hope they do not get caught, they will game the system every chance they get, they will class stack to take advantage of something that went unnoticed.
Lets face it people, if 10 mans were easier they would be doing 10 mans because first is first and that is all that matters. People that will lie, steal and cheat to be world first would not stick to their guns and play 25 man raids if 10 mans were easier. If 10s were easier they would do it to get world first, just like they would abuse a mechanic or cheat in an effort to be world first.
Now that is my final assumption, the assumption that any guild that wants to be world first will always take the easiest route to accomplish it. We have seen it. Maybe it is true, maybe 10 mans are now easier and maybe paragon was just the first one to notice it. Unless all guilds do it in the same format we will just have to live with world first over all, world first 10 and world first 25.
So lets ask the question that begs to be asked. If 10s are really easier why are more competitive groups not moving to doing 10 mans just to win?
The true test will be if paragon keeps getting worlds firsts when they do not have as much depth as they did right now changing from a 25 down to a 10. Can they still remain number one? Only time will tell. Will more guilds follow suit? Only time will tell. As far as I am concerned, whichever format most guilds are playing on is the easier one because like I said, people that want to be #1 will do anything to get there and that means following the path of the least resistance.
In the end this is what it comes down to...
If you are a 10 man raider, 10s are harder.
If you are a 25 man raider, 25s are harder.
The grass is always greener on the other side my friends.
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