Vampire Chronicle Reset

Shriveled souls wrapped in blood drenched flesh are all that remain of the humans that have become Kindred, yet even the dead can die…..  

Australia’s Kindred population Vampire: the Requiem is getting a re-boot. With rule changes related to challenges, and experience accrual coming in everyone gets to pack their favorite bloodsucker off to parts unknown or have them fall to the killer flu sweeping the world.

Our Camarilla chronicle isn’t at an end, but the characters are, and a whole new generation gets to come in to a continent devoid of vampires.

Sounds a bit dire, but for those of us that have characters that have been active for a while we get a massive experience benefit, Membership Class x 10 and + 3 per month the character was active.

So this time I’m two-gunning it, entering the game with two distinctly different character concepts so I can fully explore the game (mostly via email this time around). I have the fearless hedonist, out for fun at any cost, and the political monster, promoting the faith of the fallen.

WoW World Events

Rabbit

There are events in WoW that make sense. The sumnmer and winter festivals can all be tied in with the worlds lore, childrens week makes an excellent tie-in to a war torn world where orphans must be the norm rather then the exception. Brewfest? I can certainly see how a world in conflict would turn this into a major event. Now we have Noblegarden.

Between Noblegarden and Valentines……… I mean seriously WTF? How on earth does finding chocolate eggs, EXPLODING chocolate eggs laid by a pink montreme evolve? I get that people like Easter, but people also like WoW because it isn’t the real world, so why, oh why, do we have to drag every half-arsed, commercially created festival into WoW?

Okay maybe I’m bitter because it 250+ eggs before my dress dropped. That was with my horde shaman, which I guess makes sense, we horde are being penalized for taking up such a wimpy, gay, festival. My Night Elf Death Knight (don’t get me started on how DK’s screw with the Lore) got the achievements in record time however. maybe the intrinsic girlishness of the festival meshes well with an undead killing-machine that bounces on the spot in spontaneous moments of sickly cuteness….

Then of course is the nasty rumour that Blizzard is taking Drakes away from the achievements. Way to screw the casual gamer, the PvPer and the explorer. Remember folks, if you’re not a raider you’re apparently a ‘lesser’ player.

Dumbing down WoW

Okay I get it, Arena is where its at, e-peen vs, e-peen with QQ for the loser. Its Blizzards baby and the holy grail of Warcraft is the eternally shifting class balances that keeps people interested and desperately trying to level the superclass of the month. No biggie; its obvious that the PvE game has be relegated to a simple, ‘how-you-get-to-Arena-and-End-Raids-process’ and that its been made so simple that a six year old could do it between naps.

I get it. PvP is the Blizzard cash cow. It’s what most of the players want, and its where all of the development focus goes. That doesn’t mean I haven’t got an axe to grind though… in fact I have many axes, swords, and daggers and I have a surplus of whetstones to boot!

Do you know why?

You probably do but I’m going to tell you anyway. Because nothing friggin sells, nothing sells because the levelling process happens so quickly and easily that you never have to gear up. The sporadic quest greens you get are more then enough to push you along in turbo-levelling mode, and heavens forbid that you actually might have to complete more then 50% of the quests in a zone before you DING!

Remember when the quests sent us to strange new places, funky new bits of scenery and pop-reference? Remember when you followed a quest chain for the story rather then abandoned it halfway along because it went grey? Remember when levelling gave a sense of accomplishment rather then the mildly irritating calculations of X more till level 80?

Zul-frak had a hammer once, you had to go to an out-of-the-way but extremely scenic area call hinterlands to get it… in order to summon the mommy hydra. Now? Just ring the damn gong… who needs to go to a place that looks cool and who needs an item that makes this a living world rather then just a long version of mario-kart. Mauradaron (crappiest dungeon ever, but that’s not the point) you no longer have to slog through those first two painful areas to get the sceptre that allows you to start at the halfway point from then on. Yes the instance is easier now, yes it’s less annoying. Downside is that there is less of a sense of achievement, and content is simply ignored.

I know WoW has never been exactly challenging, but we don’t have to be spoon fed every-bloody-thing. There were once cool quests to get class-specific powers and items. There were elite zones outside dungeons Horde and Alliance were distinct. Now the new-and-improved World of Warcraft is far more vanilla then Vanilla WoW ever was….

Sweet leaping jebus blizzard! I come here to immerse myself in a game world, to escape from life. If I wanted to battle other humans in a small area without story or context I’d play a FPS. If I wanted to spend all my time getting the right set of gear for the right encounter I’d play Dress-Up Barbie. Sure Arena’s are nice, but why does WoW have to become another starcraft. Lots of combat but no world to speak of.

Give me back my fantasy world, give me something to challenge me, give me back my MMORPG.

3.1 First Impressions

Kudos, as always, to Blizzard for the new content… but could you please stop fucking up the old content?

Remember Nessingwary? Remember the Epic quests to single-handedly put entire species on the endangered list?

Remember the feel of being the animal worlds’ equivalent of a Reaper hyped up on Caffeine after a really bad day reaping?

Guess what…. nerfed.

That’s right Nessingwary has been castrated because we all know that WoW players are fluffy little vegetarians girls that faint at the idea of a skinning profession and are all card carrying members of PETA in real life. (no offence meant to the actual fluffy little vegetarian girls…. of whom I’m quite fond)

But still… what’s next? No more mining skills because it encourages the exploitation of mother earth…err… I mean mother Azeroth. Oh no… Don’t rain of fire on that marauding pack of murlocs, there might be a rare red-spotted swamp gurgler leading them.

For the love of god…. (troll gods of course)… what’s next? The quest to castrate Nessingwary? Lead Thrall to elocution lessons? Take 20 pink ribbons and cure the new King of his misogynistic tendencies?

I’ll tell you what’s next.

• The hunter class is being eliminated due to its exploitation of animals.

• Dwarven females are going to be encouraged to play naked because they should be ‘proud of who they are‘

• Trolls and undead will be hidden away because of their cannibalistic tendencies

• Both factions will make peace with the burning legion because they are ‘just misunderstood‘

• Gnomes will only be allowed to quest in male/female pairs so that they can’t fall prey to their homoerotic urges (we’ve all seen Lord of the Rings)

• … and death knights will have their ‘rise-from-the-dead-as-a-ghoul‘ ability removed in case it offends fundamental Christians… oh wait… already happened.

I feel so violated….

So actual changes… Talent trees have been dumbed down, grinding has been reduced, RET Paladins still need a serious Nerf, classes are still unbalanced, classes are loosing more and more individuality despite the unbalance issues, old crafted gear that no one will ever buy has been upgraded, Unholy DK’s got a nerf (mentioned in the last bullet point) that removes  the only ability that differentiated them from a cut-&-paste Paladin clone.

But its really Nessingwary that chafes my ass….

Repost on CC from Holy Hammers

There’s been a lot of rambling about crowd control and Paladins. Some people (mostly ones not playing paladins) complain that Tankadins are always smashing their cc and generally not cooperating.

The reasons for this are many, and varied. However I haven’t seen a good post about when cc is good for a Tankadin, so I’ve decided to continue that trend by writing a bad post about when cc is useful for a Tankadin.

The situations where a Pally needs cc are limited.

1. Fighting two big critters at a time. By this I mean when the group is supposed to be pulling only a single massive mob to pound on and gets two with a miss-pull or patrol. In this instance cc away as the big guy can probably dish out more damage then a poorly geared pally can handle.

2. The mobs are casters. Casters don’t spend time pounding on the Pally physically. That means the pally isn’t doing damage to them, and the damage they are doing with spells is probably eating a hole in the Pally’s hit points. CC these buggers, the Pally will get less manna from healing, but it will make the healers happy.

3. Runners. Runners are bad okay. If the Pally can pull ‘em back great and he’ll probably do so and break your cc at the same time. Just don’t sheep runners, we spent all that time pounding them to the edge of death so that they flee in terror, there is no point just letting them heal up in wool-form.

Repost on Stuns from Holy Hammers

There is a school of thought that says anything that is stunned or crowd controlled isn’t doing damage to the party, it is therefore better to stun then DPS.

This is false. Warlocks, Hunters and Rogues I’m looking at you now!

I’m a Tank. I’m a Paladin Tank. This means if something isn’t hitting me then it’s not taking damage. Instead of my passive-aggressive holy damage enraging the beastie beyond the limits of self-control it just stands there with a dumb look on its face… like George Bush facing a word with more then two syllables.

Stunning is Bad…. that stunned beastie isn’t getting aggro from me, it’s getting aggro from the Healer who is keeping me alive. That’s right, that squishy little tissue wearer with the survivability of a goldfish in a blast furnace is rising on the Trash Mobs “to eat” list. This is NOT COOL, this does not make Big Daddy Hammer happy, and when that occurs he feels like shoving that mauve hammer so far up your……. um…… got a little carried away there.

In summary, if you can stun it, Ipso facto it’s probably a trash mob. If it’s a trash mob and you have a Tankadin at the fore then you probably shouldn’t stun it.

WoW on Easy Mode

Blizzard is understandably proud of its end-game content. I mean once you’ve wandered into the Halls of Lightning and actually looked at the instance rather then just concentrating on the mobs, you can see the awesome artwork that has been done in this game. Naturally if you code all this eye-candy, then you want folks to see it ASAP, there is a hell of a lot of content in the game if you crawl up from level 1, so here comes the Death Knight.

As an aside, with the accelerated leveling that comes from more XP per kill, blue bar, and more XP per quest, I don’t believe it is possible to experience all the old content while still keeping to zones and quests of appropriate level.

The Death Knight can be defined as WoW on easy mode. Worried about physical damage? You’re wearing plate and can pop up Frost Aura. Worried about magical damage? You can pop up an anti-magic field that looks like the little cousin of Dalran’s old magical shield. Want to be DPS, sure go blood and heal yourself at the same time. Want to be a Tank, pop up your Frost Aura. Want to do AoE then unholy is the path for you. Seriously its so easy even a hunter player could do it :p

Death Knight is the swiss army knife of the WoW world. Soling 2 beasties 3 levels higher then themselves without raising a sweat, soloing all those annoying Dragon Blight and Ice Crown group quests without relying on the fickle attendance of other classes. Add herbalism and skinning and you get a self-heal and extra crit to round off your awesomeness to new heights of pretentious wankery.

Of course by the time you get to 10 mans, and raid content you tend to be the unwelcome kid at the party. All that alone time has given you the social skills of a cheeto’s guzzling nerd living in their mothers basement and never seeing the light of day…….. oh…….. didn’t mean to go there.

Okay, I’m off…… to play one of my three Death Knights….. oh……

Northrend Gear

I am not a happy bubble-boy.

No…. not at ALL.

Granted the gear from Outlands made me look like a evil boss from Tron that never made the final cut. My shield of golden faces, my chest of shiny silver, and pants of electric blue… but now

Now I look like a damn extra from 13th warrior. A stone Axe, what the hell is with that? I’ve gone from enchanted crystal and the occasional light-saber, to freaking stone age thumper… and this is an upgrade?

Grrr… and as for plate gear in general… I mean I know Death Knights are all the rage, and they must have been high in the developers minds as they wrote the new content, but they might have spared a thought for the poor prot pally, I mean we still tank too.

HUNTARD!!

HAH! Says I. Recently our resident trap-dropper has been moving around in a druid skin… no she didn’t flay them. Actually there’s an interesting idea, but lets let it pass for now.

Anyho.. Miss Ice-Trap is now playing as a Feral Druid, and she has recently had the joy of being on the ‘other side’ of the ‘them and us’ of hunter interaction.

The scene is Shadow Fang Keep (die Urgal you scum sucker DIE!!!!!!), and her new huntard friend has run out of arrows….but it’s okay, he’s got a sword he can use. Yet our intrepid huntard isn’t finished yet… no, he has to roll on cloth items that are completely useless to him because the mage..”got something last time”.

Now there are some wonderful hunters out there, I’ve had the pleasure of running with a number of them over a few different servers, but there is something about the class that attracts either brand new players or complete retards. Maybe it’s because so many guides say that hunter is the easiest class to play, maybe its because having a pet appeals to the soft-core player, or maybe hunters ARE the easy class and the incompetent can level them without learning to play.

Some Death Knight love next post….. (this is an actual screenshot. I swear!) hmmm… undead hotness….

As an aside, someone has hit video gaming (including the X of WoW) on the head over here.

Alterac Valley – repost

by Troll Shaman

There was a time when horde roamed across the Alterac Valley, casually slaying everything in their path in their mad, disorganized rush to kill Van. Those days have passed now on Twisting Nether, the valley is quiet now, the silence broken only by the occasional bleat from a goat as it is sodomized by a NPC dwarf patrol. It is only rarely that the great gates open and the horde sally forth to bring death and destruction to their foe.
It is however a changed horde. There is no mindless charge to kill the ‘pinkies’, no wild dash in a random direction while screaming the fearsome war cry “w00t”. Instead the horde advances, takes a bunker, takes a graveyard, shanks Balinda, takes a bunker then advances like a weight watchers convention seeing a waffle stand. Nothing stands before that wave, and those alliance waffles go down. The horde values its time in the valley these days, we play smart, people take defensive positions and attacks are coordinated.

Or maybe someone just spiked my mojo?????