Mr. Stomp

Running around the base of Wyrmrest temple in the Dragon Soul raid are two NPCs, Mr Stomp and Gor'in "Punchy" LIttlebottom. Punchy is chasing Mr. Stomp around.


Mr. Stomp yells: Stomp now.
Gor'in "Punchy" Littlebottom yells: Aaaaaaahhh! We're all doomed!

Gor'in "Punchy" Littlebottom yells: No! Right! Go Right!
Mr. Stomp yells: Buuurrrnnn!

There is more, I think Punchy tries to get Mr Stomp to go left at some point.



This dialogue coming from a molten fire construct/elemental should be rather familiar. It's definitely a reference to Rhyolith. It made me smile when I first noticed it, though our usual foot steerer on Rhyolith has never actually said "Aaaaaahhhh! we're all doomed!" he's come close a couple of times.

MMORPG

We all play WoW. (If you don't why are you reading this?) It's an MMORPG. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. People forget this simple fact all the time.

It's annoying when people forget about the RPG part of WoW. Depending on how much they forget it can pull me out of the game myself.

But far more annoying is when someone forgets about the MMO part of the game. It is extremely important to remember that the other characters on the screen are played by people. People who may have had a bad day. People who may have just had the most awesome day ever. People who are snatching an hour or two of fun or de-stressing before they go to sleep or do yard work or whatever.

I've said it before but it makes me froth at the mouth with anger when someone treats me or others like we're not people too. Like we're just NPCs in their game. The people I play with are real. Some of them I've met. Some I haven't. All of them are still people, and deserve to be treated with basic respect.

So next time you talk to your guild or run a random, remember that everyone else is a person, too. They deserve the same respect that you want.

Kael'Thas Take 2

Just before the New Year Tylara and Khyrie went to the Magister's Terrace. It was pretty fun to run through there. And it was a good change for us to practice tanking and healing in an actual instance.

Of course while I was there I had to screen shot Kael's ridiculous dialogue.



Kea'thas Sunstrider yells: Vengeance burns!
Kea'thas Sunstrider yells: Felomin Ashal!

Kea'thas Sunstrider yells: I'll turn your world... upside... down.
Kea'thas Sunstrider yells: Master, grant me strength.
Kea'thas Sunstrider yells: Do not get... too comfortable.
Kea'thas Sunstrider yells: My demise accomplishes nothing! The master will have you! You will drown in your own blood! The world shall burn! Aaagh!

The last line is the most hilarious. Kael is dead but has a ridiculously long line before he actually falls over.

Caroling

This year's special Winter Veil gift was a Gaudy Winter Veil Sweater. It's main use, aside from looking truly horrible, was to allow you to carol. The on-use for the sweater was to "sing a festive song".

The new holiday achieve was A-Caroling We Will Go. Carol, with your sweater, in the enemy capital cities. If you were observant and slightly careful you could, with a flying mount, get to all of the Alliance cities without being attacked by guards. And thus get your achieve for caroling.



It was only the two of us, but I think that if you had about five or six people the different caroling sounds would combine to form an actual song.

General Update

I've been a bit silent on the blog lately. It's been a combo of Holiday busyness and guild stress. But with the Holidays over and the guild calming down I think I have the mental focus and time to post about WoW without it being a complete rant. I have been having fun in WoW. The new raid and dungeons are fun and I think (hope) I'm doing a good job with the guild. I'm trying to push some of the work onto the other officers, but it's hard with a few of them still out for the Holidays.

This weekend Kuan and Morn went did a bunch of PvP. It was our usual Saturday night arena and hard cider. The arena's were their usual level of fun/pain, but the battlegrounds were especially bad. I swear sometimes the Horde has an awesome ability to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. But we did eventually stomp an Arathi Basin. The arena's were helped by my checking Arena Junkies and swapping a few talent points and a glyph out for Mornara's pvp spec. Of course now it's even less suited to doing PvE damage, but I massively prefer tanking in PvE anyway.

Darkfall in general is making steady progress with Dragon Soul. We're very close to getting Blackhorn down. We almost had him last night, and I think next time we'll get him for sure. Probably I should take a peek at what I need to know for Spine of Deathwing. I look forward to falling off when he rolls us.

DraNgNon and I have also been doing our best to keep up with alts as well. Eeyan and Viljo are both just barely geared enough to get into LFR. Khyrie and Tylara are 80 and 81 respectively. I think it's time for them to head to Vashj'ir. I'm loving playing cat for the outdoors, and resto for instances. I do need to remember to make an obnoxious macro for her Tree of Life form. I'm thinking something along the lines of "SUPER BROCCOLI to the Rescue!" or "Form of Broccoli!!" or "SUPER BROCCOLI is here to Save the Day!!!1!!!one!!!" I'm really torn on how to make it both informative and annoying.

LFR thoughts: counterpoint

What I'm seeing is that LFR seems to be suited for a certain type of player, the raid PUG-player. The attitude and expertise of these people is very precise, they are very aggressive and bossy, intolerant of wipes, quick to blame, and those that know the fights are clearly pleased with themselves when they know. In fact, they are exactly the people who made raiding Vault of Archavon in WotLK a painful experience. This person is not someone who can deal with progression raiding; the only challenge they are interested in is outperforming the rest of the raid, and when PUG'd in, usually drop group after more than 1 wipe on a boss. With LFR, Blizzard has given them their own playground, exactly suited to them. It's a face roll for any geared character played by someone who knows how to raid. LFR even has a loot system which is not merit based, giving the raid PUG person a perfect target for their displeasure.

I do agree that 25man raids are suffering, but not from LFR, just from the combined lockouts. We can't just go into a 10man to see the fights, then try it on 25. And 10s are easier by far, even if the odds of useful loot decrease significantly. I'm sure Blizzard is seeing this and will deal with it appropriately in Mists of Pandaria. There are quite a few remedies they could apply without significant recoding.

While the various tiers of TOC and ICC was crazy bullshit, I think MoP raids should go back to how Ulduar was done, specifically Hodir and XT, with 10 and 25 on separate lockouts, and "heroic mode" triggered by demonstrating in the fight via a gear check mechanic that the raid could handle it. Well, "heroic mode" isn't the subject of this post. They do not have to distinguish between 10- and 25-man gear. There's really not going to be any harm in letting people go after a boss twice a week.

But if they really want to avoid some people feeling they have to run both, I'd rather see 10 and 25s be separate raids, like in BC; but that would not work well with guild structure as coded in the game and would be the source of "left out" drama. Maybe 10 and 20, instead of 25.

LFR Thoughts

I'm not sure how I feel about the new LFR tool.

On one hand it's very handy. I don't really get fights until I've seen them. So what I used to do was look up strats and then have them make no sense until after the first few wipes. And then I'd have to look them all up again now that I have a bit of a mental model of what is going on. But with LFR I can go into there and then look at a strat, and it's not usually too bad to add a new mechanic or two. It's also nice to actually see all the fights and cut scenes. I've taken so many screenshots of the dialogue it's hard to sort through for posting.

On the other hand, I truly think it's the final death knell for 25man raiding guilds. Having seen how things went between Wrath and Cata I think that the only reason Wrath had so many 25s is because that is where the better gear was. And now that the gear is equalized very few people are willing to do 25s rather than 10s. 10s require a finer tuned balance of classes, but its a lot easier to find 10 non-idiots than it is to find 25 non-idiots. It also seems that many of the newer fights in FL and DS have a tendency for a mistake by anyone in the raid to wipe the whole thing. With 25 people it's a lot harder to get a mistake free pull that leads to a boss kill.

I do like that the LFR is such a handy way of gearing up any missing items and your offspec. It's been a few weeks and I'm still hoping that I can win a hat token to replace Mornara's Daybreaker Helm. Yes, she is still wearing a helm from Bastion, but nothing else has dropped! Hopefully she'll win the token from LFR or we'll kill Blackhorn soon. But aside from that she's gotten a whole lot of pieces for her dps set.

One bad thing about LFR is that it's such a low bar people can basically face roll through it. When I bring Mornara in there with her initially crappy dps gear and a PVP unholy build I expect to be hovering above the tanks on the dps meters. I don't expect to be 6th or 7th on damage every fight. And it's really quite sad when people spew abuse at the dps or heals after a wipe where mechanics were misunderstood. I have not yet seen a wipe in LFR that was caused by lack of dps or healing. I have however seen many wipes caused by confusion about how the fight needs to be done.

I think that in general LFR is going to get more people into raiding LFR but it won't increase the number of people doing normal raids. It will, however, kill the last few 25man guilds out there. I am not going to be the least bit surprised if in Mists of Pandaria the only options for raiding are 25man LFR and 10man normal and heroic.